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Choice quotes:
“I get hate mail all the time from people that are like, you're just a whore. Well, yes, but that doesn't make anything that I'm saying inaccurate.”
“I firmly want to be left the hell alone. I wish that the need for what I do did not exist. But it does because people like me, people like my partner, are constantly being attacked. They're being told that they don't deserve to live. They deserve to be in jail cells because they represent some great existential threat to children and the soul of the nation when all they're trying to do is pay rent.”
“My feminism, I think, is far more expansive. It understands that that hierarchy does not serve me. It does not serve a lot of other women. I'm not interested in winning capitalism. The sex workers that I know are not interested in winning capitalism. They just wanna put food on their table. They just wanna pay rent. It's so much easier to attack trans people who are simply interested in surviving from day to day for their existence than it is to address your complicity in upholding a system that makes them an underclass.”
Full transcript:
Cathy: Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. I’m joined today by Adrie, an amazing writer on sex work and work and feminism and all kind of amazing things. We are gonna talk today about feminism obviously, and the connection between SWERFs, TERFs, and white supremacy, among other things, whatever we can get to in our 40 minutes.
Thank you so much for joining.
Adrie: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for asking me to talk to you. I'm very excited.
Cathy: Wonderful. So you're going to present at a conference on this topic. Tell us a little bit about that. So friend of mine, fellow sex worker, Dr. Snow, introduced me to some other academics.
I refer to myself as a reformed academic. I dropped out of grad school last year for a number of reasons. But before I left, a lot of my focus was on the technological oppression of sex workers and of marginalized people, especially on social media platforms. I've written a good bit about how sex workers and trans people especially are targeted on social media.
Dr. Snow recommended me for a panel at the American Studies Association for a roundtable discussion called SWERF and TERF, which is a lot of fun. It's basically about how exclusionary feminism harms all of us really. As a sex worker, as someone who is in a relationship, long-term, with a trans person, obviously the intersections of those two things matter a lot to me.
They form a lot of not only how I see the world, but how my own feminism in my own politics have evolved a lot.
Cathy: Totally. And this sounds like it's going to be an audience of academics or, who’s gonna be the main audience?
Adrie: My understanding is that it's almost exclusively academics. But the way I understand the American Studies Association is that they're very open to non-academic scholarship, obviously as someone who's no longer in academia. I hope at least there will be some non academics.
Cathy: If you could, yeah, I'd love to just hear what you found in your preparation for giving this talk about this intersection.
Adrie: Sure. A lot of my writing, a lot of my work, deals with transphobia and homophobia in leftist spaces. In leftist spaces especially we've seen a huge rise in transphobic and whorephobic rhetoric. Especially online, it comes from leftist spaces under the guise of, you know, we have to protect workers.
A lot of it, especially in terms of whorephobia, it's really just a lot of repackaged nonsense about how sex workers are uniquely at risk for violence and oppression and all of these sorts of things. And we know that sex workers and trans people do face elevated rates of abuse, assault, interpersonal violence, all these sorts of things.
We know that to be the truth. But it's not inherent to being a sex worker or being a trans person. And logically, if you follow that thought process, it's simple enough to understand that it comes not from that inherent state, but from the oppression that comes as a result of it. And when it comes to being trans or being a sex worker, especially, a lot of that oppression, a lot of that rhetorical violence, comes as a result of not understanding how white supremacist rhetoric, how nationalist rhetoric, how fundamentalist and evangelical rhetoric, has really pervaded. And the ways that all of us were socialized. I was just talking about this earlier, there's this belief that sex is this inherently sacred thing.
Sex is tied to intimacy. It's tied to monogamy. It can't be divorced from these things. And a lot of that. Well, it's not true. But a lot of it is tied to the evangelical belief that the sole purpose of sex is reproduction and the creation of life. But a lot of people never interrogate why they hold these beliefs, that sex is something special and sex is something important.
And so they're just parroting a lot of rhetoric.
Cathy: Sorry. Can I stop you for a second?
Adrie: Sure.
Cathy: Cause I know you could go on for 40 minutes uninterrupted and I think that would be amazing, but, just to make sure that everyone's kind of with you, cuz they're not all steeped in this stuff to the extent that you are.
So SWERFs and TERFs refer to sex worker exclusionary radical feminists. Radical feminist doesn't mean they're especially feminist. It it's a particular subset of feminism. And TERFs are trans exclusionary radical feminists. So some of the homophobia and transphobia that you're talking about, obviously the exclusion of trans women from the category of women is a lot of the transphobia as well as fear about including trans women in women majority or women-only spaces, fear about sexual assault committed by trans people, which to my knowledge has literally never happened.
And for the whorephobia aspect, in leftest spaces they talk a lot about abolition of sex work and the sex industry. But as we know, you can't really abolish something that is voluntarily entered into. The only thing you can do is to stigmatize it or criminalize it.
So when it comes to stigmatizing a criminalizing sex work, it's pretty ironic that all of the credible evidence indicates stigma and criminalization make sex work more exploitative and more dangerous. So we're gonna criminalize and stigmatize something because it's dangerous, thereby making it more dangerous for everybody involved.
I think your point about, the way I put it is sex isn't magic. Whether you're talking about a SWERF or an evangelical, the viewpoint is fundamentally the same that a woman can consent to making a latte or cleaning a toilet for money, but you can't consent to sex for money because sex is magic, cuz sex is some different category that makes it totally different from anything else you could agree to do for money. But let's get back to theoverlap between the evangelical conception of sex is magic and how it ties into the SWERF and TERF conception of sex is magic.
Adrie: Sure. I think that leads to the whole idea that sex is magic and you can't have sex for money. It leads to a really good point that a lot of this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what consent is. A lot of people have issues with sex work. I've seen the phrase “paid rape” thrown around a lot, which is extremely offensive to anyone that's survived sexual assault, which is also many sex workers.
I think it's just a misunderstanding of how consent works. Consent is not a one-time thing. It's not a matter of, well, I said yes and now I can't say no. One of the reasons that sex workers find the idea of paid rape so completely offensive is because all sex sex work is a constant negotiation and reaffirming of boundaries and the conditions needed to continue actively consenting to something. For most sex workers that is the exchange of money. But being given money doesn't negate your ability to consent. That being said, I think there are a couple of really clear ties to transphobia. The most obvious one being that trans people are obviously overrepresented as a demographic in sex work.
They have little to no job protections at the federal and state level. They really struggle with maintaining employment for any number of reasons. And a lot of times trans youth end up in sex work first because they were trafficked or because they had no other job options after being thrown out of their homes as minors.
So we know that trans people are involved in sex work at greater numbers. So that’s an obvious connection. But I think aside from that, trans people threaten nationalist, white supremacist ideals of the family. It's really difficult to convince everyone to get married, maintain a standard cis monogamous marriage, pop out 2.5 kids if people are actively rejecting the ideas of biological sex and extremely traditional gender roles. And that's not even to say that you have to be trans to reject gender roles.
Cathy: I think that's true to an extent. I think what's confusing to me a little bit is that, to an extent, the difference between… I think bell hooks talked about the difference between being gay and queer. To be gay is about who you wanna have sex with. To be queer is to question the fundamentals of the nuclear family and gender roles and what's expected of you. I see a lot of gayness in American society. You’ve got a lot of people who maybe they're not a cisgendered hetero monogamous person, but they're still doing… well, monogamy's not what I mean. But I'm just, I guess what I saw a lot of in DC in particular were, I called them “white picket fence gays.” They wanted the same thing that everybody, that the white hetero patriarchy would say is best.
They just wanted it with their boyfriend instead of their girlfriend. So I'm wondering about the extent to which, obviously a lot of what conservatives are worried about with regard to trans people and gay people is just absolutely ridiculous. The idea that everybody's gonna be trans or everybody's gonna be gay if we stop stigmatizing these identities is just patently false. It's just not true. But even the idea that gay people and trans people definitionally, or necessarily threaten the white heteropatriarchy. I don't even know if that's true. I see how it could, but I don't see in practice that it does. You know what I mean?
Adrie: Well, and I think that speaks to the insidiousness of white supremacist fundamentalist rhetoric. There's this really pervasive belief amongst the queer community, or I guess not even the queer community, but amongst the LGBT community, and among even amongst sex workers, there's this belief that if you perform it correctly, you will be accepted. So the running joke is that white gays are the weakest link, because they're still just white cis men. So they're really invested in upholding the status quo. I think there's a certain truth to that. You see white gays like Milo Yiannopoulos really embraced by the right. Because despite the fact that they are gay, they are still really invested in upholding the status quo, using this rhetoric that we see a lot of the times, but at the same time, no matter how much trans people, no matter how much gay, bisexual, pansexual people parrot that rhetoric, it does not change the fact that they are dispensable tools to conservative, right-wing talking heads.
As soon as they stop serving the purpose, as soon as they stop functioning as sort of a trophy, they no longer become useful. Obviously they're not part of the queer community, but an example of this is Diamond and Silk who we saw hit the campaign trail during Donald Trump'spresidential run, his first presidential run.
As soon as they began speaking about the discrimination that they experienced amongst his campaign staff, they were discarded. Because they no longer fit the narrative that there are some good Blacks out there. And I think it's the same thing for a lot of queer people and a lot of sex workers.
We see them parroting the rhetoric. But as soon as they begin to question the narrative, they're no longer useful and they no longer function in the way that they're supposed to. I think the simple fact that trans people and sex workers continue to be such targets and such visible targets for these people, it really reinforces the idea that their existence is a subversion of the state of being that conservatives and nationalists and white supremacists are trying to preserve whether they’re actively involved in subverting those ideals or not.
Cathy: Yeah, I think to a large extent queer people and sex workers to a small extent threaten the status quo, but to a much larger extent they serve as scapegoats to whatever systemic changes, societal changes really are shaking up the status quo. We're not gonna focus on those things because they're difficult and multifaceted. So we're just gonna attack trans people and sex workers because they're the ones that are screwing everything up.
Adrie: Right. We saw that recently with, I don't remember which publication it was, but there was an article about STI rates rising amongst teenagers and young adults being linked to people watching porn. Obviously most of what I saw was people really pushing back against that idea. But what the article did not really even attempt to address is that comprehensive sex ed has become less and less common in the public school system.
And the private school system is a whole nother issue, because they're really not required to do the same things. But in public schools especially we see more and more abstinence-only education. When I was teaching in Dade County, it was a firable offense to talk about safe sex with your students, which to me is ridiculous because Dade County has the highest incidence of new HIV cases in the country.
This is causation, not correlation. We know that when you don't teach children, teenagers, and young adults about safe sex consistently and from an early age, they're more likely to wind up pregnant as teenagers. They're more likely to wind up with STIs. They're more likely to end up with AIDS, and they're more likely to drop out of school because of pregnancies that they cannot get terminated.
That being said, to blame all those issues – teen pregnancy, STIs, dropout rates – to blame those things on pornography when many young adults and teenagers are turning to pornography because the questions that they have about sex are not being answered by anyone with any kind of expertise.
The issue itself is not porn. It's that accurate, medically sound, anatomically correct information is not available to them. And that to me is wild. To bring it all back, I taught ninth grade. I had students ask me about drag queens and trans people. They wanted to learn. They had seen these things on TV, but no one in their life had ever talked to them about them.
I had one student who said, “I just think it's weird that men dress up like women.” And I asked him, well, why do you think it's weird? And he didn't really have an answer for it. But once I talked to him, and really got into it, it wasn't that he thought it was weird. It said he had never seen anyone do it before.
And how could he? He was a first-generation Cuban American student from Miami. His parents worked three jobs. It's not like he was going to drag brunch on South Beach. But a lot of times they simply need a starting point and they need accurate information. So all of that to say, I agree with you. It's so much easier to target trans people and target sex workers, to call them groomers, to accuse them of trying to traffic children or whatever other nonsense we're looking at than it is to address the fact that a lot of us are complicit in raising children that are not prepared for life after public school.
Cathy: Totally. Yeah. I read a really good book about the ties between white supremacists, heteropatriarchy, and the white Christian evangelical movement in the United States called Jesus and John Wayne. I think those ties are pretty clear. I think you could make a pretty compelling evidence based case for those overlaps. But I'm curious about the SWERF and TERF white supremacist overlaps. Tell, tell us more about that.
Adrie: Well, I think at its core white supremacy functions around the idea of homogeneity. Everyone has to look the same. Everyone has to think the same. Everyone has to perform the same.
Otherwise the status quo cannot be maintained. A lot of that has to do with forcing people into a manufactured, hierarchical struggle. If people are not constantly fighting each other to get to the top, if people aren't fighting to win capitalism, it's really difficult for the system to maintain itself. Because it can't. People just don't function that way. Every person is not the same. Every person does not share the same love, the same work. All those sorts of things are really contradictory to the white supremacist structure. Anyone that is visibly other – brown people, trans people, sex workers – anyone who subverts the status quo simply by existing, whether they're trying to, or not. And I think that's an important distinction. Most sex workers, most trans people are not trying to be activists. They simply wanna be left the hell alone, which I greatly respect. But the very nature of their existence, it pisses people off on a deep level. People get so mad at me. I get hate mail all the time from people that are like, you're just a whore. Well, yes, but that doesn't make anything that I'm saying inaccurate. I'm I'm not out to, you know, turn anyone into a sex worker. I'm not trying to convert people.
I firmly want to be left the hell alone. I wish that the need for what I do did not exist. But it does because people like me, people like my partner, are constantly being attacked. They're being told that they don't deserve to live. They deserve to be in jail cells because they represent some great existential threat to children and the soul of the nation when all they're trying to do is pay rent.
Cathy: Yeah. And it's interesting to me how the links between the Cold War and white nationalism and evangelism were established in Jesus and John Wayne. How there was this idea that Russia and communism was godless and that their families were weak. And that in America, we needed strong families. We needed nuclear families. We needed white people to reproduce. We needed Americans to be God-fearing in order to defeat communism and keep America strong. And so the freakout about premarital sex and homosexuality and these things were very much tied to these fears over communism and the Cold War.
And it seems like the throughline is that, like you said, anything other than cis, heterosexual, lifelong monogamous marriage is a fundamental threat to American society.
I think it's hard when we talk about white supremacy. I think we should define white supremacy possibly. I think that when people think about white supremacy, there's obviously the people who are avowed white supremacists who want a white ethnostate. And then there's just kind of like the latent, systemic white supremacy, which is where institutions and systems, often inadvertently discriminate against non-white people in such a way as to advantage white people comparatively. When you look at whorephobia, it is fundamentally white supremacist in its execution in that the people who bear the biggest brunt of criminalization are marginalized sex workers, particularly sex workers of color who are more likely to have to work outdoors and outdoor sex work is where most violence and criminalization happens. Where do SWERFs and TERFs come in?
Adrie: Where don't they come in? Like I said, white supremacy is to me at its core, a function of very strict hierarchy. It's about maintaining sameness, which is why there's no quote unquote white culture. It's about homogenizing the culture. It's about making everything the same boring and beige. I think that SWERFs and TERFs and really even I would say radical feminists in general, for them I think a lot of the rhetoric that they parroting comes from a time where Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem were really the champions of feminism. And I think for them that is the bound. The idea of the white woman busting through the glass ceiling and achieving corporate success. I think for so many radical feminists, that to them is the pinnacle of their feminism. I don't think that it's possible for them to imagine a feminism that is any more expansive than that. And I get into a lot of trouble for saying this, but I tend to believe white women, white feminists specifically, pose a very unique danger to anyone that is not white. people yell at me and they get really mad at me. And they're like, well, white men are so violent. I'm not disagreeing with you. White men have been and are incredibly violent. But a lot of times that violence is physical. It's very visible. It's very easy to identify. And I think fighting back against when it comes to white, [00:27:00] radical feminism, when it comes to white women in the way that they are socialized, I think it's so much more dangerous and so much more insidious because the idea is, well, we're all in this together. And if you argue with me, you're a bad feminist. You're not on women's side. You hate women. If I say, I don't think sex workers have to be empowered in order to deserve labor protections, the pushback is, oh, you think women should be raped. You think women should be assaulted?
Actually, I don't think that. I think those are terrible things. I would never wish those things on anyone. But my feminism, I think, is far more expansive and it understands that that hierarchy does not serve me. It does not serve a lot of other women. I'm not interested in winning capitalism. The sex workers that I know are not interested in winning capitalism. They just wanna put food on their table. They just wanna pay rent. It's so much easier to attack trans people who are simply interested in surviving from day to day for their existence than it is to address your complicity in upholding a system that makes them an underclass.
Cathy: So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. When radfems, particularly SWERFs and TERFs, do things like advocate for the stigmatization and criminalization of sex work, engage in transphobia, engage in carceral feminism, they are wittingly or unwittingly violently upholding white supremacist heteropatriarchy.
Adrie: Yes. Honestly, I think when it comes to transphobia, it's a little more, I hate to say nuanced. Because at the end of the day, transphobia is violent. There's really no excuse for it. But I think I can kind of maybe a little bit understand where some people are coming from when it comes to their transphobia.
For a lot of people, it's not something that they have ever had to understand before. They've never been forced to confront the fact that there are trans people in their lives (because there are.) They've never been forced to reckon with the idea that no, you can't look at someone and tell that they're trans. It's simply a ridiculous assertion to make.
I was just talking to my partner about this because I buy men's shirts because they have really broad shoulders. I see online all the time, Oh, I can tell she was definitely born a man cuz she has linebacker shoulders. Well, I'm a cis woman and I just have broad shoulders. There's really nothing I can do about it.
But I think it makes people uncomfortable to be confronted with something that they have never actually seen before. That being said, I firmly believe, and I have yet to be proven wrong, but I firmly believe that every opposition to sex work I have ever come across in the end comes down to Christian fundamentalist socialization. You are uncomfortable with some aspect of sex or the commercialization of sex and so you need everyone else to feel the same way. A lot of times people talk about the spirituality of sex and souls and all of that stuff. And that sounds really good on the internet, I guess. But just because you took the word Jesus out of it, that doesn't make it any less Christian.
Cathy: Well, and it's also individual. It's absolutely fine for you to experience sex as a soul connection or a meaningful act or something that's only to be done in these particular circumstances with these particular people. Knock yourself out. That's amazing. But for you to violently enforce your individual conceptions of sexuality on another human is not acceptable.
You can believe whatever you want. You cannot force other people to conform to your views at gunpoint, or with the threat of stigma. You don't get to punish people for not believing as you do. But yeah, I mean, I empathize with a lot of people because I grew up Southern Baptist as a white person in Alabama and the reality is if you are not individually subject to a particular kind of oppression, the only way you could possibly know about it is by listening to other people. I didn't know anything about racism, cuz I didn't have to experience it. I didn't know anything about whorephobia because I wasn't subject to it until I was a sex worker.
And really until I started listening to sex workers. You're not gonna understand transphobia and how it impacts people until you listen to people. But that's kind of the project here, is to figure out that these things exist, that we need to get educated on them, to inform ourselves about the reality of the situation and to, try to blunt the oppressive impulses that we're all imbued with simply by being raised in a society that seeks to violently uphold its status hierarchies and status quo.
Adrie: I think when it comes to the issue of trans people being called groomers or being posed as a unique threat to children, so much of that fear, I feel like I'm seeing a lot of it come from white Southern and conservative moms who maybe very deep deep down, they're terrified that they're not gonna have grandchildren.
My mom is not a white Southern woman. But it's something that I went through with my mom for years, getting her to understand that I don't want children. I never want children. I have no interest in them. And I'm less concerned about who's gonna take care of me in my old age and more will I live to see the age of 50.
So again, I can almost kind of understand if I squint really hard. But again, all of it is just really violent rhetoric. I think it comes down to, like you said, you have to listen to people who share experiences that are not your own. It's something even I struggle with, honestly.
Cathy: Sure. Well, we all do. Well, I really appreciate you coming down to share your experience and scholarship. And I just wanted to give you a chance in the few minutes we have left to tell people where they can read more of your work and follow you.
Adrie: Sure. So on I deleted my TikTok account because that was an awful experience. But on Instagram and Twitter, I am at Adrierising. All of my writing is pinned on the top of my Twitter account. My website is Adrierose.link. That's pretty much it.
Cathy: Wonderful. Well, I hope that your talk is well-received. It should be. I'm glad you get to give it. And, I really, again, appreciate you giving me your time and sharing your expertise.
Adrie: Thank you so much for having me.
Cathy: Of course. Anytime, talk to you soon.
Adrie Rose on the ties between TERFs, SWERFs, and white supremacy