rapeculturerealities:

For years, I have been writing on Twitter about the impact of legislation on sex workers, which is to say, on my community. Sometimes people pay attention, sometimes strangers write to me about it, sometimes I get threats and name-calling.

But never have I faced on the internet the kind of vitriol or the kind of frighteningly zealous support as I have since I told a family story online last week about Bernie Sanders behaving less-than-perfectly-progressive toward my mother some time in the early ’80s

The response to the tweet was overwhelming. As it turns out, people care a lot more about whether or not Bernie Sanders might have said something mildly sexist 35 years ago to a “porn star’s mom” — as a Newsweek story about my tweet put it — than they do about whether sex workers live or die.

Even after many years of living in the world as a sex worker, after the deaths of so many friends and coworkers — some of them uninvestigated and unreported, others followed by online comments like “good thing she’s dead” — the passion with which people will apply themselves to protecting (or destroying) the reputation of a politician, while ignoring the impact of legislation he supports, still surprises me.

Sanders, along with 96 other Senators, passed H.R. 1865, also known as FOSTA-SESTA (or just SESTA) on March 21. On April 11, Trump signed the bill into law. SESTA removes protections in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to create new civil and criminal liability for “anyone who owns, manages, or operates” a website “with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law does not clarify what this means. Is warning other sex workers about dangerous clients (as workers have done online for many years) facilitating prostitution? What about sharing safety and health information with sex working people? How many harm-reduction tactics are now against federal law? How will the owners, managers, and operators of social media and other communications websites respond to this, and what impact will that have on already-marginalized people?

For months before this law passed, my friends and I wrote to reporters, we tweeted and posted to Instagram and called our representatives and made as much noise as we could. It seemed obvious that this legislation would be devastating to the safety of our loved ones, and had the potential to cut all of us off from each other by making us a liability to websites that facilitate the everyday online forms of communication everyone has come to rely on. When the bill passed the Senate, our predictions came immediately true.

Websites that sex workers relied on to screen clients shut down. Google Playand Microsoft changed their terms of service. Skype and Microsoft Office have banned “offensive language” and “inappropriate content,” to go into effect on May 1. Google Drive began to delete sex workers’ content and lock out users. Sex workers started an alternative social media site called “Switter,” to ensure we would have a place to communicate with each other if we were summarily kicked off of social media. This week, Switter was kicked off of its content delivery network.

There has been other impact as well: reports of an increase in sex workers working outdoors, and stories about friends who have gone missing or harmed themselves. A friend had her bank account frozen. Another friend said that though she’d had plans to leave the adult industry, the hostility of the current climate had convinced her she would not be able to do any other kind of work. This impact is widespread and has hit folks whose work was criminalized as well as those doing legal forms of sex work such as stripping and working in adult film.

Bernie Sanders praising Cardi B after voting for SESTA is every ex I’ve had who brought me to a few parties, but wouldn’t let me even be seen in the vicinity of their parents or their boss. Every sex worker I know has exes like this.

At marches and demonstrations, my friends and I have spent so much time shouting. We’ve spent so much time writing letters, calling legislative staff, talking to journalists, showing up at administrative and legislative hearings. We’ve spent so much time being unheard by anyone, from any political party. Equally vehement in the messages I’ve received in the last 48 hours are ones from folks who think my story demonstrates some allegiance to Hillary Clinton or the DNC. Apparently there is a thing called donut twitter and something else called rose twitter, and the 2016 democratic primary is still alive on the internet as though all of this were about gaining and losing points in some ongoing adversarial sport.

Sex work, however, is not a partisan issue. Sex workers are equally hated by the right and the left. Conservatives and liberals and socialists alike have supported policies that have led to the deaths of sex workers. Nonetheless, sex workers hold beliefs across the political spectrum. We continue to vote for people who are demonstrably flawed. We vote for people who we know do not like us. We vote for people who are imperfect, and then we call them on the phone, we show up at their rallies and at their offices and demand that they become the representatives that we need them to be.

We know that they are flawed and we believe, still, that one day they will hear us.

Bernie Sanders And My Mom And The Attack On Sex Workers