Transition Scars? Transgender Women and Sex Work by Birth and Transition Cohorts

• In Event: 20417 - Gender and Work at the Margins: Criminalization, Legislation, and Local Context

Abstract

In the context of increasing political violence towards transgender people, it becomes increasingly important to understand whether gender transition leaves scars excluding transgender people from the formal labor market. This paper takes sex work as a proxy for exclusion from non-criminalized forms of work and estimates the racialized prevalence of sex work among transgender women in the United States. The focus on an informal criminalized form of work extends the literature which has documented unemployment and discrimination faced by transgender people. With a sample of over 9,000 transgender women from the 2015 United States Transgender Survey, this paper presents rates of sex work by birth cohort and how these rates are stratified by timing of gender transition. Initial findings suggest that, across all ages, transgender women of color are more likely to have ever engaged in sex work than white transgender women. Within race and age, those who transitioned at younger ages are more likely to have engaged in sex work than those who transitioned at older ages. This suggests that decisions related to gender transition are tied with exclusion from non-criminalized forms of work. In other words, transition may leave scars in the formal labor market. Despite high-profile examples of transgender women of color sex workers, there has not previously been empirical studies describing these trends.

Author

• Katie Donnelly Moran, Princeton University