2023: Health and Wellness Services: Learning from Trans Sex Workers to Provide Good Care
Our current collaborative research project focuses on health and wellness service provision for people who are trans and sell sex.
For this project, we interviewed four trans men, nine trans women and one non-binary person with current or previous involvement in sex work about their experiences of finding, accessing, and using health and well-being services in some parts of the UK. Four of the interviewees were migrants.
We analysed these interviews, and four important themes were present: i) the positive and negative experiences people have had when accessing services; ii) what an ‘ideal service’ might look like; iii) how the dual identity of being trans and a sex worker can lead to gaps in service provision; vi) how people seek out services, the importance of service location and issues around continuity of care. We discuss these themes in our booklet, which you can download either in colour or black and white below.
2023: Project Launch and Knowledge Sharing Event at York Medical Society, 29th June
On the 29/06/23 we launched our project ‘Health and wellness services: learning from trans sex workers to provide good care’ at York Medical Society. About 40 people attended the event; we invited a mix of practitioners, activists and people of lived experience as well as researchers. It was a brilliant, inspiring day, and so wonderful to meet so many people working at the intersection of trans healthcare and sex work.
In the morning session of the event, Michelle Ross and Victoria Cordoba from CliniQ gave and inspirational keynote called: ‘Fighting stigma. Inclusion matters. Trans health matters’. The super talented Nifty Fox Creative visually-scribed this for us, you can see their representation of the key-note below.
Nifty Fox Creative also visually-scribed the talk we delivered to launch our research project: ‘Health and wellness services: learning from trans sex workers to provide good care.’ You can see the image below.
After lunch we worked in small groups to complete two knowledge exchange sessions each with a different aim. In the first, we created a newspaper front-page detailing the most pressing issues facing trans people who sell sex. Each group created their own front page, and aspects were selected from each to make a final scribed front page.
In the final knowledge exchange activity each group was tasked with creating a policy brief to address the issues highlighted on the newspaper front pages. These were also brought together in the scribed brief you can see below.
2017: TransActions: A Project with Trans Sex Workers
Our first booklet, published in 2017 explored the multiple issues and exclusions faced by trans people who sell sex face in their everyday lives. Documenting conversations we had with trans people who do sex work and practitioners providing services to them, it considered pressing issues including: migration, routes into and out of sex work, criminal and social justice and crucially, the intersectional discrimination faced by people who are both trans and sex workers. We call this transwhorephobia. Download our booklet below to read more.
TransActions: research with trans people who sell sex 