Wendy you inadvertently got off on the wrong foot. Perhaps you may want to get a fresh start by posting an
introduction.
This thread raises issues that deserve both clarity and compassion.
No one here has the right to judge another person's life decisions. Not their medical choices, not their relationships, not how they survive, not how they define themselves. We each walk a path shaped by circumstances others may never fully see or understand.
Survival sex work is not shameful. Many transgender women have faced housing discrimination, employment discrimination, family rejection, violence, addiction, and systemic barriers that drastically narrow their options. When someone does what they must to stay alive, that is resilience. The moral failing lies in a society that creates those conditions — not in the person who survives them.
I personally know trans women involved in survival sex work — not because surgery gave them some inflated sense of their worth, but because addiction and circumstance left them few other options. One has no interest in surgery at all, feeling it would take away something that makes her unique. Her reality has nothing to do with the narrative being suggested earlier in this thread. She is surviving. That deserves compassion, not judgment.
It is also important to separate stereotypes from reality. Surgery does not "cause" someone to enter sex work. Transition is not a business model. For most women here — as has already been expressed throughout this discussion — surgery is about peace, embodiment, and living in alignment with one's true sex. It is about no longer dissociating. It is about safety in one's own skin. It is about being able to exist in the world without that constant internal fracture.
We are not a single story. Some of us are post-operative, some are not. Some are heterosexual, some gay, some bisexual, some asexual. Some are married, some single. Some have experienced trauma, some have not. Some have done sex work — many have never been anywhere near it. None of those realities invalidate the others.
What harms us is when broad generalizations reinforce the old trope that trans women are inherently sexualized or defined by sex. That stereotype has been weaponized against our community for generations. We should be careful not to echo it from within.
Wendy, your most recent post speaks to trauma, to non-consensual experiences, to complex embodiment, and to the search for affirming connection. That is deeply personal, and you deserve safety and respect in your healing. At the same time, personal experience — any of ours — cannot be universalized onto all trans women.
We are real women living real lives. We work, we love, we pay bills, we keep our appointments, we build families and careers. Some of us have survived unimaginable circumstances along the way. None of us owe the world conformity to anyone else's narrative of what a woman should be.
This space exists so we can support one another — without shame, without projection, and without judgment. We won't judge your life, so please don't judge anyone else's.
