WorldWE was founded by an anti-trans feminist who speaks frequently against trans people, as was AF3IRM. I mean, like, keynote speakers at events with Meghan Murphy where they call trans people predators and make fun of them level of anti-trans. Esperanza used to speak on behalf of decrim until she joined AF3IRM (she was hired shortly after a group of trans women spoke publicly about AF3IRM being an unsafe org for trans people).

It’s no surprise that Esperanza works with them, she was trained to organise in an evangelical christian programme, and really, people working against their own interests isn’t anything new. That’s pretty par for the course, especially in America. Right-wing christofascists fund like, most of the organising in the US. What was a bit more surprising was Esperanza calling the sex workers who argue on behalf of decrim “Soros-funded” which is uh…dogwhistly.

As far as Brigid, she is also anti-abortion access. I’m not sure how Esperanza and Brigid came to be so cited in Marxist circles, it’s been strange to me for a while now, as someone intimately familiar with the sex worker organisation struggles.

This information doesn’t change things, I would think. It should be obvious that the bourgeois police state are directly responsible for the trafficking of women, and can never be used as a lever to “liberate” them. In fact, most criminalisation policies (even the ones that purport not to criminalise workers, just buyers) are leveraged to increase surveillance on poor and migrant communities and further fund border security, which is the largest cause of trafficking and sexual violence.

If you want to help women get away from trafficking, the move is to support sex workers organising for their conditions to improve. There is a reason that women and sex workers are often in the thick of radical movements, and it’s because our conditions are fucking trash in capitalism. Organised labour is more easily integrated into working class movements as a whole, and thus can serve to expand the reach of a class conscious struggle against the bourgeois.

If you’re morally opposed to sex work, then the answer is decrim, folding sex workers into the larger workers’ movement, and then actually ending capitalism because as long as there is mass exploitation of proletarian bodies, as long as there is no guaranteed housing, medical care, and food, the sex trade will flourish.

Safe exit programmes (when they do not involve the police and when they are voluntary) are also a huge necessity in mitigating the damage until the trade withers away. An important part of that is to work against the stigma that is leveraged at sex workers, and to work against the criminalisation of sex work. As long as sex workers have records, or are marginalised for their sex work, they won’t be able to exit the trade because there’ll be no safe work outside of the sex trade.

As I mentioned before, the policed border is one of the prime vectors for trafficking and sexual violence, so organising against migrant surveillance and migrant criminalisation is a huge step in preventing trafficking. Despite this, most “anti-trafficking” organisations actually lobby to increase the militarisation of borders, which results in worse conditions for migrants, pushes more migrants into sex work, and also results in countless sexual assaults in migrant detention.

I highly recommend reading Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia to get an understanding of the ways borders and their militarisation create untold exploitation and fuel imperialism to new heights. If you’re interested in the history of sex workers organising, I recommend reading about STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and their struggle to establish a queer commune, and their connections to the Communist Party (which rejected them), the Black panthers and the Young Lords.