Much like with drug use, when a market is criminalized it does not prevent the market from existing: rather it creates the purest form of capitalist free market. A market completely devoid of oversight or recourse for the workers. Decriminalising sex work will help to redress the imbalance of power that sex workers face as they are able to openly organise and engage in struggle.

Sex workers deserve our solidarity in this struggle, as they’ve given so much of themselves to struggles through the years.

In medieval Europe brothel workers formed guilds and orchestrated strikes for improved working conditions. In the fifteenth century, prostitutes in Bavaria asserted before a city council that what they did was work. In 1917 200 prostitutes marched in San Francisco to demand the end of brothel closures. A speaker said “Nearly every one of these women is a mother or has someone depending on her. . . They are driven into this life by economic conditions. . . You don’t do any good by attacking us. Why don’t you attack those conditions?”

In 19th century Britain and Ireland prostitutes created mutual aid networks, sharing income and child care (a tradition that is alive in sex worker communities to this day).

When eight sex workers were murdered in Thika, Kenya, in 2010, hundreds of sex workers, including the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance came from around the country to protest police violence. Aisha, a sex worker in Thika, said, “we wanted people to know that we call ourselves sex workers because it is the wheat our families depend on.” Sixty years earlier, in the 1950s prostitutes joined the Mau Mau revolution to free Kenya from British rule.

In the 60s street trans sex workers were at the front of the charge in the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall Uprisings, putting their lives on the line to battle police for queer liberation. They also were in the line of fire for the fight for civil rights.

STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), founded by two street sex workers, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were involved in the Stonewall Uprising, was a network of radical street queens who worked together in community. Sylvia Rivera joined the Gay Liberation Front and the Young Lords, marched to protest Angela Davis’s arrest, and met in conference with Huey P. Newton.

In Disarm, Defund, Dismantle, sex workers contribute their knowledge on the importance of sex worker organizing in tackling violent policing and the criminalisation of racialised people.

Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project is one of the oldest sex-worker-led organizations in Canada and has worked to protect street sex workers, and provide support for trans people. Their essay Sex Worker Justice – By Us, For Us: Toronto Sex Workers Resisting Carceral Violence details their work in searching for a missing Black and Indigenous trans street worker, Alloura Wells, when police refused to mobilize a search for her. They have been active in abolitionist movements, understanding the necessity of ending policing and prisons for the lives of sex workers. Their work with helping trans street workers access hormones is documented in Namaste’s Invisible Lives.

Trans rights and sex workers rights are deeply linked: trans people are frequently kicked out of homes, excluded from institutions and social services, and often work as prostitutes. 44% of Black trans women in the US have done survival sex work.

As Viviane K. Namaste says, “systemic and institutionalised discrimination against prostitutes impedes and prevents their access to health care and thus the ability of many transsexuals to live their bodies as they choose. Such discrimination is evident in numerous locations: gender identity clinics, prisons, and health care and social service agencies. It is discrimination against prostitutes that orders the experiences of many transsexuals—especially MTF transsexuals—within the institutional world. How relevant is a “transgendered” social movement that does not make the decriminalization of prostitution a priority?”

In 1974 Ethiopian sex workers joined the Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions and engaged in strike actions with them against the government.

In 1975 sex workers in France occupied churches to protest poverty, criminalisation and police violence. In London, the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied churches in King’s Cross in 1980.

Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement has from its inception been intertwined with the organisation of sex workers, and has stood in solidarity with them in their quest to have their labour recognised as real work so that they might demand their emancipation from such work through a radical transformation of society.

In the words of Black Women for Wages for Housework: “When prostitutes win, all women win.”