By JT Santana | jtwb768

There are subjects you can write about once, hit publish, argue about for a few days, and move along.

Sex work is not one of them.

The deeper I have gotten into the preliminary research for what began as an idea for a handful of articles, the clearer it has become that sex work sits at the intersection of almost everything I have spent years writing about: stigma, sexuality, bodily autonomy, public health, LGBTQ+ lives, gender, criminal law, poverty, policing, religion, HIV/AIDS, trauma, technology, disability, privacy, and the strange American habit of deciding that discomfort is sometimes sufficient justification for punishment.

So I am going considerably bigger.

Sex Work in America is now being developed as a 60-part JTWB768 series, tentatively scheduled to begin Thursday, January 7, 2027. If the current weekly publication schedule holds, one new article will appear each Thursday, taking the project into February 2028.

That sounds enormous.

It is.

The subject deserves it.

What began with one basic question — At what point did sex work become so thoroughly stigmatized in the United States, and why? — kept producing more questions. Why is selling sex treated so differently from purchasing it? Why can two adults legally have sex, yet the exchange of money can transform the same act into a crime? Why does the seller so often carry the enduring social identity of the transaction, yet the purchaser can disappear from the conversation? Why do Americans routinely confuse consensual adult sex work with sex trafficking when federal law does not treat them as synonymous? Why do some countries regulate commercial sex as labor, some criminalize purchasers, some license brothels, and others rely heavily on criminal prohibition?

Then come the questions that do not fit neatly into a law book.

What happens when a sex worker needs a doctor?

What happens when someone working illegally is robbed, assaulted, raped, or threatened and must decide whether calling police creates another danger?

What happens when a transgender woman is presumed to be selling sex simply from where she is standing or what she is wearing?

What happens when a disabled adult wants intimacy and turns to a paid professional?

What happens when someone wants to leave sex work but has no housing, employment, child care, health insurance, or viable income waiting on the other side?

And what happens when policymakers write laws about an entire population without seriously listening to the people those laws will govern?

Those are not sixty versions of the same question. They are sixty doors into American history, law, sexuality, health, culture, labor, and stigma.

That is what Sex Work in America is going to examine.

Before Anything Else: Sex Work and Sex Trafficking Are Not Synonyms

One distinction has to be established before this project publishes its first article.

Consensual adult sex work and sex trafficking are not interchangeable terms.

The U.S. Department of Justice defines sex trafficking as recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting someone for a commercial sex act when force, fraud, or coercion is involved, or when the person induced to perform the commercial sex act is under age 18. Adult trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of minors are treated differently under federal law. Movement across state lines is not what creates trafficking. Force, fraud, coercion, or the involvement of a minor is the controlling issue under the federal framework (U.S. Department of Justice, n.d.). (justice.gov)

That distinction does not minimize trafficking. It makes trafficking easier to discuss accurately.

Real people are beaten, threatened, manipulated, financially controlled, sexually assaulted, defrauded, and forced into commercial sex. Children are commercially sexually exploited. Adults can enter something voluntarily and later encounter coercion or violence. Someone can exercise agency in one part of life and be exploited in another.

A serious project has to hold more than one truth at the same time.

Attorney Brittnie Panetta of Matthews & Associates put that problem directly when I asked her about sex work and public policy:

“Laws that are meant to improve safety can have unintended consequences when they are developed without meaningful input from the people most affected. Sex workers should have a voice in discussions about their autonomy and access to legal protections without fear of being ignored or stigmatized.”

Panetta brings a legal and public-policy perspective to this discussion. She is admitted to the State Bar of California and the U.S. District Courts for the Central and Northern Districts of California. Her work at Matthews & Associates includes complex civil litigation on behalf of people seeking legal recourse after serious harm, and she holds a master’s degree in International Policy Studies with a focus on trade, investment, and development. Her professional background gives her a useful perspective on access to justice, institutional accountability, public policy, and what happens when people harmed by systems struggle to obtain meaningful remedies. (Matthews & Associates)

Her point reaches far beyond terminology.

Bad definitions produce bad policy.

If every adult sex worker is automatically classified as a trafficking victim, the worker who says, “No, that is not my experience,” becomes inconvenient. If every claim of agency is treated as proof that exploitation never occurs, trafficking survivors and workers facing coercion disappear from the other direction.

Neither approach is acceptable for this project.

I want the uncomfortable middle, where the evidence lives.

Why Stigma Cannot Be Treated as a Side Issue

Sex work is often discussed as though stigma were simply the social price someone pays for participating in something controversial.

That description is far too shallow.

Stigma can affect whether people receive medical care. It can affect housing, employment, banking, police interactions, family relationships, mental health care, client screening, reporting of violence, and whether someone feels safe telling a doctor what actually happened.

The World Health Organization states that sex workers face high levels of stigma and criminalization across much of the world. WHO connects punitive laws, discrimination, violence, and exclusion with barriers to HIV and STI prevention, mental-health services, reproductive care, contraception, hepatitis services, and broader health access (World Health Organization, n.d.). (World Health Organization)

Research has raised equally serious questions about policing.

A major systematic review published in PLOS Medicine examined 40 quantitative studies and 94 qualitative studies concerning sex-work laws, policing, health, violence, and access to services. Exposure to repressive policing practices was associated with higher odds of sexual or physical violence, HIV or sexually transmitted infections, and condomless sex. The authors were careful about the limitations: much of the evidence was observational, study populations varied, and some legal models had far less quantitative evidence than others. Those limitations are part of the story, not an excuse to pretend the findings do not exist (Platt et al., 2018). (PLOS)

This project will spend considerable time on that difference between what a law intends to accomplish and what happens after human beings have to live under it.

Those are not always the same thing.

That distinction appears in another expert response I received while developing the series.

Sara Sloan, LMFT, CST, IRT, is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, and a Certified Imago Relationship Therapist. Her clinical work focuses heavily on sexuality, intimacy, identity, relationships, kink, ethical non-monogamy, trauma, and related concerns. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists lists Sloan as a Certified Sex Therapist, and her Austin Concierge Therapy biography documents her clinical credentials and prior work as an instructor in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program. Her teaching and writing have included gender, sexuality, and identity, and she has contributed sexual-health and relationship commentary to national publications. (Austin Concierge Therapy)

Sloan has worked clinically with sex workers, and she takes a strong position on what social erasure can do:

“Sex work should be normalized in order to bring sex work out of the shadows. This would improve the health of the sex workers and the overall population. By denying that sex work exists, you must also pretend sex workers don’t exist.”

She went further:

“I have worked with sex workers for years and it’s their dehumanization that creates the real problem.”

That does not mean every article in Sex Work in America will begin from the premise that Sloan’s preferred policy approach has already won the argument. It means her clinical observations raise questions that deserve examination.

Can stigma make people reluctant to seek therapy?

Can fear of judgment prevent honest conversations with medical providers?

Can criminalization or secrecy deepen isolation?

Can someone who wants to leave sex work find clinicians, housing providers, employers, and institutions willing to treat that person as more than a past occupation?

Can someone who does not want to leave receive health care without first being told that exit is the only acceptable outcome?

Those questions belong in public health. They belong in mental health. They belong in conversations about stigma.

They belong in this series.

Sex Workers Need to Be Participants, Not Exhibits

There is an old habit in American policymaking that I have come to despise.

Find a population.

Write laws about them.

Hold conferences about them.

Publish reports about them.

Debate them.

Then somehow forget to invite many of them into the room.

Sex workers have been subjected to that treatment repeatedly.

Panetta’s response points directly at the problem. Policy created without meaningful participation from the people most affected can produce consequences lawmakers never anticipated. Her second point is equally important: experiencing exploitation or abuse does not erase a person’s credibility or right to seek justice.

That principle cuts in every direction.

A current sex worker who supports decriminalization deserves to be heard.

A former sex worker who hated the work deserves to be heard.

A person who entered voluntarily and later experienced violence deserves to be heard.

A trafficking survivor deserves to be heard.

A worker who believes legalization helped deserves to be heard.

A worker who believes regulation created another layer of surveillance deserves to be heard.

Someone who supports the Nordic model deserves a fair account of that position.

Someone who believes buyer criminalization makes workers less safe deserves a fair hearing too.

There is no honest way to write sixty articles about this subject and pretend sex workers constitute one political faction with one life story.

The same standard applies to trafficking survivors.

I refuse to create a series where sex workers are used to defeat survivors in an ideological argument, or survivors are used to erase every adult who describes their own participation as consensual.

That would be intellectually dishonest and ethically ugly.

Sex Work in America will treat disagreement as evidence that the subject is complicated, not evidence that one side needs to be edited out.

So What Are We Actually Going to Talk About?

The working project plan currently contains sixty articles organized across history, terminology, American law, stigma, public health, labor, LGBTQ+ experience, disability, purchasers, international systems, technology, and policy.

The titles remain preliminary. Research can change them. A law can change. A better question can appear. An interview can expose a blind spot. A title that looks brilliant in September can look embarrassingly clever by January.

Still, I want readers to see where this is heading.

Here is a sample of the current working titles:

• What Sex Work Is—and What It Is Not
• The “Oldest Profession”? A Phrase That Hides More Than It Explains
• Consent, Money, and the Question America Keeps Avoiding
• Sex Work Is Not Sex Trafficking: Where the Legal Line Actually Falls
• Who Counts as a Sex Worker?
• Who Buys Sex? The Half of the Market We Rarely Study
• Before the Red-Light District: Sex Work in Colonial and Early America
• Brothels, Boomtowns, and the American City
• St. Louis Tried Regulated Prostitution in 1870. What Happened?
• Storyville, Segregated Vice, and the Politics of Containment
• The Progressive-Era War on Prostitution
• “White Slavery,” Immigration Panic, and the Mann Act
• The American Plan: When Public Health Became Sexual Policing
• Midcentury America: The Sex Worker as Deviant and the Client as Normal
• Stonewall, Street Economies, and Queer Survival
• COYOTE and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Sex-Worker-Rights Movement
• HIV/AIDS, Condoms, and the Public-Health Criminalization Paradox
• How America Made the “Whore” Into a Social Category
• The Sexual Double Standard: Why the Seller Carries the Shame
• Race, Respectability, and the Policing of Commercial Sex
• Poverty, Housing, and Survival Sex
• Religion, Morality, and the American Politics of Prostitution
• “Walking While Trans”: When Gender Expression Became Probable Cause
• Fifty States, Fifty Versions of Prostitution Law
• Nevada: Legal Brothels, Illegal Prostitution, and the Las Vegas Myth
• Maine’s Partial Decriminalization Experiment
• Police, Stings, Entrapment Debates, and the Machinery of Enforcement
• After the Arrest: Records, Housing, Immigration, Employment, and Family Consequences
• Sexual Health Is Bigger Than STI Testing
• Violence Against Sex Workers—and Whether Calling Police Feels Safe
• Payment Does Not Purchase Consent
• Can Sex Work Be Treated as Labor?
• Male Sex Workers: The Population America Rarely Sees
• Gay and Bisexual Men in Commercial Sex
• Transgender Women, Sex Work, and Layered Stigma
• Trans Men and Nonbinary Sex Workers
• Disability, Sexual Access, Intimacy, and the Ethics of Paid Companionship
• The Buyer-Seller Stigma Gap
• Women, LGBTQ Clients, and the Purchasers Missing From the Stereotype
• Client Responsibility: Consent, Health, Safety, and Exploitation Red Flags
• The Netherlands: Legal Sex Work, Regulation, Taxes, and Persistent Stigma
• New Zealand: What Full Decriminalization Actually Looks Like
• Belgium: Employment Contracts Without Selling Away Sexual Consent
• Sweden: The Nordic Model and the Case for Criminalizing Demand
• FOSTA-SESTA: Fighting Trafficking or Making Sex Work More Dangerous?
• Deplatformed: Banking, Payment Processors, Advertising, and Financial Exclusion
• AI, Deepfakes, Privacy, and the Next Sex-Work Policy Fight
• Which Legal Model Produces the Best Outcomes? An Evidence Audit
• Beyond Stigma: What a Serious American Sex-Work Policy Could Look Like

And yes, that is only a preview.

One subject I am particularly interested in is the purchaser.

American discussions of prostitution can be bizarrely seller-centered. We talk endlessly about “prostitutes.” We have spent generations creating degrading terms for sellers. We debate what kind of woman sells sex, whether she is respectable, whether she is damaged, whether she needs saving, whether she deserves punishment.

Meanwhile, a transaction requiring a purchaser somehow becomes culturally defined by one participant.

That deserves scrutiny.

Who buys sex?

Men, certainly. What about women? Gay men? Bisexual people? Transgender clients? Married people? Widowed people? Disabled adults? People seeking companionship? People exploring sexuality? People who behave abusively? People who respect boundaries? People who create demand for trafficking? People who actively avoid exploitative circumstances?

The answer will not be one stereotype.

That entire side of the market needs examination.

Why Am I Qualified to Write This?

Let me answer this one before someone else does it for me.

I am not a sex worker.

I am not a trafficking survivor.

I am not an attorney.

I am not a sex therapist.

I am not going to pretend proximity to a subject grants me ownership of somebody else’s experience.

What I am is JT Santana, an independent digital publisher, public-health communicator, community advocate, and social-impact writer whose work has consistently focused on stigma, sexuality, identity, criminal justice, health, disability, public policy, LGBTQ+ life, and the treatment of marginalized people by institutions. That is how my own publication describes the work I have built through JTWB768.com and the broader becoming project. (The Babblings of JT)

I have spent years writing about the difference between what systems claim to do and what happens to the human beings living inside those systems.

I have written about HIV/AIDS history and stigma, queer history, transgender rights, public health, mental health, criminal justice, incarceration and reentry, poverty, disability, sexual health, political accountability, civil rights, religion, and social judgment. My work regularly asks a recurring question: Who gets protected, who gets managed, who gets believed, and who gets treated as the problem? (The Babblings of JT)

Sex work fits squarely inside that body of work.

My qualifications are not built around claiming to know what sex work feels like.

They are built around knowing how to research systems, read laws, interrogate stigma, examine policy claims, work with experts, distinguish lived experience from population-level evidence, and recognize when the people at the center of a debate have been reduced to political props.

My work has long included LGBTQ+ advocacy and sexual-health communication. I have written publicly about the AIDS era, queer stigma, gender, sexuality, bodily autonomy, and the consequences of public-health decisions made through fear rather than evidence. My published work has discussed the AIDS crisis as lived cultural history rather than a chapter safely confined to a textbook. (The Babblings of JT)

That experience does not make me an epidemiologist.

It taught me something else.

Words matter.

Definitions matter.

Who gets invited into the room matters.

Stigma can become policy frighteningly fast.

And policies written about marginalized people frequently outlive the panic that produced them.

That is enough qualification to ask the questions.

It is not enough qualification to answer them alone.

That distinction will guide this project from the beginning.

What I Want This Series to Refuse

I do not want sixty articles telling readers what they are supposed to believe.

That would bore me, and it would insult you.

I want the project to investigate.

If evidence supports decriminalization on a particular outcome, I will say so.

If evidence supporting a claim is weak, I will say that.

If a popular sex-worker-rights claim is overstated, it gets challenged.

If an anti-trafficking statistic falls apart when its methodology is examined, it gets challenged.

If a decriminalized country still has serious problems, those problems belong in the article.

If a criminalized system produces an outcome advocates predicted correctly, that belongs there too.

If somebody I interview says something that complicates my own position, good.

That is what research is supposed to do.

One of the strongest findings already emerging from the preliminary research is that legal categories alone tell us surprisingly little. “Legal,” “illegal,” “decriminalized,” and “Nordic model” sound wonderfully tidy in a headline. The real systems involve licensing, zoning, policing, immigration rules, taxation, health regulations, employment classifications, banking access, platform rules, local ordinances, third-party laws, and enforcement choices.

Two countries can both say sex work is legal and operate radically different systems.

Two American cities can operate under the same state statute and police commercial sex differently.

One law can be written in the language of protection and still create consequences nobody intended.

That is exactly the type of contradiction I want this project to expose.

Two Experts, Two Different Lenses, One Shared Warning

Panetta and Sloan come to this subject from very different professional directions.

Panetta comes from law.

Sloan comes from clinical sex therapy.

Panetta warns that laws aimed at improving safety can create unexpected consequences when affected people are excluded from policymaking.

Sloan warns that social erasure and dehumanization can push sex workers farther from health care, mental-health support, legitimacy, and social recognition.

Those positions are not identical.

They do not need to be.

Together, they point toward one principle that will sit at the center of Sex Work in America:

You cannot create credible policy about people you refuse to see as credible participants in the conversation.

That includes people who remain in sex work.

It includes people who left.

It includes people who were trafficked.

It includes people who experienced violence.

It includes people who describe positive experiences.

It includes people who want sex work abolished.

It includes people who want it decriminalized.

It includes public-health researchers, attorneys, therapists, historians, law-enforcement officials, disability advocates, LGBTQ+ organizations, labor experts, trafficking specialists, and purchasers.

Nobody gets automatic veto authority over the evidence.

Nobody gets erased either.

January 7 Is the Starting Line, Not the Answer

The tentative launch date for Sex Work in America is Thursday, January 7, 2027.

I am giving myself the months between now and then for a reason.

This project needs history before hot takes.

It needs statutes before slogans.

It needs worker voices before assumptions.

It needs trafficking-survivor voices without turning their experiences into an argument against every adult sex worker.

It needs health research.

It needs legal research.

It needs uncomfortable interviews.

It needs people who agree with me.

It needs people who absolutely do not.

And it needs the intellectual discipline to leave some questions unresolved when the research cannot support a clean answer.

I already know something about where the research is pointing.

I do not yet know where all sixty articles will end up.

That is exactly how I want it.

If I could tell you the answer to the entire project today, there would be very little reason to spend the next year researching it.

So January will begin with definitions.

Then history.

Then law.

Then stigma.

Then health.

Then labor.

Then LGBTQ+ lives.

Then purchasers.

Then the rest of the world.

Then technology.

And, near the end, we will put the major legal models next to one another and ask the question that should have been asked long before Americans decided that criminalization was self-explanatory:

Which policies actually reduce violence, exploitation, disease, coercion, and stigma — and which ones simply make society feel as though it has taken a moral position?

That is the project.

Sixty articles.

More than a year.

A lot of research.

Probably a few arguments.

Almost certainly some uncomfortable findings.

Good.

Sex work has spent long enough trapped between moral panic, exploitation narratives, romanticization, criminal law, bad television stereotypes, political slogans, and conversations that too often happen without the people being discussed.

I want to see what happens when we give the subject the time, history, evidence, humanity, and skepticism it deserves.

Sex Work in America begins, tentatively, January 7, 2027.

We have a lot to talk about.

References

American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists. (2026). AASECT Certified Sex Therapist and professional directory. (AASECT)

Austin Concierge Therapy. (n.d.). Sara Sloan: LMFT, AASECT Certified Sex Therapist. (Austin Concierge Therapy)

Matthews & Associates. (n.d.). Brittnie Panetta, attorney. (Matthews & Associates)

Platt, L., Grenfell, P., Meiksin, R., Elmes, J., Sherman, S. G., Sanders, T., Mwangi, P., & Crago, A.-L. (2018). Associations between sex work laws and sex workers’ health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of quantitative and qualitative studies. PLOS Medicine, 15(12), e1002680. (DOI)

Santana, J. (2026). About JT Santana. The Babblings of JT. (The Babblings of JT)

U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). Human trafficking. (justice.gov)

World Health Organization. (n.d.). Sex workers: HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections programmes. (World Health Organization)