“I was conceived in an act of sex work,” says Henri Bynx, thirty-three. Her mother, an Australian immigrant, was working at a Reno truck stop when she met Bynx’s father. “My papa was a truck driver, who already had two kids by two other mothers. He was a repeat client,” she says. When he discovered Bynx’s mother was pregnant, he married her.
Growing up in Alaska, Bynx knew nothing about her mother’s work. She first learned about it from family members after her mother died, and the knowledge helped her understand parts of her childhood.
“[My mother] carried a lot of internalized whorephobia and shame that really influenced the way that she moved through the world,” Bynx says. “She went through this really strange religious phase where she was like, ‘I have to put Henri in church all the time so she doesn’t grow up to be a whore.’ ”
Despite her mother’s wishes, Bynx became a sex worker, too. Now living in Vermont, she’s trying to make the world a safer place for herself, women like her mom, and other sex workers through the Ishtar Collective, which she co-founded. The group is working closely with Selene Colburn, a Vermont state representative who earlier this year co-sponsored a bill to decriminalize sex work.
The bill, now in committee, would remove all legal penalties for sex work “while retaining strict prohibitions and felony criminal penalties for human trafficking of persons who are compelled through force, fraud, or coercion to engage in sex work.” If it passes, Vermont would become the first state to decriminalize sex work.
“Sex workers deserve the same legal protections as any other human beings.” — Jane Stromberg, Burlington, Vermont city
“My activism is incredibly informed by the way stigma treated my mom and thereby affected our relationship and my life, ” Bynx says. “I don’t want that for any of my buds in the industry. I don’t want that for their kids.”
But groups that seek to decriminalize and destigmatize sex work face an uphill battle.
“The sex workers’ rights campaign is much less organized and resource-poor than the anti-sex work movement,” writes Ronald Weitzer, a sociology professor at George Washington University and author of Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business, in an email interview. He notes that the claims of sex-work opponents that “most or all prostitution is forced, trafficked, or run by organized crime . . . have resonated with politicians across the board.”
Actually, research shows that these claims aren’t true. A 2018 meta-analysis of 134 studies of sex work laws and worker safety correlated criminalization to an increase in violence against sex workers from police and clients. In New Zealand, violence against sex workers decreased after decriminalization in 2003. A 2020 review of more than eighty studies found no “clear link between criminalizing sex work and stopping human trafficking.”
Still, as Weitzer notes, “It is risky for any politician to take a stand in favor of decriminalization. Those who do risk either losing their next election or being made a laughingstock.” That leaves the work of changing laws and reducing stigma up to sex workers like Bynx and politicians like Colburn.
Bynx has become involved in the national decriminalization movement and recently traveled to Oregon—another state which introduced a sex-work decriminalization bill—to connect with other sex workers. “We have a dream of building a sex worker army,” she says, “so we can take care of each other across state lines.”
Throughout the country, there has been a sea change in attitudes to sex work, similar to the cannabis legalization movement. A 2020 poll found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) support decriminalizing sex work. In addition to Vermont’s bill decriminalizing prostitution, New York State has two competing bills before the legislature: one that would fully decriminalize prostitution and another that would make selling sex legal but buying it illegal.
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Henri Bynx dreams of “building a sex worker army, so we can take care of each other across state lines.”
Last year, the Manhattan district attorney stopped prosecuting people for sex work and unlicensed massage, and the state of New York eliminated the “Walking While Trans” law, which enabled the arrest of primarily trans women of color under the presumption they were “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense.” In 2021, Washtenaw County, Michigan, home of Ann Arbor, stopped prosecuting consensual sex work.
During the past three years, six states—Vermont, California, Utah, Oregon, New Hampshire, and Montana—have passed “immunity laws” shielding sex workers and those being trafficked from prosecution if they report being the victim of a crime. This year, New York, Hawaii, Colorado, and Tennessee have pending immunity bills, according to Ariela Moscowitz, the director of communications for the national advocacy group Decriminalize Sex Work.
In every state, it is already legal to work at a strip club, sell nude photos, and perform in pornographic movies if you are a legal adult. But “full-service” sex work is illegal—aside from some counties in Nevada where sex work is legalized, but not decriminalized. Sex work activists prefer decriminalization to legalization, because legalization puts the state in control through regulations, taxes, and penalties, making workers beholden to brothel owners.
“If sex work or prostitution became legal in Oregon, that means that all of the assholes that already own strip clubs would just own brothels,” says Elle Stanger of the Oregon Sex Workers Committee. “And then in order for me to legally be able to make money, I have to be hired and managed by these assholes.”
Bella, a member of Stanger’s group who asked to be referred to by first name only, says she has been arrested three times for sex work and violent people have targeted her because they “know that my line of work is criminalized.” If sex work were decriminalized, “I would have been able to call law enforcement the times that my pimps beat me up or the times that my clients raped me and assaulted me.”
Weitzer thinks sex work decriminalization should be followed by regulations to prevent organized crime from controlling the industry, as it did after casino gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931.
Some advocates argue for the Nordic, or “end-demand,” model adopted in Sweden and now prevalent among many European countries. It focuses on reducing the demand for sex work by making purchasing sex illegal while allowing it to be sold by individuals. But sex workers and scholars on the left point to research showing that this model—though it may seem like a progressive alternative—still endangers sex workers because clients are reluctant to provide their legal names, and workers are unable to run background checks on them.
Bynx moved to Seattle at age eighteen. After two years and a breakup, she traveled the country on freight trains and eventually landed at a New Mexico strip club where she started doing sex work around age twenty-one. In 2014, at twenty-five, she took a break.
“I was in a bad mental space and needed a change,” she recalls. Bynx joined some friends who had moved to Vermont to start a farm. But when the farming season ended, she headed south and began doing sex work again in between growing seasons.
In 2016, Bynx had an experience that shook her. She was working her first night in a New Orleans strip club, chatting with a coworker named Fox and a particularly annoying customer, when the police busted in.
“We got raided by a SWAT team during Disneyfication efforts to shut down independent clubs on Bourbon Street,” says Fox, a third-generation sex worker who asked that her last name not be used. Everyone was rounded up; IDs were checked for warrants. Bynx says an automatic rifle was pointed in her face. All of this happened even though the work the two women were doing was legal.
For Bynx, the raid “planted a seed” of sex work activism that “incubated for a long time.” It was just one more indignity on top of what can be the norm. “Clients can come through and wreak havoc [at a strip club], but if they spend enough money, it doesn’t matter,” Bynx says. “We’re fodder. We’re seen as usable and abusable.”
In 2018, Congress passed, and President Donald Trump signed, the national Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, which held websites liable for allowing sex work ads on their platforms. The websites where Bynx advertised, including Backpage and the Craigslist “personals” section, were shut down. “Everything that I was using to network was gone,” she says. “So my career was over for a while.”
Her last job was a private party at a biker bar. “I did a flaming stripper act because I eat fire,” Bynx says. “I found out I could set my nipples on fire and they wouldn’t fall off.” Though the performance went well, the crowd was drunk, racist, and violent. “It was scary because we were in a space that was beyond the control of law enforcement,” she adds, highlighting how she was followed out to the parking lot. “If [bikers] don’t want you around anymore, they can make that happen.”
Afterward, Bynx deactivated her social media, moved to the Caribbean, and worked on a farm. “I just disappeared for a while because I really needed some space and some quiet.”
In February 2020, Bynx moved back to Vermont and co-founded the Ishtar Collective with J. Leigh Oshiro-Brantly, a fellow sex worker, who is also a gender researcher at New York Transgender Advocacy Group. One goal of the collective was to support Representative Colburn’s sex work decriminalization bill. “Then the pandemic hit and the [legislative] session was kind of shut down, outside of crisis control stuff.”
The collective provided emergency financial aid and harm reduction kits to sex workers and trafficking survivors in Vermont. “The main priority for that program was to get funding out to folks who weren’t being taken care of during a global health crisis,” Bynx says. Harm reduction kits included fentanyl testing strips and Narcan. The collective also distributed free food to locals in need.
Then, in summer 2021, Perri Freeman, a city council member in Burlington, Vermont, stumbled upon language from the city charter that allowed the city “to restrain and suppress houses of ill fame” and “to punish common prostitutes and persons consorting therewith.” She decided that this language needed to go, which would effectively decriminalize sex work in Burlington.
At the first in-person meeting of the Burlington City Council since March 2020, Freeman and fellow council member Jane Stromberg co-sponsored a resolution to study sex work decriminalization in Burlington and to strike out anti-sex work language. “Sex workers deserve the same legal protections as any other human beings,” Stromberg said at the time.
Bynx, and other sex workers, began testifying at city council meetings. The council had to vote on the resolution three times before it could be placed on the ballot. The first vote was unanimous. But before the second vote in December 2021, unexpected guests—many from the New York–based World Without Exploitation, an anti-trafficking group—showed up to a city council meeting. The organization’s co-founder, Rachel Foster, argued that the measure would exacerbate existing problems. The resolution passed a second time, but this time one council member voted against it. Foster didn’t give up.
At a city council meeting on January 18, 2022, Foster argued that fully decriminalizing sex work will lead to an increase in sex work and sex trafficking. Despite Foster’s efforts, the resolution passed a third time.
On March 1, Burlington citizens went to the polls, and 63 percent voted in favor of removing the anti-sex work language. Moscowitz, of Decriminalize Sex Work, calls it “a really big deal in terms of decriminalization, because as far as anyone can tell . . . no other municipality has removed language around sex work from city documents.”
Whether Colburn’s bill will pass later in the year is uncertain, but Bynx is thinking beyond Vermont.
“I would really like us to build a national support network,” she says. “Beyond passing legislation, we need to make sure that people are safe.” Decriminalization, she says, is not enough. There also need to be anti-discrimination bills “so that landlords, employers, and banks cannot turn sex workers away for putting strip clubs on their résumé.”
The goal is to ensure basic worker protections for sex work. Even in legal sex work, Fox says, such protections are lacking. “If I twist my ankle because the stage is broken, I’m just thrown out,” she says. She wants paid time off and job security, just like other workers have. “It’s just a job, and we deserve respect and safety.”
But, as Bynx knows, organizing for change is hard work. “Advocacy has been a blessing to me,” she says. “But it’s one of the most exhausting jobs I’ve ever done, that far surpasses any encounter I’ve had in sex work because I have to expose my trauma to state workers and make it palatable, in hopes that they can sign a piece of paper that says I’m allowed to exist.”