Life As Performance Art 154

There is a coffee shop on Commercial drive that has posted a notice by the order counter that says that "We uphold and respect all transpeople and all sex workers." Uh-huh. I get it. And what precisely has this got to do with getting a coffee and muffin, or cookie, scone, or fill in the blank? I am not going to ask the barista, and certainly not the customer ahead of or behind me, if they are trans. Not even if it's a lady in a tight pink mini skirt and six inch heels, well over six feet in height with an Adam's apple, big hands and feet, a linebacker's shoulders and the voice of a trucker after a wild night with the boys, the girls, and the others. (I have met people like that in the past, Gentle Reader. And I call them she or her. I do have a healthy sense of self-preservation, after all!) Likewise, if it's a little guy with a five o'clock shadow, little soft looking hands and feet, child-bearing hips, and a voice that sounds like he just sucked all the helium out of a giant dirigible. I am not going to ask, though I might wonder, if his breasts are flattened with a band or if he's had a double mastectomy, and I am certainly not going to ask about anything that might be situated anywhere lower on the body. (Though I'm probably still going to wonder!) And what about all the sex workers that they honour and uphold in this august establishment? So, what do I say to the barista, especially if he or she moonlights, so to speak? Stood on any good street corners, lately? Is your ad in the back pages of Georgia Straight, right next to Savage Love? Or how about one-stop shopping? If we meet up later on do I get a discount on my muffin? But, really, if you still have to hook on the side (oops, I mean, perform sex work. Silly me!) they can't be paying you much for slinging espresso. Full disclosure, Gentle Reader. I devoted something like almost twenty years in street ministry and supportive roles with hookers and trannies (I am using the pejoratives just to piss you off, my hyper-politically correct and oh so delicate little snowflakes!) They are only words. They have nothing to do with disrespecting the people who are trans or work in the sex trade. The problem is that people have become so squeamish about giving offense and of course people in marginalized populations need to be treated with special care and delicacy. But this also ought to exclude having to buy into emotional blackmail. There is also a certain intolerance in the so-called progressive communities that insists that we all have to think alike. No one is allowed, apparently to even question the ethics around sex reassignment therapy, or of prostitution. In order to respect the people involved in these practices and activities one is expected to completely agree with them. That is fascism. I never once was in agreement with prostitution as a valid career choice. Once sex is an item for barter or sale then a whole lot of other problems come in. Ask anyone who lives in a neighbourhood where the hookers moved in. I was fully aware of this when I was giving pastoral support to hookers in the West End. I cared deeply about them and respected them as individuals. I never once tried to counsel them to leave their occupation for something more legit, especially given the low grade kind of prostitution that occurs in many so-called respectable fields of employment. The utter hypocrisy. But each person I knew who was a sex worker, was there renting out his or her body, not because that would have been their first or top career choice, but for a whole plethora of tangled and very difficult causes and circumstances. And really, Gentle Reader, if sex work is really to be completely destigmatized and counted as one of the honoured (and certainly oldest) professions, then how about if your son or daughter says to you one day, Mom, Dad, I want to be a sex worker. Wouldn't that make you proud? Didn't think so. I do not agree with gender reassignment surgery, in most cases anyway. I will still respect every transperson I meet and refer to them by the pronoun and name of their choice. And I will keep my personal judgment to myself while respecting that they have made what they believe to be the best possible decisions for themselves. Likewise with sex workers. But I am still not going to endorse the practices themselves. Those are ethical minefields and I am not going there, I don't want to go there and I don't have to go there. Not on this post, anyway. The rest of you can squeal to your politically correct little hearts' content in the most strident peals of outrage that your little throats can muster.