Introduction

I was raised to follow the footsteps of parents who served their government faithfully. My mother sacrificed to get me as far in my education as she could so that I would attain a higher economic status than she did, specifically by working my way up a (to her) 'respectable' corporate ladder. Even without considering my divergent aspirations, her dream is made unlikely by the fact that my disability complicates my relationship with the traditional 9-5 work setup. Still, in contradiction to the capitalist narrative, I can engage in meaningful work, albeit in a different way. Like all persons, regardless of ability status, 1 I have purpose. I can contribute meaningfully to the world and partake in it despite the persecution of my Black disabled body because of the positive role sex work plays in my life.

Considering the many experiences of disability, it is prudent to clarify the parameters of the term, "ability status" as it relates to this paper. I use ability status here to denote the visible and invisible differences that dictate the extent to which one can or cannot meet the expectations of the able-bodied world. The word status also makes clear that disability is an external signifier and it helps us to understand that it is one's status within the ability/disability binary rather than the disability itself that often harms and marginalizes people with disabilities.

I agree with Margrit Shildrick 2 in that I consider my "disability" the social and political categorization of conditions that complicate my relationship with the world. I call them mine because they are inescapable and will impact how I move through life until I die. This categorization is based in my psychological divergence from the norm asserted (unreasonably) by the hegemonic white-male supremacist understanding of human purpose and function. Simply put, the standard puts me at a disadvantage by determining the value of people like me based on their ability to mask their non-typical predispositions such as physical tics or challenges with social interactions. Our productivity is linked to characteristics that are unrelated to ability to add value even as narrowly defined by capitalism. However, disability status becomes tied to ideas about acceptable or profitable production in a Western ableist and racist capitalist system. The significance of my disability is an external imposition because there is much that I wish to do and can do, but because I do not do it in the way prescribed by societal expectations, I am told that I cannot. The societies I have lived in (Jamaica, USA, Germany) have decided that my production process is untenable, an unacceptable contribution that is insufficient to secure my full participation in society. Sex work and the community of colleagues I have been welcomed into have been crucial in providing the extra-institutional support needed to navigate spaces where institutions intentionally leave those of us who deviate from societal standards to fall through the cracks.

When I decided to move to Germany for my master's degree, I knew that I would likely not be able to complete my studies on schedule. I would not be able to work a traditional job while studying. I would need a source of income that could allow me to live in conditions conducive to my mental health, including paying for my medical debts in the USA and significant medical bills despite Germany's admirable public healthcare. These were not limitations so much as guidelines; additional conditions— like a visa or a bank account—that had to be met if I were to take this opportunity. I had emotional support, but my mother could not afford to sustain me financially away from home. Nirmala Erevelles 3 aptly notes that survival with disability is often a matter of access to economic resources, outside of medical access. The economic limitations made real by my disabilities are matters of life or death. Without medication, I am practically non-functional. Without medication management, my volatile responses to medication render me unable to partake in life.

At the time of my decision to move alone across the Atlantic, I had some experience as a sex worker in the United States, doing the work sporadically to provide myself some financial breathing room. Sex work has, over the last five years, facilitated the conditions of my survival. In Germany, I was able to live alone, pay my expenses and bills, and study while taking care of my health in a foreign country with an unfamiliar and, at times, hostile medical system.

This paper discusses my experiences as a full-service sex worker in Germany and the USA in the context of my position as a Black womxn thriving with disability and neurodivergence. I point out how intersections between disability, race, and sex work determine how I am perceived and, therefore, my relationships with systems of power. My fraught interactions with the medical establishment in Germany and the USA are particularly important. I use my experience as a sex worker to contextualize these experiences in their white supremacist, ableist, and racist roots.

My mental health issues relate in intricate ways to my positioning as a Black sex worker. I use Jasbir Puar's concept of debility 4 to flesh out the relational dynamics that define the confluence of disability and race in my lived experience. I discuss how my race and gender in the contexts of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, and cissexism, make me a target for discrimination that is then compounded by disability. Still, it is important to note that my disability status is socially imputed and, therefore, cannot be completely separated from other social categorizations. However, it is useful to examine the layers of discrimination individually before taking to task their synergistic manifestation. I follow this examination with the final layer of social determinants, disability. I explore how my race, gender, migration status, and other factors determine my experience with the medical establishment, made necessary and complicated by my diagnosis.

When writing about my time working within the European Union and in the United States, I often categorize these two sets of cultures together. In the scope of this transnational analysis, the similarities in experiences across locales are rooted in the shared history of denigration of Black and non-normative bodies. 5 This is not a formal comparative analysis, but an incomplete look at the points where these two threads of thought converge. Europeans brought notions of Black inferiority by way of pathological deficiency with them to the "New World" in the forms of racial science (eugenics) and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 6 These notions have been foundational in both the USA's and Germany's accumulation of wealth and international influence. In both locales, I am criminalized. I am fetishized. I am treated as an exotic other; not just because of my race, but also my migrant background. These impositions are, counter-intuitively, crucial to my success as a sex worker.

The final two sections are my modes of resistance lain bare. When formal institutions fail due to their myopic foci, informal communities are there to buoy each other and meet our needs in an affirming way. I explain how sex work has allowed me to navigate the limitations of debility under capitalism by restoring at least some of my economic power. Comparison to traditional capitalist work expectations is essential in my analysis to accurately situate claims of agency and coercion that haunt sex work.

Finally, I explore how the sex worker community compensates for society's attempts to prescribe my human capacity with racist, ableist, and stigmatic expectations. I discuss how the place I hold in my community recognizes my wholeness regardless of disability status. This recognition manifests in the spaces granted to advocate for myself and my peers through education, mutual aid, and direct outreach. My neurodivergence does not exclude me from any aspect of BIPOC-led sex worker community spaces. In fact, in these spaces, I feel safest exploring the implications of stigma, stereotypes, and intersecting oppression on my existence as a Black sex working womxn. Sex work and the attached community of sex workers have been the cornerstone of my efforts to overcome debility despite much scholarly literature arguing that sex work in itself is a form of debility. It is easy to refute these claims once sex work, exchanging sexual services for economic gain, is differentiated from the current social ramifications of engaging in sex work, such as stigma and social and economic exclusion. The Black sex worker community is a radical space where I am respected as the determinant of what I can, cannot, wish to, and wish not to do. In these communities, my neurodivergence and disability provide a roadmap for me and my peers to interact effectively.

Therefore, in concluding this article, I take lessons I have learned from sex worker organizing and Black sex worker-led spaces to prescribe a reimagining of sex worker perspectives as a tool for combatting white supremacist ableist policies.

Methods: A Note on Autoethnography

The autoethnographic method is best suited to the aim of this paper as it allows for the legitimation of experiences not yet fully explored in academia. This paper seeks to deduce the cultural applicability of my experiences at demographic intersections that often go unexplored. 7 I have deliberately chosen the anecdotes used to illustrate the points of difference between those who, like myself, exist in the margins of what is considered "society" (epitomized in academia by able-bodied white folk who have been granted permission to be visible), and the mainstream depiction of our existence. This "society" exists within parameters that I do not. Our interplay is, at times, uneasy and often combative. I explore instances where my Blackness, disability status, and vocation clash with social expectations of propriety individually or altogether. While there is much written on sex work, disability, and Blackness, academia has rarely touched on these intersections together. 8 The literature that links sex work and disability is decidedly geared toward the client with disabilities and the sex worker as a caregiver. 9

An autoethnographic approach uses lived experience as data. 10 Analyzing the lived experiences of Black sex workers with disabilities challenges a historical disregard for nuanced intersectional analysis of sex work, labor inequities, anti-Blackness, and ableism. My analysis of the data is grounded in Black Feminist Theory and Critical Disability Studies—particularly the concept of and movement for disability justice—because both center explorations of experiences that do not fit into the hegemonic narrative. I hope that by employing a Black Feminist and Disability Studies theoretical approach to analyze my autoethnographic data, I coax some nuance out of the exclusionary discourse around sex work, disability, agency, and how those topics relate to race.

Theoretical Framework

In this paper, I incorporate aspects of Black Feminist Theory (BFT) and frameworks of Disability Justice (DJ) to ground my assessment of my experiences as a Black sex worker living with disabilities or, more aptly put, abilities that diverge from expectations in the way they manifest. Black Feminist praxis centers the subjective experiences of those who do not belong to the dominant group. In this way, it bypasses what Patricia Hill-Collins describes as "The Euro-centric Masculinist Validation Process," 11 by which those in positions of power are the sole arbiters of experiential validity. BFT calls to task the role of capitalism in the continued sidelining of Black women's societal contributions and realities. It rejects the common assertion that capitalism is a "natural" order whose prescriptions are aligned with the nature of its subjects. 12 This rejection is crucial to elevate women, specifically Black women and those who occupy a similar social stratum (i.e., poor, non-cisgender, non-white, disabled women), out of the limited capacity for self-determination and thought imposed by white supremacy through capitalism. It reimagines a world where the validity of experience does not rely on a single notion of productive contribution or worth. These subjective experiences form a basis for social overhaul. BFT validates the racial and sexual components of the experiences explored.

Not unlike BFT, DJ as a framework and a movement is born out of the systemic neglect and compounding of the challenges associated with disability that affect those who are not "normal," in this case, due to visible or invisible embodied differences from those in positions of power. 13 DJ acknowledges the damage caused by the whitewashing of disability, namely, the erasure of race and class in disabled realities in order to make the field of disability studies more palatable to existing theoretical structures. DJ follows thinking in critical disability studies more generally which asserts that the "problem" of disability is not disability or the disabled but rather how society has isolated people with disabilities and stigmatized disability as an undesirable condition to be fixed or else discarded. 14 DJ additionally links the ways disability and race have been used as tools of oppression and interrogates the disparate access to recognition and therefore resources between white middle to upper class and non-white poor communities. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha defies common representations of agency by describing the unique ability of disabled people to form their own communities and care networks 15 despite assertions by mainstream thinkers to the contrary. 16

One of the ten principles of DJ as articulated by Patty Berne and Sins Invalid is "Interdependence." Berne writes of interdependence within DJ: "We see the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our own communities [and] [w]e attempt to meet each other's needs as we build toward liberation." 17 The interdependence model recognizes that the relationships between agent and dependent, caregiver and caretaker are not necessarily binary or unidirectional; we all depend on one another. As Piepzna-Samarasinha argues, "care webs" are ways that Black and Brown, disabled, and queer communities have always related to one another, structures of care and ways of understanding dis/ability that recognize both the needs of and caretaking ability of and caretaking demands on working-class non-white persons in the discussion of disability. 18 Deconstructing the care-giver/receiver binary forces the recognition that disability does not negate agency or productive value, but is a categorization that determines, along with other socially constructed identifiers, how a person is situated in the world. The agency asserted by DJ advocates requires an adjustment of the mainstream perception of what ability status entails. Dominant Western ideas about disability, social services, and accommodations assert that persons with disabilities should retain autonomy and productivity (here used to mean economic or social contributions under an individualistic capitalist model) in conjunction with the need for additional support. Following thinking in BFT and DJ, I use analyses of my own experiences to reveal how productivity must include acts of self-care and self-preservation as the individual is inherently valuable.

BFT and DJ frameworks theorize ways of providing care and resources that are essential for those occupying the margins. Both BFT and DJ frameworks place knowledge that comes from Black experiences of disability on equal footing with white narratives when considering policies for resource allocation and access. Black Feminist praxis has long emphasized community work, led by those directly affected, as the foundation for upliftment. Disability Justice advocates have also taken up this baton. Both approaches help us to conceptualize and implement practices that are responsive to the needs of non-white-cis-het persons with disabilities.

Race, Gender, Disability, and Prevailing Perceptions

I am a Black, queer, large womxn. 19 I explore the intersection of these identities to highlight how racist and sexist perceptions, created to harm me, can be spun into tools that help me navigate a whitewashed, ableist world. I must be clear that the perceptions explicated are not (unless explicitly stated) reflective of my own self-perception. Clients do not engage with me, but with a hodgepodge of stereotypes that shape how clients perceive my performance. The purpose of engaging with client perceptions is to understand the wider, subtler implications of my race, gender, class, and ability status in how I am seen. Bits and pieces of these assumptions are inevitably internalized but quickly examined and discarded. I arm myself with knowledge of racism's, sexism's, and ableism's manifestations as a tool to navigate spaces where these perceptions prevail. Doing so shelters my sense of self from external impositions.

Sex workers, Black women, and Black sex workers of all/no genders are seen as less deserving of respect because they transgress societal boundaries by choice of employment and/or by existing outside of whiteness. In many cases, white supremacy kindly holds the door open lest we wish to atone for our difference through assimilation of thought and action. Patricia Hill-Collins decries the melding of validity of experience and by extension, attainment, with the trappings of whiteness. 20 Instead, she calls for new ways of viewing the Black experience without considering the input of the white gaze. In its traditional sense, success is aligned with the values of white supremacy and capitalism. Failure to attain success thus defined are turned on the individual. Collins and other Black feminists challenge us to view the survival of our Black bodies and how we secure it, as success. This shift in viewpoint requires a revisiting of notions of accessibility, opportunities, and the importance of culturally influenced desires in determining individual outcomes.

Meeting the standards of white institutions is noteworthy to my clients even though education is far more demanding in the majority of Black Jamaican classrooms where I studied thirteen subjects each year in high school and floundered in what were, to this day, the most rigorous years of my academic career. When I tell clients I have multiple degrees, I am met with wide-eyed disbelief. For some clients, the disbelief comes not from the revelation of my qualifications, but the revelation that they were not attained in Jamaica, where they would, presumably, have been worthless. The points of deviance (race, gender, occupation) coalesce into a two-dimensional figure in the average client's mind.

Degrees from USA and European educational institutions are seen as a redemptive markers because they come from white perspectives that assert a colorblind perspective but which are deeply informed by racist ideology. 21 My attendance at a predominantly white liberal university indicates to clients a familiarity with the values of the white thinkers whose work comprised my syllabi. My white, middle-aged, male professors did educate me in the tradition of European thinkers in which they were trained. A fraught discussion of Kant's biopolitics was the closest we got to critiquing race, and feminism was confined as a topic to two three-hour sessions in two years. It is common knowledge that outside of Historically Black colleges, universities generally value white knowledge production. Indeed the contemporary push for recognizing Black and gender studies programs as valid fields of study is an indication of how many universities retain a male-dominated, heteronormative, colonial, nationalist, and whitewashed curriculum. My submission to and success within predominantly white USA and European universities sometimes reduces the invalidation I would otherwise experience due to my marginalized gender, sexual, racial and ability identities. 22

There are many ways to subvert white supremacy. Whether sex working or not, Black women have long crafted their presentation to take advantage of aspects that engage with notions of respectability to their own benefit. My formal education challenges, without valid justification, readings of my (in)capacity for higher-level thought assumed by my race, gender, and ability. Clients' awe as their ignorance crumbles is satisfying in its own right; however, on occasions when I reveal my educational background, it is deliberately to subvert their notions of my worth. It's a tip-worthy revelation for most clients. They pay extra to the student because she is a worthy cause, redeemable from whoredom by her proximity to respectable white institutions. There is hope for her, and there is perhaps a hope that she can be saved.

Denial of agency to sex workers intersects seamlessly with the denial of agency to people living with disability. European and European descended societies problematize and/or erase, persons with disabilities alongside other social outcasts like "rogues, vagabonds… drunkards… [and] prostitutes." 23 Attribution of disability has long been used as a means to determine who is worthy of citizenship, social participation, and even life itself. 24 The medical model of disability categorizes it as "a biological inferiority, malfunction, pathology, and deviance when compared with… individuals without disabilities." 25 Using a negative frame of disability, colonialists could delineate human value, which coincided with capitalist productive capacity. Disability grew into a shorthand for determining who is entitled to the full benefits of citizenship in accordance with racial and socio-economic assessments. 26 This assessment uncannily reflects white supremacist rhetoric about racial and gender inferiority. 27 In other words, disability is, in colonial thought, a condition as well as a consequence of one's innate (lack of) value. Since colonized disability denotes a lack of value, the limited infrastructure existing to facilitate the whole lives of those with disabilities, comes into view as a deliberate exclusion that continues today. 28 The emphasis on treating and curing disability in individuals rather than reforming institutions to accommodate the full range of human experience is a by-product of this neglect.

Diversion tactics aimed at 'rescuing' sex workers by forcing them into government-sponsored programs reek of the same paternalism that leads to classing any form of non-normativity as a problem to be controlled under the guise of remediation. Clients' and legislative perspectives intersect on this point. Both see me as a cause to be fixed or else managed for their own good.

The racial dynamics determining who is targeted for prosecution dictate that Black and POC sex workers are over-represented in carceral settings. For Black sex workers, this overrepresentation is interpreted as validation of existing racial and sexual pathologies. 29 The relative numbers of Black vs. white women in carceral settings can be directly linked to assumptions about the ravenous sexual appetites of Black people, particularly women, by painting Blackness as incorrigible, subhuman, and led by primal impulse. 30 Because of these perceptions, Black bodies existing in the open become immediately suspicious. The result is that Black women are constantly forced to justify their occupation of space in a way that white women are not. 31 I must overcome inquiries about my presence in an apartment building in the middle of Berlin, or shopping in a store that I ostensibly (because of race) cannot afford. The issue is not economic; these incidents evidence widespread anti-Blackness. Unfortunately, sex work stigma compounds discrimination by adding another layer of stereotypes and bolstering existing anti-Black assumptions. As a result, sex work offers only a marginal point of access for a Black women to overcome white suspicion in the mainstream. In my experience, it is an economic turn-key that softens class distinctions when racial prejudices are not in play. In other words, money talks, but not louder than prejudice.

Navigating Racialized Healthcare

Where universal healthcare is not a right, chronic illness begets crippling debt; debt that literally holds me bound to one position, with few options for geographical, social, or economic mobility. A refusal of access to government support, barring destitution, is an apt method of maintaining the deadly social separation between 'normal' and 'deviant.' The absence of accessible social programs that facilitate independence for persons living with disabilities constitutes institutional violence when barriers cause deterioration in individuals' physical and/or mental health. 32 One primary reason I started sex work is to pay for my exorbitant USA healthcare costs. I decided that the psychological effect of going unmedicated was far more life-threatening than the dangers I face from would-be abusers and law enforcement. This decision is my successfully carving out a compromise with capitalism that suits my well-being. Despite the tradeoffs involved, I, like my sex working colleagues, was able to rationally assess my options and eke out a degree of comfort and stability that normally would not have been granted by formal employment. For me, stability looked like paying bills and having money left over for a nice dinner with friends with a little bit stashed away for my inevitable mental health crisis.

Racial discrimination in healthcare and the intersecting stressors Black women must contend with put us at increased risk for physical and mental disease. 33 As a chronically ill person with a mostly 'invisible' disability, I have been on this particular chopping block several times. I have had diagnoses delayed, symptoms downplayed, accusations of drug seeking, and general disbelief of my complaints by (mostly) white doctors. Having been raised to trust doctors, it is difficult to parse their nonchalance in the face of my urgent need for care. In my case, this cognitive dissonance turned inward. For years, being put on garden variety psycho-pharmaceuticals by the cheapest available care provider challenged my confidence that my illness was not just a deep-seated character flaw. Each time a doctor told me, "I don't think that's true," or some variation of that statement, I repeated it to myself. It was not until clients began to let slip blatantly racist assumptions made about me while engaging with my services (made more attractive by those assumptions), that I began to understand that the persons credited as authorities were primed to regard me with distrust and skepticism bolstered by mythical notions of Black invulnerability that have roots in Black enslavement. These experiences reveal, as Erevelles' notes, "the European, bourgeois, heterosexual, healthy, male body as the normative standard against which to compare 'other' bodies." 34

One particularly jarring illustration of these assumptions was a client's bold declaration that he could only do certain things he likes with Black women because white women would not consent to it. There was no mention of the economic constraints that might lead to a Black sex worker being more likely to step out of her comfort zone. There was no consideration that Black women are more likely to be street workers and survival sex workers and, therefore, may need to take greater risks to secure their income. 35 This difference in sexual proclivities was assumed to be entirely innate, divorced from context. It seemed unfathomable to him that Black women could be prudish too. This example highlights the divorcing of societal factors from individual action in the mind of those who do not navigate the debility imposed by that society.

I realized from such interactions, perhaps a bit late, that "deviance [is] hierarchically organized via the constructions of race, class, gender, disability, and sexual difference; and the authenticity of their claims justified on the basis of observable biological 'facts' that [are] verifiable by a secular science." 36 This means that there is no overcoming the medical establishment's refusal to see me as simply a patient. I walk into the exam room as a Black sex working womxn, which predetermines the experience I will have.

The persistent relics of home-grown white exceptionalism in Europe and the USA have real implications for the survival of deviant bodies. The gradual progression of Black bodies from animal to human in the medical establishment is as yet incomplete. The fact that information gleaned involuntarily from Black bodies is still indispensable to the USA's medical system indicates the inextricability of racism from medical practice. 37 Today, African Americans carry the trauma of medical neglect and experimentation. 38 While race-based statistics are harder to come by in Western Europe than in the USA, accounts of anxiety about interactions with the medical establishment based on traumatic experiences are not. As a chronically ill person, I have some experience with the German medical systems and even more with several in the USA. I have been forcibly hospitalized; in one case, chased across Long Island, New York, by police until I turned myself in. I was handcuffed in front of my family, and brought by police to the hospital, all with a stunning lack of compassion and no medical personnel despite my documented mental distress. Disbelief and nonchalance toward my reported symptoms persist throughout my experiences with the US and German psychiatric healthcare systems. My differences have been pathologized and practitioners relegate them to the burnt ash heap of determinism. My experience mirrors that theorized by David Gillborn 39 that scholars and care professionals maintain a colorblind façade while advancing theoretical racial differences in intelligence and behavior by appealing to heredity of intelligence and certain behavioral predispositions. 40

My medical experiences dealing with my disabilities are tainted by subtextual racial thinking. My doctors tell me, "You expect too much," but never mention the subtextual "because you're Black" or "because you are a sex worker." Nevertheless, the stories shared on social media and among my lighter skinned more affluent acquaintances make clear that our providers' expectations are based on preconceived notions of capacity determined by heredity and, therefore, race.

My dark skin, migrant background, and limited German language skills trigger assumptions of resource exploitation. These assumptions are evident in sleights of language and occasionally overtly stated. A doctor once loudly refused to treat me because "people like [me]" were what was "wrong with this country [Germany]" because, in his mind, I ought to speak enough German to express my concerns. In other words, I failed to meet his qualifications for care. I did not stay that day to inquire what kind of person I was. The answer to that particular question came to me through client comments on how lucky I was to be in Europe and how I was "taking advantage" of the "opportunity" to support myself through sexual labor. Their conclusions about my socio-economic status in my homeland are clumsily hidden behind inquiries into how many siblings I have and if I'm sending money back home. It took months of coaxing questions; however, one person finally explicitly expressed the assumption that I was a refugee. While this assumption would harm me in most contexts, it increases my exoticism in my work. It titillates clients' voyeuristic fascination with my otherness. To many, an educated refugee is an anomaly and an even more attractive target for saving. I am Jamaican and have a noticeable Jamaican accent, which goes a long way to confirm their conclusions about my underprivileged position.

I have had two English-fluent German doctors suggest that I return to the USA for treatment because Germany was not suited to me. The blame for their inability and/or refusal to address my medical concerns is never expressed in terms of their lack of knowledge and internalized biases. When I explained that my academic performance was suffering due to my mental illness not being effectively managed, it was brushed off for two years. I often wonder whether this approach by my doctors has to do with assumptions about my innate academic capacity as a Black womxn. As I describe my formal qualifications, the disbelief in my doctors' eyes reinforces the conclusions many clients have drawn; that I have exceeded my natural potential. My first (of three) German psychiatrist did a double take and had me repeat myself when I told him my level of study. When I told him I am a sex worker, he had the same look of shock before he shook his head and replied, "I guess anything is possible." I take this response as another example of the cognitive dissonance between my reality and racial expectations that clients and medical professionals choose not to overcome.

Without appropriate medical intervention, I was forced to extend my program in order to take it in more manageable semesters. Fortunately, my work and the flexibility it offers made this a possibility. A month before I finished my master's thesis, I was finally diagnosed with a typically co-occurring mental health condition. The delay in diagnosis due to expectations based on my identities is one example of Puar's concept of debility, in this case systematically imposed, being used to control the potential of certain populations. This assessment stands whether the agents of the system were acting out of malice or ignorance.

Defying Debility

The decisions I make to defy the forms of debility that I labor under— debt, medical racism, xenophobia, for example—illustrate a way to mitigate debility. Debility often results in "slow death" rather than immediate, directly related demise. 41 Because of the financial and societal demands on Black women to maintain basic functionality, and the related modes of exclusion that accompany those demands, my capacity for attainment is limited by the energy and focus attainment requires. My experience of being indebted to the healthcare industry and doubted by medical professionals effectively limited my academic achievements and personal development in ways from which I am still recovering. Being systemically backed into a corner is a lifelong affliction. I easily could have had to leave school in need of additional resources necessary to manage my health, thereby forgoing personal and professional opportunities. These circumstances constitute an institutional attempt at creating a feedback loop between imposed limitations on achievement and expectations of low achievement. I chose sex work as my tool to break the cycle.

Combatting slow death is only partially a matter of medical access. My support needs extend far beyond medical systems and into community. I consider myself lucky in this arena. The network of support and services created by and for sex workers, of which I am part, has stepped in in place of institutional support to meet the multifaceted needs of our intersecting identities. Sex work allows me the space to consider contributions to my communities. I began working in sex workers' rights two years after starting sex work. In my work with the Black Sex Workers Collective, I see a microcosm of a world where disability, even when intersecting with other points of deviance such as race and gender identity, does not necessarily beget debility and slow death. Movement leaders represent the wide range of the human experience, thereby creating and intentionally living a comprehensive human rights framework based around sex workers' rights, racial/gender justice, and disability justice.

The ability of sex workers to organize independently in hostile societies to meet our needs is a survival skill by which we thrive. For example, when I run out of energy or am having a health crisis, my sex worker community ensures my bills are paid, and I have food and medication while I take a break from work. Unlike the governments, they do not force me to lay bare my trauma in compromising ways to qualify me as someone deserving of having their needs met. I am trusted as the final word on what I need to be well again. When a client turns into an abuser, my community is quick on the draw with tips and resources to stay safe. This paper has been reviewed by sex working scholars, formally and informally educated, who are invested in shifting the narrative of sex work to incorporate agency. The realizations here are born out of midday conversations with colleagues in my living room while the "civilians" are at their 9-5, and virtual Sunday night meetings where sex workers across continents come together to hash out the implications of, and our responses to, the institutional onslaught against sex work and those who do it. These actions are political in their implications. They equip us with tools to deconstruct internalized anti-Blackness and return culpability for the community's challenges to the institutions upon which society is built. We de-pathologize ourselves as an act of resistance. Together we prove that we, too can create value when not debilitated.

This labor is largely unpaid but not uncompensated. I reciprocate with my own support initiatives and support of sex workers' resources, workshops, outreach, etc. In our Black sex worker communities, capacity is valued, and limitations respected without detracting from our ability to show up for each other in affirming ways. We afford each other the visibility denied us outside our circles. In this community, I learned what it means to show up; to consistently support within one's means. The lateral intersectional structure of grassroots Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC)-led sex worker organizing necessarily begets inclusivity and more effective outcomes than current formal responses to sex workers' issues because the community is the movement.

Sex work and sex worker community organizing are imperfect antidotes to debility. Sex work is the source of funds that allows us to organize things like education, healthcare resources, and safehouses for each other. Sex work gives us the time and flexibility to sit and deeply consider what the world could be if everyone were affirmed in their wholeness. Our discarded position in society gives us the freedom to create a microcosm of this world by living the principles of interdependence as empowerment. 42 It is the tie that binds us in the eyes of our societies, and it is a portal into a deeper understanding of the way our governments and societies fail those constructed as deviant. Unfortunately, the problem is larger than the solutions sex worker communities can provide. For example, when a police officer assaults a trans sex worker, there will often be a community to ensure she gets gender-affirming healthcare and ensure she can safely process her trauma. But the community cannot prevent this trauma. In many ways, sex worker organizing is a persistent attempt to get ahead of the abuse we face at the hands of institutions.

Had I not priced my sexual labor for the money as well as the flexibility needed to navigate neglectful medical systems and my disabilities, it is no exaggeration to say I would not be alive today. I certainly would not have had the hours, finances, emotional support, time to rest, and geographic flexibility it took to sidestep the systemic gaslighting that stood between me and competent care. The stigma of my race and gender follows me into the doctor's exam room, much in the same way it follows me at work. This ubiquity makes the skills and insights developed at work highly transferable to my personal experiences.

Navigating the Informal Economy

If money is power and the powerful are largely white, then it is not illogical that money also bestows a degree of white adjacency (and agency) by giving access to white spaces. While in Germany, thanks to the flexibility afforded by my work and by the necessity for my work, I rented an apartment in gentrified Berlin-Mitte that would, in turn, attract a higher paying clientele. Living in close proximity to displays of white culture and privilege, I learned to mimic the entitled mannerisms of the average resident. I boldly walked into my apartment building amid stares. I held the questioning glare of my neighbors with a one of my own. I held my 'unkempt' head up and wore the clothes that made me comfortable in places where I did not belong. It became a matter of resistance to perform the privilege I observed. In doing so, I objected to the entitlement that excludes me from white spaces. Eventually, I was confident enough to deploy this skill at the doctor's office. In moments of acute discomfort when interacting with the medical establishment, I have resorted to reminding myself that "people like him come to me almost daily for this body." It is a reminder that we might not be equal in social status, but we are equal in humanity.

While this adjacency isn't quite a privilege, it does give the advantage of an insider understanding of the facts of a racialized power dynamic. I pay for access by enduring micro-aggressions and objectification almost 24/7, in and out of a work context. However, this adjacency allowed me to casually share private thoughts about race dynamics and deeply held xenophobia on occasion. In my work, I know we have moved into this space when a client tells me "I've never had someone like you" or, for those with experience, "You're not like the other Black women here (in Germany)."

The weight of microaggressions is outweighed upon consideration that, for the first time in my working life, I can negotiate terms of employment that benefit me, both as a sex worker and in the formal sector. Sex work and sex worker organizing are the foundation of the professional skills that facilitate the success of the initiatives I undertake. I absorb this understanding in the piecemeal way typical of my brain function. My community makes space for this atypical process, gently guiding me to full understanding. I work in the way I am effective, and I need not plead with anyone for lenience or understanding. Knowing that I am also an independent worker, I am far more selective about the conditions of the formal work I do. Sex work allows me to be intentional in choosing who to work with and what projects to work on. The privilege of a community that recognizes my needs as valid is a social antidote to the constraints of not having a welfare or universal healthcare system in lieu of an expectation that people like me must suffer in order to survive the world as it is.

Mireille Miller-Young, a self-styled academic pornographer, provides firsthand accounts of Black sex industry workers being masterfully aware and critical when navigating their occupations. 43 When sex workers are treated as though anything is better than that, it sets a low standard for the alternatives being provided. This assumption that the decision to enter sex work is de facto irrational or born of destitution, means that every sex worker has their ability to make decisions for themselves and their families questioned. We see this in instances where children are removed from homes because the parent engaged/es in sex work, and that stigma has broad implications for how society treats sex workers. Stigma begets abuse. The struggle to assert one's entire humanity straddles the work/life divide.

Miller-Young outlines the trajectory of Black female bodies in sex work as a historical site of abuse as well as a reclamation of autonomy.

Black women's sex work from the late 19th century to the Depression-era and World War II Provided an arena for Black women to exhibit economic self-reliance and individual self-respect… and struggle against the meanings and modes of control that disciplined black female sexuality at every turn…. we must continue to hold in tension the understanding that the exploitative conditions of economic disenfranchisement, discriminatory segregation, and abusive criminalization were met by Black Women's own labors to survive, to assert themselves and to move within and against sexual expropriation in ways that suited them. 44

Despite the ways that the exploitation of sex work is often presented in comparison with other jobs, the bargaining power of workers within "secure" and "respectable" employment within the formal economy is in some ways weaker than it is for those who are sex workers. In many traditional forms of employment where unions historically maintained some power and influence, the individual worker is now devalued by competition in the workforce and the power of corporations. 45 In the US, employment is a broad and systemic form of oppression. Buzzwords like "right to work" and "direct bargaining" are common in legal and private sector discourse. Corporations have seized institutional power from workers, thereby alienating them from any leverage to negotiate their interests, particularly when it comes to job security, a rapidly eroding guarantee in the USA's labor market. 46 By design, the worker's bargaining position focuses on monetary values determined by employers. This laser-like focus on productivity in exchange for monetary compensation hides several costs that the employee absorbs. For example, by discussing leave in terms of paid time, employers can advance their bargaining position. Leave is, in fact, necessary. Rest is necessary for any living being, and burnout is not a necessary exchange for a 'good salary.'

The upside of working in the informal economy is that individual clients do not come to negotiate with the full force of the public and private sectors behind them. When a sex worker decides to stop working or to stop seeing a certain client and warn their colleagues to do the same, there is no union buster to force them to renege. The informality of sex work often translates to higher earning power because the worker can independently negotiate the value of her labor to the market. Boundaries are more likely to be steadfast because there is no institutional bulldozer to pressure compromise on purely economic grounds. 47 With this freedom and some soul searching, I can determine the actual cost of my labor to me, and its value in the free market. This price is holistic, and a quick Google search will show it is higher than my CEO clients would pay me in salary and sick benefits to sit at a desk in their high-rise buildings using two decades of education and a lifetime of self-development for the sole purpose of making them money. As a practice, I don't negotiate. I set my rates, and those who recognize my value are free to take me up on it. No government entity can then force me to work for less. 48 It is the closest approximation to the free market for labor that I have experienced.

There is something more to be said here about agency and European and European-descended societies' rejection of Black women's ability to assess their unique intersecting circumstances and make a beneficial decision. I am far from the only Black womxn with a disability engaging in sex work. While it is a fortunate turn of events, the fact remains that I entered sex work because I was discarded on the basis of my race and disability. Yet policymakers rarely, if ever, mention the pathway into sex work that exists at this intersection. For many policymakers inculcated in the white-male supremacist ableist narrative of how agency is deployed, choosing to engage in sex work simply doesn't make sense, and that's all there is to it. Therefore, to be a Black sex worker, is to be pathologically abnormal and illogical. 49

Historically, European societies have been especially unforgiving in their assessments of Black and POC people's capacity for higher-level cognitive function. 50 This assumption of persons with disability, Black women, and sex workers as incapable of making 'rational' (to respectable able-bodied white folk) decisions leads to violent measures like institutionalization as punishment (in the case of sex workers), as a form of disappearing the undesirable (as with sex workers, Black people and persons with disabilities), or both, as in the case of Black women who receive harsher sentences for sex work than their white counterparts. 51 The neglect of disability status within Black communities compounds the risk of getting caught in the state's punitive measures. I think here of disabled womxn/women like myself who do sex work to survive and are caught by authorities. In these cases, avoiding long incarceration often depends on the ability to spin a convincing yarn of victimhood that tugs at heartstrings. People with disabilities face challenges doing so because their disability combined with race makes them 1) less sympathetic to judges and juries, 2) considered more likely to re-offend, 52 or 3) simply unable to affect the performance required.

On the flip side of the racialized, pathologically errant depiction of the Black women who do sex work, the assumption of victimhood from a white, able-bodied perspective is evident in prevailing narratives of sex trafficking from developing countries where innocent, ever-unsuspecting young women are entirely coerced solely by individual or small group actors into sex trade in foreign lands. 53 The white victim narrative is deliberately ill-suited for application to Black women because it does not consider Black realities in their entirety. Sweden's Nordic Model is built on the assumption that all sex work is coercive. The Swedish government's former so-called expert on prostitution and trafficking writes that "it is understood that legalization of prostitution will inevitably normalize an extreme form of sexual discrimination and violence and strengthen male domination of female human beings." 54 Sweden, a world leader in abolitionist policy, places responsibility for this 'coercion' squarely on the shoulders of clients, traffickers, and pimps, rather than in society's failure to facilitate the worker's attempt to navigate institutional violence with limited resources. This "male domination" apparently does not refer to forced medication of those considered "seriously mentally ill" or forced childbearing. 55 The claim is that client criminalization will reduce demand. 56 The decision to engage in sex work cannot be swayed by criminalization. As a migrant, I worked under Germany's partial criminalization, which put me at risk of arrest and deportation as I do not fit the victim narrative. The threat of arrest and deportation did not deter me because it was my best option to ensure I could complete my studies. Disability makes this decision an acute matter of survival. It takes three missed days of medication before my symptoms leave me agonizingly debilitated. I refuse to endure that when a half hour of my time can pay for a month's supply.

Solutions from BFT and DJ

Black Feminism and Disability Justice both seek to restore the power of community building to community members themselves. This aim stems from the realization that those in marginalized positions are sources of crucial knowledge that is neither intuitive nor entirely available to those outside the community. It requires the acceptance that shared experience is knowledge, and sometimes the plural of anecdote is, in fact, data. A community-centered approach is a disruptive foundation for rebuilding complex notions of human value that situate external factors as determinants of outcome but not innate capacity. By centering non-hegemonic perspectives, we can systematically redefine terms that are taken for granted in mainstream discourse. Productivity, for example, is divorced from its largely capitalist connotations in disability justice and is extended to non-economic contributions, as well as the actions of self-preservation that benefit the community. Every individual has the capacity to be a positive addition simply by existing in their wholeness. The theories explored in this paper disconnect physical presentation and capacity from an individual's right to be part of a community and society.

Black liberation is intersectional. It takes to task the ableist, classist, and sexist institutions that push deviant bodies into slow death. Patricia Hill Collins highlights the primacy of an intersectional approach of Black Feminism as a foundational aspect of praxis, writing, "Black women confront and dismantle the 'overarching' and 'interlocking' structure of domination in terms of race, class, and gender oppression." 57 Black Feminist analysis lends itself well to the diverse and often divergent ways differently situated persons navigate the sex industry. Any solution to the systemic exclusion of Black sex workers must at the very least address the racial component that undergirds social issues in the USA as well as Europe. The Black Feminist arsenal includes consciousness raising, grassroots advocacy, mutual aid, restorative/transformative justice, and policy advocacy. Research undertaken by its subjects (rather than by dispassionate observers) must be codified and used to inform disability and sex work policy. Of course, stigma stymies any such initiative.

It is crucial that sex workers and those with disability across marginalized demographics are centered in relevant policymaking. If nothing else, my story is a testament to the empowerment that comes from within the community. Sex workers' rights and harm reduction components must be replicated in social, environmental, and economic policy. To effectively support any community, there must be consideration of the many intersections that exist within it. Current social services measures are demonstrably geared toward the white able-bodied standard. Excessive paperwork, long lines, and longer wait times assume a level of resource access to things like paid time off and childcare that precludes those who need those services most. Social programs hold strict standards for who is allowed to claim disability that do not reflect the messy reality of socially imposed limitations. For example, in order to collect disability payments in a country (the USA) where healthcare is not a right, one must show that they have been consistently in treatment for their disability as part of an extensive assessment by dispassionate bureaucrats checking boxes. This assessment can take anywhere from three months to three years, depending on the state and whether your claim is denied the first time around. 58 Collecting Social Security Disability payments also requires that the applicant has worked "long enough." 59 This example highlights the risk when accessibility is considered optional or not considered at all. These exclusionary restrictions reveal an unspoken assertion that those who are disabled or operate under debility imposed by their socio-economic status, race, gender, or other externally imposed categories, are optional members of society with no right to its entitlements. This deliberate act of erasure saddles those at the margins with a responsibility to prove their human worth in a way that able-bodied white folk are rarely expected to.

The problems presented as inherent in sex work are, in fact, imposed by a social order that values capital as the determinant of hierarchical value. Sex workers' rights and disability justice initiatives exist under the constraints of attempts to alienate sex workers and disabled persons from access to capital. Stigma and inaccessibility limit formal employment options for sex workers with disabilities. Assumptions about the worth of bodies may also force sex workers with visible disabilities to negotiate rates that do not fully meet their needs. Combined with the cost of being disabled, it is not difficult to imagine that sex workers with disabilities are uniquely challenged in their survival. So long as we navigate capitalism, the solution to our problems are intricately tied up in access to capital. Institutional barriers to access to capital (and thereby care) include direct measures such as employment discrimination, as well as tangentially related but no less impactful measures like disability criteria and geographical/financial/social barriers to healthcare access.

It is necessary for allies to contribute money and time to sex worker-led organizations so that directly impacted activists can have stability while doing the work, rather than take upon themselves the role of speaking 'on behalf of' sex workers. Piepzna-Samarasinha rightly asserts that support is a long-term slow drip of actions and time invested in community. 60 It is not simply a grand, time-limited gesture like a benefit concert or a meal train for a few weeks. It is also not an individual matter. Holding space for people with disabilities requires the reformation of notions of human responsibility to each other. Accessibility should not be optional and does not need to be earned. I hope that successful consciousness raising can drive home the fact that sex working persons with disabilities are fully capable of representing themselves in every aspect, as scholars, orators, artists, politicians, etc. In fact, we have been doing so under the threat of erasure for a long time. This realization must become mainstream if any meaningful institutional change occurs. Only then can we begin to deconstruct the hollow two-dimensional perspectives that inform legislative measures.