The Hill has thighs.
A duo of sex workers descended on Capitol Hill Thursday to deliver a sermon to an earnest group of far-left House staffers about how the “affordability crisis” is impacting the world’s oldest profession and to denounce law enforcement.
The workshop, entitled “When Sex Work Pays the Rent: A Roundtable Discussion about the Hidden Side of the Affordability Crisis,” was cohosted by the Congressional Progressive Staff Association (CPSA). Claire Kaufman, a legislative assistant for Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and education director for the CPSA, represented the group at the discussion.
The speakers included two proud sex workers: Tamika Spellman, the founder of Grammy’s Place, a self-described “safe house for Black transgender women,” and Amber Lashbaugh, a “harm reduction” advocate who is “in recovery”. It’s not clear if either speaker is still actively engaging in sex work.
In a small conference room on the fourth floor of the House Cannon Office Building, roughly a dozen people sipped coffee and lemonade as the two activists held forth.
“When you’re on the streets, you have a bevy of things that you have to deal with. Number one is the police, and don’t think that they are these kind and gentle watchers of the people, because they’re not. I have been raped and robbed by them,” Spellman, who is transgender, said, going into an anti-law enforcement diatribe.
“I have had money extorted from me by them. I’ve been physically and mentally abused by police, and I have been a traveling sex worker for many of those years, and one thing I can say for sure, they’re all the same in every state, and I’ve been here when they come for their conference, come here every year, and those same cops are doing the same things I was doing, smoking crack, doing drugs, buying sex workers, doing all kind of ungodly things, but they want to criminalize us when they’re back in their municipalities, that’s not fair.”
“I want to make sure we have a clear understanding about what I look at as a progressive, as a Democratic Socialist,” Spellman added later, saying sex worker rights needed to be front and center of the agenda.
Spellman “has a 4 decade history as a drug using Sex Worker,” she noted proudly in a June 2024 Medium post.
After growing up in a low-income family and suffering from substance abuse, Lashbaugh—who had racked up a criminal record as well as debt—credited the income she made from prostitution for helping to finance her education.
“Now I’m at Georgetown, finishing my master’s, and I know that I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t done this sex work,” she said.
“Why don’t we pay our teachers enough to live? People are like, why are they turning to OnlyFans?” she added later, touching on how many people use prostitution to augment meager on-the-books income.
Both women spoke negatively against the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (known colloquially in advocacy circles as SESTA FOSTA). The bills, which President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018, crack down on online platforms that facilitate sex trafficking, but the sex workers insisted that they had actually hindered their business interests.
“SESTA FOSTA has not been used successfully to criminalize anybody except for sex workers that are consenting and shut down all of the avenues that we were using to do sex work and to also keep us safe,” Spellman said.
Kelly Crouch, a “they/them” “recorded Quaker minister,” also helped lead discussion, with Crouch’s nonprofit, Ecumenical Commons, also serving as an event cohost.
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