Unpacking Kamala Harris's Record on Trans and Sex Work Issues

By 2017, Harris had successfully forced Backpage to remove the adult section of its website — a development opposed not only by advocates of independent sex workers, but also by some anti-human trafficking groups.

Fulfilling the worries of both sex workers and anti-trafficking groups, who feared closures like that of Backpage’s adult section would hamper anti-trafficking investigation, the closure proved to have a minimal effect on reducing child sex trafficking. What it would do, however, was force many adults pursuing consensual sex work to seek and/or return to substantially riskier subsets of the industry, including use of dating apps and street-based sex work.

 Harris supported FOSTA/SESTA, whose 2018 passage led to the removal of at least a dozen sites and pages that provide sex workers with life-saving mechanisms of finding safe work. 

Harris's targeting of Backpage.com during her time as California attorney general would prove a precursor to her work as a junior senator. During her first term, Harris supported the passage of the Stop Enabling Child Traffickers Act/Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA), a pair of bills that together decimated many sex workers’ ability to use online channels to vet future clients. As the writer and sex work advocate, Andre Shakti, wrote for them. at the time, “Sex workers want to see an end put to sex trafficking just as much as anyone else. But instead of working with us to effectively identify and eradicate trafficking...government officials are seizing and shutting down the very online platforms that we use to make a living and keep ourselves safe.” 

Worse still, as sex work advocate and Tits and Sass co-editor, Caty Simon, pointed out, the consequences of FOSTA/SESTA-related closures would be felt most devastatingly by those already at society’s margins: “Many of us will die, some of us have already died because of the damage SESTA’s done, and especially because of the loss of Backpage,” she wrote. “And the victims will more often be trans workers, disabled workers, workers of color, and trafficking survivors—those of us who never had many options to begin with.”

Harris was not alone among 2020 Democratic presidential nominees in voting in favor of the legislation. In fact, so did Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar.

Harris's current view on sex work decriminalization is rooted in the controversial “Nordic Model.”

After scoffing at Proposition K as district attorney, defending California’s criminalization of sex work as attorney general, and voted in favor of FOSTA/SESTA as a senator, Harris sort of came out in favor of decriminalization during a February 2019, interview with The Root. Responding to a question asking whether she thought “sex work ought to be decriminalized,” the then-presidential hopeful responded, “I think so. I do.”