By Evelyn Hadassah Kronfeld

Terre Thaemlitz (aka DJ Sprinkles) has a particularly pessimistic perspective on labor, art, and community. She is perhaps known more for her cultural criticism than for her innovations within and surrounding the genre of house music. A lot of her writing has accompanied physical and digital releases of her musical works. For the release of her 1998 extended-play Sloppy 42nds: A Tribute to the 42nd Street Transsexual Clubs Destroyed by Walt Disney’s Buyout of Times Square, Thaemlitz wrote a scathing and poignant piece suggesting a connection between the dynamics at play inside a trans nightclub and those at play in New York City’s politics and economy. 

To Thaemlitz, “trannies don’t pay for the city – the corporate Johns do.” The well-to-do clients of the trans femme sex workers of Sally’s II, a nightclub that was later forced to close due to gentrification, enforced their taste in music. “In particular, one tacky bastard who dressed like Tatoo from Fantasy Island was upset because I refused to play Gloria Estephan every time he sat his fat ass down in the ballroom,” writes Thaemlitz. 

She left her gig at Sally’s II after being told to “start playing major label tracks or leave.” Even as a DJ, not a sex worker, Thaemlitz had to tailor her self-expression to the desires of a controlling male elite. She refused, though. But in the years between Thaemlitz’s departure and the closure of Sally’s II, someone surely stepped in to play the mainstream tracks that Thaemlitz resented. Perhaps the new DJ resented those tracks too, or perhaps not. Either way, the Johns were to be pleased. 

Trans women being pushed into sex work is among the most violent psychic and physical attacks on our autonomy, and this process is a result of transmisogyny. So much trans femme art and writing deals with our victimization; it is a theme so ubiquitous that, although there are divergent examples which are described later in this essay, it is sometimes hard to imagine trans femme artistry without its struggle. We should, however, begin to imagine a universe of trans femme cultural production that transcends the demands of patriarchy and capitalism. Transmisogyny has had a deleterious effect on trans women’s art due to its collapsing of our communal spaces and its necessitating a reduction in the scope of our work. 

Through a Different Lens: Occupational Health of Sex-Working Young Trans Women, an analysis of data from Erin C. Wilson’s five-year study of young trans women, finds that sex work’s “advantages range from financial (i.e., funding transitions) and vocational (e.g., job availability, easy entry, and self-determined hours) support to psychological well-being (i.e., gender affirmation, affection, and community connectedness).” The ‘psychological well-being’ factor is curious. 

Many of my trans femme friends have either been sex workers or considered sex work. During a period of mania, I spiraled and took steps to become a sex worker. I interviewed for a phone sex service and submitted applications for various other weird gigs. I started an OnlyFans, thinking that it would make me feel confident and empowered. I got admitted to a psych ward before any of these jobs began. After getting out of the psych ward, at which point I was finally taking antipsychotics, I got back in touch with a friend from high school. This friend was also transfeminine, and came from a similar background to mine – East Coast, suburban, middle-class with supportive parents. Unbeknownst to me, this friend had been doing full-service sex work throughout her own extended period of psychological instability. 

My friend and I were college students, and not particularly hard up for cash. I can’t fully make sense of the reasons why I chose to pursue sex work. I can plausibly trace my decision back to a poorly-timed comment from my aunt about getting a job and becoming independent. 

On a systemic level, my decision had a lot to do with a broader attempt to navigate the contradictions of life as a trans girl. I had been left disillusioned and cynical following some sexual relationships with straight men. I was convinced that trans women, with all of our methods for expression and survival, had a special ability to compartmentalize the ways we are treated by men and bosses – a special ability that made us better at sex work. I had become mired in the history of house music and sex work, reading and reading into Terre Thaemlitz and Nina Arsenault. I was trying to find pieces of myself in these iconic artists and sex workers, manically attempting to construct my pseudo-philosophy of working-class trans femme gender performance. I wanted to heighten the contradictions of transmisogyny; I wanted to make the contradictions so vivid and so obvious that my nascent sense of resolve could finally emerge. 

I dreamt that sex work could fund my art, and that I would be ‘hacking’ transmisogyny to my benefit. The fetishization of trans girls was basically a social ill, but one that could get me paid. Emma Heaney, in her 2017 theoretical work The New Woman, comments on psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s transmisogynistic rhetoric. “Trans feminine sex workers,” Heaney writes in reference to Krafft-Ebing’s seminal text Psychopathia Sexualis, “who Krafft-Ebing considers more likely to have acquired their condition through degenerate living, use ‘the arts of coquetry’ such as ‘ornaments, perfumes, feminine style of dress . . . to attract pederasts and homosexuals.’”

‘The arts of coquetry’, described in dismissive terms by Krafft-Ebing, could, alternatively, be understood as beautiful or, even if influenced by the patriarchal expectations of women, as a performance of gender that involves creativity and the outward expression of an inner self. Fashion and makeup are too often framed as purely seductive. Lots of approaches to fashion and makeup are about much more than attracting a mate or client. Nevertheless, Krafft-Ebing is accidentally correct in his assumption that trans women, much like cis women, often contort our presentations in our efforts to please men. This is not ‘degeneracy’, however. This is adaptation. This is economics. 

Trans women’s aesthetics and sexualities have had to respond to both fetishistic and conservative attitudes. Whether we’re sex workers embracing the roles demanded of us by fetishists, or we’re models embodying traditional feminine archetypes, we are centering men. The problem is not hyperfemininity or participation in fetish, but hyperfemininity and participation in fetish that is compulsory. 

Beyond aesthetics and sex, our broader creative efforts are often spent dealing with transmisogyny, either acting in opposition to it or in collaboration with it. In the 2020 documentary Disclosure, various trans actresses discuss their cameo appearances on shows like Law and Order and Nip/Tuck. These shows reproduce mainstream conceptions of trans women: criminalized and medicalized. The trans actresses, many of whom have been sex workers in the past, appear on these shows for a paycheck. Like sex workers, they are aware that transmisogyny plays a major role in their work. By using television opportunities to elevate their notoriety, they are attempting to ‘hack’ transmisogyny. 

Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s 2019 film So Pretty is largely a document of domestic life. Trans women are seen cooking, sleeping, and having sex. It is, for the most part, a very cozy film about T4T – a sort of post hoc ‘movement’ of trans people toward lives of intra-transgender love and community. In their 2022 article, Meanwhile, t4t, Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino suggest that most depictions of trans life focus “on the dramas of trans people negotiating cis worlds of sense.” Some of my favorite films are along these lines: Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019), Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), and Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) are all notable examples. These films have immense merit, but there is something very hopeful about art being made that centers trans love and chaos outside of the context of transmisogyny.

One of the songs featured in So Pretty is a house track by DJ Eris Drew, titled “Hold Me (T4T Embrace Mix)”. It is very funky and upbeat, and it plays while Erika (played by Rachika Samarth) scrolls on her phone next to sleeping Tonia (played by Rovinelli). While it follows an instance of police brutality, the scene doesn’t really try to deconstruct policing or transmisogyny or anything. It’s a moment of rest. 

In a 2023 interview with 3voor12, Eris Drew praises her girlfriend and fellow deejay Octo Octa. “I loved your rock-and-roll spirit behind the decks,” says Drew. “And your, just, like amazing taste in house music – your love for house music. You know, not some kind of derivative of house music or deconstruction of house music, but house music.” 

Drew seems to be suggesting that there is a platonic ideal of ‘house music’ – one that is pure and not looking to deconstruct. I don’t necessarily agree with Drew, as it seems that house music always involves some kind of deconstruction, but her point invites the possibility of trans femme cultural production existing unencumbered by transmisogyny or demands for its deconstruction. I would like to believe in this. Trans women are smart, beautiful, and capable of immense creativity. Meanwhile, transmisogyny displaces, silences, and limits us as artists, workers, and people. In a moment of genocidal backlash to trans rights, it is more important than ever that trans artists do what we do.

Singer-songwriter Ethel Cain, a trans woman, recently posted photos to Instagram showing her genitals. James Factora, writing for Them, points out that Cain’s photos are “not intentionally provocative, per se, but not at all concerned with catering to cis audiences.” While the photos were surely released with an awareness that trans women’s penises have been highly politicized, fetishized, demonized, and imbued with all kinds of essentializing meaning, the portraits themselves center Ethel Cain’s formal beauty. 

This is the future of trans femme cultural production. It is unbelievably exciting to imagine a world, however far away, in which we don’t have to contend with transmisogyny, even in opposition to it. T4T is part of that new world, despite transmisogyny’s enduring role in intra-trans relationships. The unencumbered house music of Eris Drew and Octo Octa is part of it too, even while many of us, including the brilliant Terre Thaemlitz, continue to use our work to deconstruct transmisogyny. We have always been so limited, but together we can really explore. 

Author bio: Evelyn Hadassah Kronfeld is a Baltimore-based student and writer exploring mental health, gender, and media. She is completing her bachelor’s in Film and Media Studies at Towson. Her Instagram is @evkronf.