by Saoirse Grace, 2024 Privacy Rights Fellow
Much has been written about the legal, social, and practical reasons AB 3080 must be stopped. I agree—it must be. For those unfamiliar, AB 3080 is a bill in the California state legislature that proposes to force Adult Industry content providers to verify users’ age. As of August 18 the bill did not emerge from the suspense file in the Appropriations Committee. But we can assume this won’t be the last try. One thing that is missing from this discourse is how people weaponize concepts like morality, a desire to protect children, and urgency in order to create a state of affairs in which laws that would otherwise be plainly outlandish can take root.
In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, author Lee Edelman argues that people who weaponize justifications like “we are doing this to protect children!” do so not (or not exclusively) out of a genuine desire to protect children, but because opposing them implicates the justification of children’s safety. The goal of this tactic is to place the opposition in an impossible position where it cannot oppose without conceding the point that children are not worth saving. Edelman’s critique comes in the context of queer theory, where the Child is raised as a banner in opposition to transsexuals like me showing up in public spaces. The strategy is the same, however, and it is no coincidence that legislative assaults on sex workers often show up hand-in-hand with legislative assaults on trans people, or that those categories often overlap. I have not seen this named in contemporary political discourse so explicitly (though I have seen people point out that the party of “pro-life” is not actually pro life, which is revealed in the way they treat babies and their caretakers post-birth), and I think it is an important intervention.
In conducting the research for this essay, I learned a new idiom: letting the camel’s nose into the tent. The idea is that, once a camel gets her nose into a tent, it will be all but impossible to prevent the rest of her from getting in. This seems to fit within the stated goals of AB 3080’s proponents. For example, Jon Schweppe, director of the conservative think tank American Principles Project, said age verification legislation like AB 3080 is a “good first step.”1 Also, the elimination of sex workers through the language of obscenity has disastrous consequences on members of the LGBTQ community. For example, “West Virginia’s Senate Bill 197 defines the existence of transgender people as ‘obscene,’”2 which means laws intended to protect children from sexual content can be applied to people who are not performers. But I do not want to rely too heavily on the argument that we must protect the adult industry from this bold attempt to reach into our most private space—the relationship between our identities and desires—because the laws will spread to other areas and affect other people. Sex workers are worthy of protection even if what threatens them is not the nose of a camel.
AB 3080 was a bad bill that is calculated to harm the adult entertainment industry (the Industry), and that alone is enough information for many people to oppose the bill. But like all things, it is complicated. Many of you will have heard (or even chanted) “Rights Not Rescue!” This is a slogan used by many people in the Industry to reject the paternalistic motivations of politicians to rescue “fallen women,” à la Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean to Fantine in Les Misérablesor Ewan McGregor’s Christian in Moulin Rouge! This same paternalism is now being directed at consumers, rather than performers, but it is the performers who will be the most significantly affected by this law. This law will not protect children, the way its proponents so forcefully argue. It will, instead, funnel children toward sites that, per Alison Boden of the Free Speech Coalition, “don’t comply with laws and certainly don’t provide a revenue stream for the creators whose content [the non-compliant sites] host.”
According to a full-service sex worker who has also worked as an Industry performer and who declined to be named, there are two more types of harm that have not gotten the full attention they deserve. First is that, within the umbrella of sex work, Industry performers are relatively safe compared to full-service sex workers, but that when AB 3080 removes options that consider performers’ sexual health and that have some measure of oversight and renders the Industry no longer a viable option to earn money, many women will put themselves in greater danger by turning to full-service sex work. Further, many of these women are mothers and the loss of income will lead to greater harm to their children. A grim example is that of Larissa Garcia, who was murdered and then sexually assaulted by a man who had hired her for the evening. Garcia lost her life, and her children lost their mother and sole parent. Garcia is one of the more recent examples, but this is a story that is too often told—or not told, given the racial and classed dynamics of media attention and who makes for a “good victim” in the media discourse.
As a transsexual, I know what it is like to be an easy political target. Politicians and ordinary people use this body of mine as a playground; I am a politically convenient target. There is a deep relationship between trans people and sex work. Many of us cannot find work despite our transness and so we find work that is available because of it instead. That work is often sex work, and a lot of us find our way into the Industry as performers. This is the case for so many of us that we are a category on many sites. But this is not the only relationship between trans people and the Industry. Many politicians use trans people and Industry professionals independently as easy targets with the full intention of spreading their reach beyond us.
“This is an epidemic!” comes the Greek chorus. That urgency is a necessary element for the spread of surveillance that AB 3080 promises on its face not to create. Agamben describes this urgency as a state of exception.4 In his eponymous book, Agamben argues that, “[t]he immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorized the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’ (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.” While this example is admittedly hyperbolic, it contains within it a truth that is consistent with the language of urgency that people use to target Industry performers and sites.
People must be attentive to the three points I have brought up. First, and most importantly, this will harm performers and that alone is significant—a law does not have to promise to also hurt other people when a marginalized group is under assault for people to organize against that law. Second, people are being manipulated by calls to protect children by people who are not motivated by a genuine desire to protect children—as evidenced by the fact that similar bills have failed spectacularly to do so—but rather are using children as a symbolic means of quashing opposition. Third, the need not merely to protect children but to protect children now is a tactic which is calculated to manipulate people into believing they can make an exception to protect certain aspects of our lives (here, the privacy of our own thoughts and actions) in service of a goal that is, ostensibly, valid. Proponents of AB 3080 and similar bills across the US are loud and well-funded, but regardless of the height of their volume or the depth of their pockets, opposition to AB 3080 is the correct action. It will not do what it purports to do, and the consequences of its enactment will be swift, dire, and, as is so often the case, utterly predictable.
1 https://theiowastandard.com/schweppe-age-verification-is-a-good-first-step/
2 https://newrepublic.com/article/178175/republican-anti-trans-laws-punish-eradicate
3 I do not believe the State should be the principal organizing structure of a society at all, but this is not sufficiently specific to the point I am making.
4 Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005.