Dear Madam VP Elect: An Open Letter to Kamala Harris from a Sex Worker

Laura LeMoon
4 min readNov 16, 2020

Last Saturday morning I was laying in bed and checked the Huffington Post — 284 Biden and 214 Trump. I texted my best friend immediately, a sex worker and well versed politico, who responded;

“Yes! They’re calling Biden President Elect Biden on the news!”

I was ecstatic and somewhat in disbelief, because personally I was sure Trump’s dirty pool tactics would get him another four years in office.

Madam VP Elect, your win as a woman and especially as a woman of color is absolutely historical and worthy of excitement. But as a sex worker, it is a mixed bag for me.

Your history with our sex working communities has been ambivalent, at best, and a complete disaster at worst. This being what it is, sex workers have still done a lot of work to get you and President Elect Biden into the White House. Sex workers, those who are able, are typically deeply political people, because our identities are so maligned. So many current and former sex workers that I know really worked hard for the Biden/Harris campaign. We have done this despite the ways in which you and the policies you have promoted have impacted us.

You have never formally apologized for the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2018, which has rolled back Section 230 of the…

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Laura LeMoon

As seen in HuffPost, The Daily Beast, Bitch Magazine, Insider, and more. Former peer policy advisor to UNODC, USDOJ, CDC, City of Seattle and WHO.