"As Someone Who is Disabled, I am so thankful for Sex Work": Alternative Approaches to Access Among Disabled Sex-Workers
Abigail Rodolitz, Vaughn Hamilton, Tamanna Tabassum, Jinny Lerner, Megan Hofmann · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3746375
Summary
This paper investigates the access strategies developed by disabled sex workers, a population at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. Through 12 semi-structured interviews with disabled individuals engaged in various forms of sex work (escorts, webcam performers, lap dancers, and others), the researchers explore how disability shapes entry into sex work, how sex work provides unique accessibility benefits, and how participants navigate systems that are simultaneously sources of support and harm. The study is grounded in intersectionality, interdependence, and harm reduction frameworks, deliberately centering a community that exists in what the authors call the "forgotten margins" of accessibility research. Participants reported diverse disabilities including physical disabilities, chronic pain conditions, mental health conditions, and neurodivergent conditions. Many entered sex work specifically because traditional employment was inaccessible—rigid schedules, physical demands, and discriminatory hiring practices created barriers that sex work circumvented. The paper identifies three key dynamics: how adversarial stakeholders (police, platform operators affected by FOSTA-SESTA legislation, healthcare providers, disability services) create harm even when providing essential resources; how participants use disclosure and selective engagement strategies to navigate hostile systems; and how the concept of "duality" allows disabled sex workers to manage plural identities across different contexts. The methodology reflects careful ethical considerations, including working with a sex worker community consultant and implementing privacy protections appropriate for a criminalized population.
Key findings
The research introduces the concept of "systems of access"—a framework where disabled people navigate a dynamic network of people, institutions, and built environments, making constant trade-offs between accessing resources and avoiding harm. Key findings include: (1) Sex work provides accessibility benefits unavailable in traditional employment, including schedule flexibility, bodily autonomy, the ability to work from home, and control over work pace and environment. (2) Adversarial stakeholders are pervasive—participants described healthcare providers refusing to believe their knowledge of their own disabilities upon learning of sex work, platforms becoming inaccessible due to anti-sex-work legislation, and disability services threatening benefit loss. (3) Participants employ sophisticated "consequence-based" access strategies rooted in harm reduction, making calculated decisions about which laws to follow, which identities to disclose, and which stakeholders to engage based on anticipated consequences rather than prescribed rules. (4) Systems of access can be stable or unstable—stable systems allow long-term planning and resource accumulation, while unstable systems force reactive decision-making and increase risk. (5) Selective engagement with sex-worker-friendly providers and platforms creates more reliable but narrower systems of access.
Relevance
This paper fundamentally challenges accessibility research assumptions by demonstrating that stakeholders in disabled people's lives are not always benevolent. The "systems of access" framework has broad implications beyond sex work—any marginalized disabled community (queer youth, undocumented immigrants, people of color) may face adversarial stakeholders who simultaneously provide and threaten access. For accessibility practitioners, the paper offers three critical research implications: presume the presence of adversarial stakeholders when designing for marginalized communities; anticipate consequence-based accessibility where users make trade-offs rather than simply overcoming barriers; and actively seek out access strategies from marginalized communities rather than only studying populations with conventional support structures. The work also highlights how legislation like FOSTA-SESTA can have devastating accessibility consequences for disabled people who rely on online platforms. The paper calls on HCI and accessibility researchers to adopt human-centered threat modeling from security research to identify and design around adversarial relationships.
Tags: disability disclosure · intersectionality · marginalized communities · sex work · systems of access · harm reduction · adversarial stakeholders · qualitative research · disability employment · assistive strategies