Former Vice President Joe Biden revealed on Tuesday afternoon that he had chosen California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. The announcement, made via a text to supporters, sparked an outpouring of responses. Many hailed Harris as a favorable choice given her experience as a U.S. senator, having already been put through the media wringer as a former presidential candidate, and being the first woman of color ever to be a part of a major party’s presidential ticket. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is Black and Asian-American.
Among those to offer full-throated declarations of support for the newly minted Biden-Harris ticket were liberal heavyweights Bernie Sanders, Stacey Abrams, and Barack Obama, the latter of whom asserted that the vice presidential pick is the “first important decision a president makes.”
Others to throw their hats behind the pick were LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations like GLAAD, Equality California, and the Human Rights Campaign.
“Senator Kamala Harris is nothing short of an exceptional choice for Vice President,” said HRC president Alphonso David in a statement, noting Harris's role in ending the use of LGBTQ+ “panic” defenses and her fighting to overturn Proposition 8 in California as evidence of her pro-LGBTQ+ bona fides. Other positive aspects of Harris’s record on queer issues include her establishment of an LGBTQ+ hate crime unit as San Francisco district attorney and her early support of marriage equality. (Harris performed same-sex marriages herself when San Francisco briefly legalized the freedom to marry in 2004.)
But contrary to the Democratic establishment’s rosy assessment of Harris's vice presidential candidacy, a substantial cohort of progressives and leftists greeted the news with trenchant critiques of her career, both as a prosecutor (Harris was district attorney in San Francisco from 2004 until 2011, when she became California’s attorney general) and as a lawmaker in the U.S. Senate.
Some of the most damaging criticism directed at the self-described former “top cop” cite her record on the rights of sex workers, the trans community, and the overlap of both. According to a 2015 survey conducted by the National Center for Trans Equality, nearly one in five of trans adults in the U.S. has engaged in sex work. That figure is as high as 40% for Black trans folks, a statistic that demonstrates how a public official’s policies regarding sex work can be understood as an extension of their policies regarding the LGBTQ+ community.
As the activist and G.L.I.T.S founder Ceyenne Doroshow wrote on Instagram recently, “Kamala Harris is no friend to trans women black trans women and a always [sic] cop. I don’t support her at all.” And so in the interest of presenting a fuller picture of the potential future Vice President of the United States, we’ve compiled a roundup exploring Harris's record on issues pertinent to sex workers and trans people.
Harris described a proposition to decriminalize sex work as “completely ridiculous.”
In 2008, Harris opposed Proposition K — a measure that aimed to decriminalize sex work — while district attorney of San Francisco. “I think it’s completely ridiculous, just in case there’s any ambiguity about my position,” Harris said at the time. “It would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco.”
Far from “completely ridiculous,” the proposition grew out of years of advocacy and research. This included a University of California San Francisco study which found that 1 in 7 of the more than 200 San Francisco-based sex workers surveyed had been threatened with arrest by police officers — that is, unless they had sex with them. One in 5 reported that police officers paid them for sex.
An antecedent to today’s calls to “defund the police,” Proposition K aimed to redirect city funding away from prosecuting sex workers and toward public health solutions to the threat of STIs faced by so many in the industry. It failed to secure sufficient votes to be put into practice.
Harris rejected efforts to decriminalize sex work by claiming that it contributed to the transmission of HIV/AIDS.
Harris continued defending the criminalization of sex work as California attorney general. According to an Out magazine op-ed written by activist and ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, Harris defended her pro-criminalization stance in one 2015 case by using the misleading logic that “[p]rostitution is linked to the transmission of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases.” In fact, numerous studies from the time show that the correlation between sex work and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, is exacerbated by criminalization, not prevented by it. A prime example of how criminalization of sex work leads to higher rates of STIs is the use of condoms as evidence of sex work — a practice that was banned in California in 2019, two years after Harris left her post as attorney general.
Harris was a nationwide leader in targeting websites that offered sex workers a means of identifying and vetting potential clients.
As California attorney general, Harris used her position to go after websites such as Backpage.com, which provided sex workers with an online venue by which they could exercise additional agency in ensuring safe working conditions. She did so as early as 2013, becoming one of the first state attorney generals in the country to ask Congress to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in order to prosecute sites like Backpage for facilitating the sale of sex.
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.”
“When you are talking about consenting adults, I think that, you know, yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed,” Harris added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Harris discusses her “history on the issue,” noting that as district attorney she strived to “stop arresting these prostitutes and instead go after the Johns and the pimps because we were criminalizing the women, but not the men who associated with it, who were making money off of it or profiting off of it.”
As some experts on the subject pointed out at the time, Harris' position does not seem to constitute fully advocating for the decriminalization of sex work. As journalist Melissa Gira Grant wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “Despite Harris' discussion of decriminalizing the sale of sex between consenting adults... it’s not clear that she is truly committed to such a position. That’s because Harris appears to still support criminalizing purchasing sex.”
This approach — targeting sex workers’ customers, not the workers themselves — is often referred to as the Nordic model, or End Demand. Gira Grant explains that these policies “don’t permit any legal way to engage in sex work,” even while supporters claim the approach amounts to full decriminalization. “As such, sex workers remain penalized and surveilled by police,” she says.
Harris sought to deny a transgender woman who was incarcerated gender-affirming health care.
While Harris was California attorney general in 2015, she defended the state’s decision to deny giving Michelle Norsworthy, a trans woman incarcerated in a men’s prison, medically necessary surgery for her diagnosed gender dysphoria. As Strangio noted in the aforementioned Out op-ed, “Not only did the state employ an ‘expert’ who categorically opposes the medical standard of care for transgender prisoners, but under Harris's leadership not only defended the denial of care in court in the face of Ms. Norsworthy’s escalating distress and suicidality but then continued to appeal decisions in her favor.”
In one brief signed by Harris, she joins other state attorneys in dismissing the significance of Norsworthy’s plea to receive affirming health care: “Norsworthy has been treated for gender dysphoria for over 20 years, and there is no indication that her condition has somehow worsened to the point where she must obtain sex-reassignment surgery now rather than waiting until this case produces a final judgment on the merits.”
In April 2015, Federal District Court Judge Jon Tigar ruled that denying Norsworthy care violated her rights to adequate medical treatment under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment. The historic ruling resulted in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation being ordered to provide Norsworthy with “adequate medical care, including sex reassignment surgery… as promptly as possible,” as the court stated at the time.
Four years later, after Harris had announced her campaign for the presidency, a Washington Blade reporter pressed her on her role in repeatedly appealing court decisions that would have afforded Norsworthy — and countless trans folks after her — medically necessary health care.
“I had a host of clients [as attorney general] that I was obligated to defend and represent and I couldn’t fire my clients, and there are unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs,” she responded, adding that she takes “full responsibility” for what her office did.
“The bottom line is the buck stops with me,” she said at the time.
Harris has not unequivocally stated her support for providing incarcerated transgender people across the nation with affirming health care.
In the same interview with The Blade, Harris was asked if incarcerated trans people throughout the country should be afforded gender-affirming care and replied with a vague call to better understand trans folks’ lived experiences. “I believe that we are at a point where we have got to stop vilifying people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and we’ve got to understand that when we are talking about a particular transgender community, for too long they have been the subject of bias, and frankly, a lack of understanding about their circumstance and their physical needs in addition to any other needs they have, and it’s about time that we have a better understanding of that,” she said.
In fact, although the LGBTQ+ policy platform Harris produced during her presidential campaign mentions the need to reduce trans incarceration rates and to ensure that health insurance companies cover gender-confirmation surgery and other transition health services, she failed to mention covering the gender-affirming health care needs of trans people experiencing incarceration. What’s more, the former Democratic presidential nominee does not mention her support for incarcerating people in accordance with their gender identity, which constituted another key dimension of Norsworthy’s case.
That said, Joe Biden’s lengthy LGBTQ+ policy platform includes “requiring gender identity be considered when making housing assignments” and ensuring “all transgender inmates in federal correctional facilities have access to appropriate doctors and medical care — including OBGYNs and hormone therapy.”
Get the best of what's queer. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
.jpg)