 I thought about making slides, but I couldn't be bothered to be honest, so I hope you don't mind. So I'm Kitty Stryker. I'm a sex worker. I've been in the sex industry since I was 18. Simultaneously, I went to university, paid for, by my sex work, for psychology, and it took a little while before I realized that I would rather pursue sex work because I found that to be more ethical. I have to acknowledge that my experiences that I'm going to talk about right now are definitely impacted by the fact that I'm white, I pass as middle class, I'm cisgendered, and as a fem, I'm often invisibly queer. So my experience of sex work involves a lot of being able to pass. And of course, my access to tech also reflects that. So what I wanted to talk about is the sex industry as it relates to tech. And this is something that I've had a long process with. The sex industry is an industry like any other industry. We are on Twitter, we are on Facebook, often we're kicked off Facebook, and then we get back on again. And tech can be really great in a lot of ways. It can help marginalize voices to be heard. It was through tech that I found out about this conference, so that was cool. But also it can lead us to being sort of put out there for attack. Because we're out there, if you make the choice to brand yourself really, to have being a sex worker part of your personal brand, then often that can come back on you when you're, for example, trying to find another job, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit. So the first area that I wanted to talk about as it relates to the sex industry in tech is real name policies. And this has been something that's impacted not only the sex industry, but anyone who wants to have their name not be their legal name online, which considering the atmosphere of doxing that's been going on is a pretty good idea. I mean, we don't generally give our personal information to strangers and yet we're expected to do that on the internet for some reason. Even though it's an incredibly hostile environment to do so. Your decision on why you might not want to have your legal name on the internet could be because you have a dead name. It could be because you don't want your family to find out. You might not be out as a sex worker. You don't want your school to find out. You could have stalking issues. I have an abusive ex, but I don't want to find me. But that doesn't matter oftentimes. And having those kinds of reasons why you don't want to use your legal name, your real name, as they always call it, because it's not really necessarily your real name. Everyone knows me as Kitty Striker. That is my real name. However, according to Facebook it is not. Any companies will Google your name. They'll request access to your social media profiles. My most active social media profile is under Kitty Striker. So if I want to show a company, like look at how amazing I am at marketing, look at my 6,000 followers, like I built this up by myself, it's also got all my porn on there. I mean, that's my main job. So that can limit my ability to ever leave the sex industry, ever. It has come up in job interviews. It has been inappropriately referenced in job interviews because, of course, as a sex worker you're not allowed to have any boundaries. And that's if you get an interview in the first place, which is very difficult to do. I want to point out that this is something that often affects the workers, the performers, like I'm a porn performer, that's primarily what I'm out as now. And the fact that I'm a porn performer is legal. My job is legal. It wasn't always legal, but right now it is. And it doesn't matter that I'm doing legal work, that I have, you know, I file my taxes, none of that matters because it's still considered a stigmatized industry. I know people who are in tech who have worked on the tech side for various porn companies, like for example kink.com, they don't have problems finding jobs. It's perfectly fine to work at kink.com as long as you are in the tech sector, but God forbid that you are ever actually a performer. So of course, you know, the real name policy thing is, as I suggested before, it's a safety threat. I was actually outed long time ago now through porn WikiLeaks, which a group of people decided, man, let's be honest, white cis men, decided that they wanted to out a bunch of sex workers, porn performers, by giving their legal name their sex work name, like the name they performed under, their home address, their phone number, their family's phone number, photos of their family, photos of their children, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was outed not for being a porn performer. Amazingly, they didn't even know I did porn, probably because I do queer porn. However, that didn't stop them from posting all of my personal information for having written about the issue and my parents were called and it was very exciting. Amazingly, I was out to my parents, so I was very lucky in that way. I was very privileged that my parents supported me. They tell me the story that they actually had a phone call where they said, did you know that your daughter is a pornographic whore and a hooker? And my parents said, well, did you know that we're hackers with guns? Is widely thought to be over, but the site still exists. It's still there. All of my legal name is on there forever, linked to my sex work name, linked to ex-boyfriends and my parents' home. And there's nothing I can do about that because it's completely legal apparently. I was moved on from a lot of these real name policies after a lot of struggle, but Facebook maintains that policy. I have so far had to renew my Facebook three times. I refuse to give them my photo ID because I don't trust them with that information, so instead I use my business cards and pieces of mail. But that still means that I have to give them my home address. It still means that I have to have this information around to give. And that's one area where, if you're a sex worker, you kind of have to be on social media. This is how you connect with people. This is how you connect with your fans. This is how you get speaking gigs. This is how you get asked to go to other conferences. But if there's so many barriers in your way and they're constantly trying to kick you off because you're not really supposed to be there. I mean, it's fine for you to be there as long as you're considered attractive in a mainstream sort of way. I didn't see as many problems with like Kim Kardashian's ass, for example, that was fine, but like God forbid my ass be on Facebook, then it's all over for me. Another area is payment processors. And this is a huge problem. When I was exploring, there was a period of time where I was like, you know what, fuck the sex industry, I'm over it. I'm done. I want to move on with my life. This is when I was trying to get a job in tech and finding how difficult that was. One of the things I ended up finding was writing. I could make some money writing. Unfortunately, most companies will either not pay you at all for your writing because you get paid an exposure, how lovely. As a porn performer, I don't really need exposure. I'm perfectly capable of doing that on my own. Or they'll pay you maybe $50 an article if you're lucky, maybe $75 if you're very lucky. So I actually use Patreon. That's what I found worked for me. And that seemed to be fine until PayPal, which was at, in the beginning, their main source of payment processing, decided that anything that they deemed as adult content, not only stuff you posted on Patreon, but on your personal site, like for example, even though my writing wasn't sexual in nature, because my website had banners to sites that I performed on, it was still considered too adult for PayPal. So PayPal basically threatened Patreon that they were going to shut down all the integration unless Patreon made every adult seeming profile invisible unless you had the wake. Everyone was flagged and you could no longer use PayPal. They, of course, made this decision at the end of the month, which is when we get paid. So there was a mad scramble to contact everybody and be like, hey, I'm so sorry. Can we use this other method so that I can actually get the money that you decided to kindly give to me? I would really like to have it so I can pay my rent. And it was a big issue, again, there was nothing I could do. There weren't other options, really. PayPal will regularly shut down sex worker accounts even if the account isn't used for anything adult in nature. If you're using PayPal to make shit on Etsy and you are a sex worker and somehow they figure that out, they will shut down your account, they will freeze all of your money and you're just out of luck. It's not just PayPal, though. I mean, PayPal gets a lot of the shit and they should. But WePay, which does a lot of, I think they are the payment processor for Indiegogo and a few other places, they've shut down fundraisers for sex workers looking to fund vital medical care. So even though it's not for sex work, it's not for porn, it doesn't matter, it's still getting shut down because you've ever been a sex worker in your life. Amazon Payments has done the same. They've fought with an author that I know about a memoir because even though they were willing to accept the money for her memoir, they decided later that it was too racy for them and didn't want to release the money to her. Google Wallets has refused BDSM toy makers from getting their money because of the adult nature of their work, which you would imagine they would have figured out when the person signed up. Now, all of this comes down to Visa MasterCard most of the time. It's really Visa MasterCard who makes the overall archived decisions and everybody else scrambles to fall into line because they don't want to get hit with the large fees. The problem is that Visa MasterCard's ideas of what is explicit and what is adult nature is completely vague and no one can really tell you what it is. So it's impossible really to follow along and oftentimes what ends up being criminalized by Visa MasterCard are things that are marginalized or queer in nature. For example, one of the reasons that you won't find fisting content on many porn DVDs that are distributed widely is because fisting is considered obscene and violent by Visa MasterCard. They're making these decisions for you. And then finally I want to talk a little bit about how the censorship of adult content doesn't come from law but moralistic decisions. It's really just a bunch of people making these choices for us. And as more and more people are trying their hand it's something at the adult entertainment arena. Maybe they're camming, maybe they're selling their dirty socks, like whatever. We live in a culture that stigmatizes us permanently, like forever, forever having dipped a toe into sex work. While simultaneously telling us we have to leave sex work for our personal satisfaction and like that's what we need to do in order to be better people. So it's impossible for us to leave, but we have to leave. And it becomes a really serious issue of contention. I feel that tech is an area where we could actually begin to combat these things but instead unfortunately they are perpetrate them. I would really like to see that change. So many of my friends have been isolated by these kinds of tactics. And the last thing that sex workers need is less community. Thank you.