The Population That Was Written Out Of Democratic Policies Is ‘Terrified’

The 2024 democratic platform leaves out millions of Americans who were included just four years ago.

The 2020 platform included a commitment to “protect the lives of sex workers,” recognizing the heightened risks, particularly for women of color and people who are transgender. In 2024, the supportive language was removed.

“We don’t have a way to know if we will be safe. Personally, I’m absolutely terrified of what the future looks like,” Electra Rayne, the founder of QueerCrush, told Newsweek. “Harris’s campaign is positing itself as super progressive…and then they completely eliminated the one mention we had. It’s really startling. It’s really alarming. It’s really concerning.”

The lack of acknowledgment shows Rayne and others within the sex working industry how the Democratic party thinks of them, she said. Without any language for sex workers, they feel “less than human and less important.” It’s evident that sex workers were “excluded from these conversations” in creating the policies, she said.

“If they want to be the party of change and hope then they have to be inclusive of these communities that are under-resourced and are so frequently harmed by their policies,” said Rayne, who is a leading advocate for authentic queer passion and sex worker rights.

There are also concerns about Harris’s “long-standing history of direct harm” background in prosecuting sex workers and their industry.

Social justice network SWOP Behind Bars penned a letter to the Vice President, noting “some concerns we need to address before stepping into the voting booth.”

Harris, while California Attorney General, helped bring down Backpage.com, a website founded in 2004 for classified advertising. The closure meant sex workers were financially insecure and felt less safe, according to Rayne.

“The results of that directly, extremely negatively impacted our clients and people that I personally know and care about,” Blair Hopkins, the co-executive director of SWOP Behind Bars, told Newsweek. “That has been a very difficult thing to come to terms with. It makes it difficult to get excited about VP Harris’s run, which is too bad because I really want to be excited about it.”

While a senator, Harris voted for and helped craft two acts—Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts (SESTA)—that became law in 2018 to make assisting, facilitating or supporting sex trafficking illegal.

At the time of the vote, advocacy groups argued it would have a disproportionate impact on sex workers, harming sex workers’ safety online and reducing or shutting down their services.

In their letter, SWOP Behind Bars acknowledged Harris “likely intended to combat trafficking” with her vote, which the organization also supports. However, the laws had “severe unintended consequences.”

Many sex workers lost their primary source of income due to the new laws, and now there’s a larger fear around police integration.

Hopkins said her group at SWOP Behind Bars is “very much voting against Trump more so than we are voting for VP Harris and more so than we are voting for the Democratic Party in this election.”

The opportunities for human rights work are “much, much greater” in a Democratic administration, Hopkins said. She also added that based on the Vice President’s record, Hopkins is “confident” that Harris would be supportive of SWOP Behind Bars’ work to provide services “to those who’ve experienced forced criminality, violence and exploitation in sex trade.”

“Frankly, that’s enough,” Hopkins said. “It’s a motivator. Project 2025, the general attitude that we’ve seen around the way the industry is treated, is terrifying, is archaic, is just awful. I think that there’s a lot more room to move the Democratic ticket and administration.”

Within criticism against Trump’s campaign, there is also a dialogue around Stormy Daniels “to suggest that someone in the sex industry is a moral stain, something that reflects badly on one’s character,” Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, told Newsweek.

“Sex workers are workers and humans and citizens who exist at every intersection of every racial, socioeconomic, gender, geographic and other imaginable identity,” Hopkins said.

Stabile also noted the censorship that the country is currently under around sex and gender.

“It’s not entirely surprising to see mentions of sex or sex work or sex workers’ rights disappear from the conversation,” Stabile said. “When you have one party that’s making wild accusations that anything related to LGBTQ content is pornography and that exposure to that information is similar to grooming or child abuse, it makes it much harder to have intelligent conversations about sex work. Everything’s entirely inflamed right now.”

That said, Hopkins and Rayne agree that people will continue within the profession no matter the election results. Rayne noted that a lot of people from marginalized communities—that make up a majority of the sex worker population—do not have the option to not be in the industry.

“Sex work isn’t going anywhere,” Hopkins said. “It will only change its shape.”

There will be a Zoom call in September to discuss the voting strategy for sex workers with Stop the Raids. The webinar will discuss both presidential candidates’ records.

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