Australia’s leading, left of centre Liberal Party announced austerity measures recently and will be tightening the proverbial belt on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)—equivalent of Canada’s provincial disability income and health support for people living with disabilities. One of the measures includes banning access to sexual services under NDIS.
Since 2020, individuals have had the option to apply and get approved for “reasonable and necessary” sexual services and products, approved (or not) on a case by case basis. The reasoning for this—and similar initiatives in the Netherlands, where folks can be approved for a monthly sessions with a sex worker—are pretty simple: Sex is an important part of overall well-being, and if the program’s aim is to help people living with a disability to lead a full life, this should include funding to ensure that folks have access to consensual sexual services to benefit their mental and emotional well-being.
If we get over the stereotype where we imagine disabled people as asexual, long suffering angels whose suffering has purified them from even wanting sex, we can then begin to see people living with disabilities as deserving the same pleasure as the rest of us. The spectrum of needs sex serves is vast, and it meets different needs for different people—including among people living with disabilities, because they are like everyone else. For some sex can give a feeling of belonging for those who may be experiencing loneliness; a physical outlet to relax for others, and for others some sex may offer that human touch and intimacy. There are a variety of unmet needs that a sex worker may be able to fill. Caretaking components of sex work are no different than caretaking components in other allied health and health-adjacent jobs,but with more nudity. We are good listeners, who customize our services to the needs of each client. We are compassionate and adaptable. We are adept at navigating boundaries. We take precautionary measures in terms of occupational health and safety that keep us and our clients safe—by practicing safe sex, for example. Most importantly, we already know how to work with clients who have a range of disabilities, and do our best to accommodate their needs.
Asides from the fact that cutting funding for NDIS is tragic in every which way, and a clear example of neoliberal failure (all of this can be solved by taxing the mega rich and the corporations they run for profit at the expense of workers!), cutting access to sex work is a new moral panic. While it’s true that in 2020, a legal precedent was set by the Federal Court of Australia to expand NDIS access to include services provided by sex workers, in reality, between April 2023 and April 2024, there were a total of 228 such applications, and all of them were denied.
Politicians often stoke imaginary moral panics for political gains, most often at the expense of marginalized communities (see: Trump’s claims about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield Ohio), and this is no different. By limiting access to sexual services, politicians are both pontificating and ridiculing both disabled folks and sex workers in one blow. A media circus always ensues, the average media consumer may not have the time or inclination to pore over the details, and the damage is done. Luckily, this time around, some outlets are rightly calling this latest moral panic a “red herring”.
I’ve touched on this in previous columns—sex workers are often themselves disabled and seek out employment with flexible hours so that they can manage symptoms of their illness/disability. Sex workers often seek out mainstream employment in caring professions such as nursing, social work, education. One can see that for some sex workers, signing up with the NDIS to provide sexual services may be a step stone to more mainstream work in the fields above.
I’m not saying that clients who seek out sex workers don’t seek a fun, naughty, sexy thrill—as I said earlier, people seek out sex for several reasons. But many of our clients often come to us with emotional needs. I have held clients who have lost family members and I have consoled soldiers going to or returning from war. It can be true that these clients are physically attracted to me, and at the same time recognize that I am helping them through painful times.
Sex workers also often work with elderly and frail clients, and some who are living with disabilities, including wheelchair users. My beloved friend helped a young autistic man overcome his social anxiety and build confidence. Sex workers are both able and willing to accommodate clients with various needs, and if we’re doing so already, we’re more than qualified to provide services under NDIS. This is to say we offer more than their bodies – we create safe and intimate spaces for people to open up and share their grief, trauma, depression and PTSD in a society that largely denies emotional outlets.
Even less seriously, I often give clients massages, and they joke that if only they can expense my services, they would see me more often, so I offer to write a receipt with my lipstick on a cocktail napkin. We joke about what would happen when a Blue Cross employee processes the claim, but somewhere under the laughter, it’s clear that this would benefit us both and we secretly wish for a world where this is possible.
It’s not clear how far the advocacy efforts of sex worker groups and disability advocates will go, and the government will back off from putting access to some NDIS services on the chopping block. What is clear is that the powers that be want to deny disabled people access to a service that exists largely on paper, instead of actually making it accessible, and throwing sex workers under the bus as an extra bonus and discounting our work as frivolous.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
