We don't have a lot of confidence in this process because it's not conducive to actually looking at evidence and data. Just from my brief testimony here, I've been told that I'm passionate about five times, which is code for, “Okay, we get it. You're an angry sex worker with emotions,” and it's a way to dismiss what I'm saying as if it's not evidence but opinion or feelings.
We have thousands of pages of evidence and we will submit evidence to you, and I expect every one of you who have our lives in your hands, who stand between us and the ability to maybe work without being murdered, to maybe raise our children without interference from the state, to actually read every page of that evidence that we send you and to come to the conclusion that the only reasonable thing to do at this point is to decriminalize sex work. It is inevitable. It will happen at one point, and we will look back at this time in our country when we decided that instead of encouraging sex workers who had a win at the Supreme Court, we would ignore the Supreme Court and punish them for fighting for their rights. We will look back on this as one of the moments in all of the world's history when a Supreme Court human rights decision was blatantly ignored by a government. You have the power right now to recommend that this law be repealed and to right the wrongs of this law.
One of the slogans that a lot of sex workers use is “only rights can stop the wrongs”, so we're hoping that what will emerge from this is a clear recommendation for human rights, and not that there are people who disagree, and not that more research is needed. The research has been done. It is published. It doesn't matter how many people come and tell you that they don't like sex work, that they think it's wrong and that they think it's exploitation. Are people harmed by this law? The answer is yes. We have a duty. We have a charter. It's outrageous that in 2022, we're still here arguing for this very basic principle and pretending that it's not entirely a moral and ideological argument.