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A deaf, disabled sex worker and spokesperson for the national peak body advocating for the rights of sex workers and sex worker organisations, says having an equal opportunity to access sex, is what everybody deserves.
Katia Schwartz, who is the National Programs Manager for Scarlet Alliance, has shared her views with The Wire after NDIS Minister, Bill Shorten, announced last week that sex work services will no longer be funded by the NDIS scheme.
It was a decision criticised by community advocates, with Greens disability spokesperson Jordan Steele-John, on social media, calling it “a double standard”.
The Wire's Jo Newbury called up Katia Schwartz, to hear directly from someone who is affected by the Minister’s announcement.
Ms Schwartz says the infantilisation of people with disability is the biggest social stigma many individuals within the broader community hold, and Minister Shorten’s comments this past week have only fuelled this particular stigma.
“Disabled adults are not children, we deserve the right to intimacy and pleasure if we want it,” Schwartz says. “People seem to find it very contradictory or impossible that disability and sex can co-exist.”
Furthermore, Schwartz states that as a public figure, a politician, and as an able-bodied person – Minister Shorten is in a position where anything he states publicly can become a trigger for public discourse.
“It’s really frustrating because disabled people have been forever fighting to be seen as adults, to be treated as equals and to have our needs and our lives be seen as important and our voices be heard.
“We are the experts in our lives… Able-bodied people, politicians, literally anyone else, are not…There is a big difference between entitlement and someone’s equal access to sex, or to anything in the world. Having an equal opportunity to access sex is what everybody deserves.”
This is an extract from The Wire’s Jo Newbury’s interview with Katia Schwartz from the Australian Sex Workers Association, Scarlet Alliance. You can click here to listen to the full speech and read the full transcript here.