So what if I'm a puta : diaries of transness, sex work, desire

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An incisive, intimate diary of the life of a travesti sex worker in Brazil, with a foreword by Charlotte Shane

So What If I’m a Puta, originally published on author Amara Moira’s popular blog of the same name, consists of 44 crônicas that wryly portray her experiences as a trans sex worker in Brazil. In a brazen, funny, and at times heartbreaking voice, Moira explores the political and personal textures of her encounters with the men who buy sex from her, and the complex reality of her labor of a sort of love.

Woven through Moira’s essays are reflections on transition, safe sex, desire, whorephobia, consent—in the grim context of Brazil’s record rates of violence against trans women. show more Ultimately, Moira writes to center trans sex workers in Brazil’s putafeminist movement, modeling a feminism that envisions inclusivity, safety, self-determination, and joy for us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Self-determination, personal autonomy, individual freedom, call it what you like: It is the central fact in the competing ideologies of high-control and laissez-faire systems of social organization duking it out around the world of 2025. Spoiler alert: It's always going to fall short for one side's happiness and comfort. I myownself want it fall shortest for the high-control (usually religious) fascist slime.

There. I'm out of the closet. I want what "They" claim to want, the PTB out of my personal business, telling me who I can fuck, marry, or vote for. What "They" want is to impose more control on people they don't like, eg women, queers, other religions, and that will make "Them" happy. No it won't. Read Amara's words.

Her clients for sex services are very high-control men, from (I suspect) the same background as the other fascists though that is only inference on my part. The stories of the services they require of Amara, a woman in their eyes, aren't any surprise to any woman reading the book.As a cisqueer man i'm not going to assume I get what these cishet men are after because I'm not after it. I'll say that every single woman I've ever known well enough to have this kind of subject arise in our conversations has a story like at least one of Amara's stories...men who get joy(?) from overriding her wishes, aka rape, all the weird psychosexual kinks all people have...it's part of her job as a puta (whore in English) to meet them. Or so the men buying access to her body assume.

The huge tragedy in this is transphobia. It leaves women like Amara outside the moral indignation circle "feminists" like the hateful wizard-book lady draw to protect women from abuse and exploitation. It leaves these women open to the rage-filled hate of their clients, often leading to femicide, that evil act of gendered violence.

Those gender essentialists are complicit in each and every crime committed against transfem or transmasc people. If you are a gender essentialist, do not tell me so and expect to receive any respect or even tolerance for your hateful belief.

Amara Moira's blog, this epitome of it brought into English by the amazing Bruna Dantas Lobato (whose work I've praised in those linked reviews) and Amanda De Lisio (who both edited the blog entries and assisted in translation), takes back control of her narrative. She is the embodiment of self-determination, lacking throughout this read even a whiff of victimhood. And honestly, if Author Amara wanted to play the victim card, I would say nothing against it. She has too much integrity for suchlike nonsense, though.

The only quibble I have is the same one I have with all fix-ups of shorter works: It gets repetitive. The book clocks in at under 200pp, so it isn't a deal-breaker for me. I do not know how better to convey my sense of the importance of this read than to say: If ever you're going to say a transphobic word, don't open your yap until you've gotten to know a trans person.

Start here. show less

Never mind the publisher's promo material, Amara Moira's So What If I'm a Puta is a book about resistance and the powers that want to smash that resistance. The resistance is Moira's. She's a literary scholar, tranvestí, and sexworker. The powers are cis het men titillated by pursuing what they would imprison others for, social convention, and the politics of hate—and an infinitude of others, though I'm stopping here.

I'm writing this in the US where anti-trans violence and hate are currently "hot": one of the key hatreds that allow Trump to get away with all kinds of graft and brutality. As long as Trump can convince his followers that it's open season on transsexuals and immigrants, his followers don't care about—or else show more celebrate—totalitarian limits placed on education Pre-K through Post-Doc; the disappearances of both the undocumented and the documented and the illegal shipping of people across the world to regions where they are most apt to experience harm; the muzzling of whatever we still have in the way of free press; and the growing power of cryptocurrency, which will someday (I hope) face the crash it merits—because Monopoly money is still Monopoly money, even if your spray paint it gold and make owning it like becoming a member of the he-man woman-haters who-gives-a-fuck-about-the-plebs-but-they're-easy-to-milk club. Someday, I'm going to have to overcome this impulse towards subtlety... (Maybe my next spin on the Vedic wheel.)

So, I'm reading Moira through the lens of my own time and geographic location. She demonstrates that sexwork is like any kind of work: occasionally satisfying, but more apt to fall somewhere along the awakward to the life-threatening (like Amazon warehouse employees, folks working in explosives factories, workers on the processing lines in the chicken business). And the message of my time and place is that we keep trying to free ourselves from the walls of constraint that have been built around us and are patrolled regularly—and that to be one's full self is to be forbidden and despised no mater how many freedom fries one eats.

Read So What If I'm a Puta both to spend time looking through Moira's eyes with rage, solidarity, and grief and looking through our own sans blinders and distractions.

I received an electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own. show less

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