Crossing borders: the intersectional marginalisation of Bulgarian Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers in Berlin

ABSTRACT

Bordering situates immigrant sex workers at the margins of an already marginalised industry and naturalises the legal conditions of their dispossession and precarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, we offer a situated intersectional analysis of the everyday bordering experiences of Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers from Bulgaria (hereafter TISWs). Focusing on three interactional contexts – minority belonging within EU and German politics, encounters with medicolegal institutions, and the new sex work regulation in Germany – our study demonstrates both that everyday bordering experiences derive not solely from national border enforcement and citizenship regulation but also from intersectional sociocultural barriers imposed by non-state actors, while the internal bordering practices of the German state exacerbate the exclusion and marginalisation of sex/gender transgressive people and sex work. We conclude that despite their physical existence as EU citizens in Berlin, TISWs’ everyday bordering experiences require a more nuanced understanding of intersectional systems of oppression which postpones TISWs’ arrival in Berlin indefinitely.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• sex work
• Transgender
• immigration
• Germany

Introduction

We met Rihanna on the street in Berlin on the evening of 21 November 2018. She mingled with five other sex workers walking up and down the dimly lit sidewalk of M street’s ‘stroll’, the area frequented by sex workers, each waiting for a car to pull over and the night’s work to begin. Their figures were illuminated by the Späti on the corner, the vernacular name in Berlin for 24-hour corner stores and cafes selling a variety of goods, including alcohol. Unlike the usual crowd of rushed commuters, this Späti was frequented by men in daywear and women dressed just like the sex workers outside in impeccable make-up and flashy clothes, all patiently drinking their tea or coffee. Lured by the mixture of Turkish and Bulgarian spoken, we approached the women strolling up and down the dark street and introduced ourselves. One woman’s face lit up when she heard us speaking Turkish and announced, with a big smile, ‘My name is Rihanna for Germans, and Yasemin for Turks’. With the usual question of ‘Where are you from?’ she waved her long red hair over her shoulders and said, ‘I’m from Bulgaria, but I am Muslim’. After welcoming our compliments on her name, Rihanna gestured to her cleavage and proudly added: ‘It’s my real name. I changed my name and my ID. I took on the name Rihanna, and I am a woman, a real woman’. Named for a pop star and the princess who appears in the famous Aladdin folktale Rihanna/Yasemin embodied two different worlds as she waited patiently at a dark intersection in Berlin for customers to arrive. Her story is at once extraordinary and mundane. Rihanna was one of a number of Bulgarian Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers (hereafter TISWs) we met at the corner of M street over the course of our ethnographic research. To be who and where they are today, each of them have had to cross multiple borders.

Our aim here is to tease out the connections between everyday bordering and intersectionality. We demonstrate how bordering in the sex work industry functions not unlike a continuum of national borders that marginalises those who fail to be ‘desirable’ because of their minority status (Bulgarian Muslim), gender identity and sexual expression (trans*), and contested occupation (sex worker). We then analyse the layers of bordering the TISWs confront through Yuval-Davis' (2006) definition of intersectionality as involving diverse positions within systems of oppression in which ‘each social division has a different ontological basis, which is irreducible to other social divisions’ (195). We argue that the bordering experiences of TISWs are produced through an intersectional process in which the meaning of gender identity, nationality, and heteronormativity are mutually constituted (also see Ham 2017).

In this ethnographic case study, we focus on trans*immigrant sex workers who moved from Bulgarian cities and villages to Berlin. To illustrate the connections between legal/bureaucratic borders and sociocultural bordering experiences, we turn to our ethnographic data, which was generated during one year of fieldwork. This ethnography included biographical interviews with TISWs and semi-structured interviews with their social workers, which introduced us to various forms of trans* identities and gender expressions. Based on these data, we analyze three interactional contexts where TISWs experience bordering: (1) minority belonging within EU and German politics, (2) encounters with medicolegal institutions, (3) the new sex work regulation in Germany (The Prostitution Act of 2017). These three interactional contexts add layer upon layer of marginalisation and exclusion to trans*immigrant sex workers bordering experiences.

We contribute to the existing sex work and immigration literature by offering a microscale analysis of TISWs and argue for treating borders as practice and metaphor in order to account for the intersectional production of trans*migrant subjectivities. Our findings show that arbitrary and intimidating bureaucratic processes adds to TISWs’ marginalisation and undermines the exercises of their EU citizenship (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018). Moreover, the presence of TISWs in Berlin challenges the binary racialisation of LGBTQ people as white Germans and Muslim immigrants as hypermasculine perpetrators. TISWs navigate their competing identities in Berlin by embodying a ‘borderland,’ a place where the meaning of home and border is blurred and their physical and metaphorical arrival in Berlin is postponed. Below, we present our theoretical framework, briefly map out our ethnographic fieldwork, and then turn to the study’s three substantive contexts of bordering. Approaching bordering processes via an intersectional analysis (Yuval-Davis 2006), we conclude that these three interactional contexts reveal the connections between sociocultural and legal-bureaucratic bordering experiences.

Methods: ethnography of the internal borders of Europe and the margins of street sex work

Grounded in the complex everyday experiences of sex workers, we conducted our fieldwork in two locations. Available to us only at certain times, the first was located on the streets where sex work regularly takes place on Friday and Saturday nights. The main corner of what we call M street, where sex workers wait is reserved for TISWs through an informal and unwritten street code. On this street corner, there is the Späti we described in our introduction, where we had the chance to chat with sex workers while they took their breaks. Here, we heard them converse in several languages with locals who frequent the Späti. Identifying ourselves as researchers from the University, we gained their permission to listen to their life stories and ask them questions, where appropriate, while drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The second field site was two civil society organisations that operate in concert in the neighbourhood of M street. One of the organisations provides emergency services to TISWs especially those who are sometimes falsely categorised by the institutions as ‘young boys’ who may be trafficked to Germany and cannot return to their country because they have no money or who are abused and need urgent help. The second organisation works on a non-emergency basis to help homeless TISWs with German state bureaucracy. Funded primarily to provide services related to public health and sex work, this NGO’s mission is to provide free and confidential medical consulting and treatment in sexual health-related cases. This NGO also provides crucial information to sex workers on sexual health, safer sex work practices, and client-customer relationships. Besides their defined roles, social workers from these NGOs assist TISWs in finding housing and in handling everyday communication with institutions, for example, when opening a bank account, registering for social welfare, or in the case of police misconduct. They also host events self-organised by trans activists to provide a recreational space for the community to share a meal and meet together. During these self-organised events, we conducted in-depth face-to-face interviews at the NGO facility with Turkish-speaking trans*immigrants from Eastern Europe, mainly Bulgaria, who are working as street sex workers and with the assigned social worker, originally from Turkey.

During 2018–2019, we devoted one year of fieldwork to attending community gatherings and joining our participants on the streets of Berlin. We connected to a larger group of approximately ten TISWs during the fieldwork process. They were first-generation migrants, who had moved to Berlin within the past fifteen years. Within this group, we conducted six biographical interviews with Turkish-speaking TISWs with a Muslim background, who were frequently visiting the NGO. As Bulgarians, these TISWs are part of one of the largest groups of migrants who moved from East to West Europe after the the EU’s enlargement (with Polish migrants the largest group), and one of the largest migrant groups amongst registered sex workers (after Romanians).¹ The TISWs connected to us easily when we first met at the Späti, in part due to our shared Turkish language (the first two authors, who conducted the fieldwork, are both native Turkish speakers, though with a different dialect). However, we were not always able to find people again for further meetings, given the uncertainties and instabilities of TISW’s everyday lives.

We also conducted two follow-up interviews with one social worker working in the same NGO.² During our interview with the social worker, we found out that TISWs may travel to other cities, return to Bulgaria, develop illnesses or drug addictions, or may die at a young age. It was therefore not always possible to follow up with the same TISWs over sustained periods during our fieldwork.

Each of our interviews lasted between one and two hours. We took extensive notes separately during and after our participant observation and interviews, and later compared our notes and analysed the data together using inductive and deductive coding. The six biographical interviews with TISWs mentioned above were conducted in colloquial Turkish peppered with terms from Lubunca, a queer argot popular in Turkey among LGBTQ and sex workers, and Roma, the language used in some villages of Varna and Burgas in Bulgaria. These interviews were digitally recorded but not transcribed as they carried strong oral characteristics such as softening the ends of words, not found in written Turkish, making transcription very difficult (Kyuchukov 2016). Instead, we took notes during the interviews to complement the digital recordings, which we listened to during our analysis. The interviews were open-ended and focused on personal family history, living conditions, and migratory experiences specific to the interviewee, with questions prepared specifically for each interviewee. Because this is a very small community, we do not disclose location names (the street names are fictious) and use pseudonyms in place of real names and sex work names. We do not claim these interviewees as representative of trans* street sex workers in Berlin. Rather, these interviews helped us to contextualise specific bordering experiences within their life stories.

To generate a respectful research engagement with rather than on immigrants working in the sex industry’ (Oliveira 2019), we joined our research participants in various events and activities outside the two primary fieldwork locations. We attended public events organised for or in collaboration with our research participants and met regularly with other sex workers. We attended the 2018 and 2019 Whore Parade in Berlin in commemoration of International Sex Workers’ Day where we walked together with sex work activists from our main fieldwork sites and had intimate conversations with the organisers about the political demands of Berlin’s sex workers movement.

Through these engagements we connected with research participants across both similarities and differences. We are all non-sex worker and cis-gender, with the first author being a member of the LGBTQ community, while the second author connected with TISW’s with whom she shared parenting experiences. The third author also identifies as a member of the LGBTQ community but did not engage with the fieldwork directly. The first author immigrated from Turkey to Germany for graduate studies, while the second author moved to Germany to take up her academic position. Thus, both authors who engaged in fieldwork are middle-class with stable citizenship status, the latter they shared with some but not all research participants. The language played an essential role in defining the dynamic between the authors and the participants.

Conducting ethnographic research with a marginalised group of sex worker requires a sensitive approach for the design of ethnical and non-exploitative research. We follow the ethical guide of established sex work researchers (Dewey and Zheng 2013; Mai 2018; Sinha 2017) and carefully ensured the privacy and confidentiality of the participants, and their informed consent throughout the research. Remuneration of participants for the time allotted in the research project has been a controversial issue in ethnographic research. We considered both sides: one claiming that paying sex workers for gaining access to information causes possibly exploitative relations (Sanders 2006), and the other claiming that it is the only responsible way to avoid causing additional burden that may be imposed on sex workers’ time (Reed et al. 2014). After consulting with fellow researchers doing sex work research in Berlin, we came to the conclusion that monetary incentives were not only a choice, but a necessary tool to minimise the risks of the participants whose likelihood of missing a customer during an interview may lead to a great risk (see also Sinha 2017). Therefore, we offered monetary incentives from our own budget and made sure that the amount was fair for the time allotted to the project. After our first set of interviews, we realised that monetary incentives helped the participants to be able to focus more completely on our time without worrying about losing a customer (see also Dewey and Zheng 2013).

Situating trans*migrant sex workers: bordering as intersectional process

We join a group of scholars who analyze how state and non-state actors marginalise immigrants through bordering practices that sort them into gendered and racialized categories (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019; Hess and Kasparek 2010; Van Houtum 2005). Drawing on this scholarship, we use the term ‘bordering’ to denote those regulatory state practices that limit immigrants’ freedom of movement while at the same time marginalising them via sociopolitical processes (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019; De Genova 2013; Yıldız and De Genova 2018). Recent studies of bordering have moved beyond the analytic of territorial sovereignty, framing borders as multiple, insidious, and expansive (Green 2013; Balibar 2011; Fassin 2011; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019). The significance of borders has also been discussed in the literature of governmentality and immigration. According to Fassin (2011), ‘The border [is] no longer a backdrop of social change, but a crucial component that impose[s] its presence on social relations’ (Fassin 2011, 215). If much literature on migration provides a broad focus on border crossing, the aforementioned scholarship unpacks how power struggles over borders demarcate and regulate subjects in quotidian ways and beyond the purview of the territorial state (Vradis et al. 2019; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). This literature unpacks the border-like qualities of everyday life and its classificatory logic demarcating the lines of inside and outside; inclusion and exclusion.

Work on trans* subjectivity that uses the border as metaphor is also relevant to our analysis. For example, Halberstam (1998) already suggests that the home/border metaphor is a critical element in developing trans subjectivities – where being at home in ones body is associated with either one’s belonging to their assigned gender at birth, or, for people falling out of this definition, crossing a gender border that is policed by the heteronormative ideals of the general public. This bordering concept is further developed by Aizura (2006), who adapts the concept of ‘borderlands’ (Prosser 1998; Anzalduá 1987) inspired after the dividing line between the US and Mexico where the two cultures edge each other, the gender-variant bodies’ experience borderlands as metaphorical locations where the definition of borders between differently gendered bodies are (in)definitely blurred. The literature on trans* sex work reveals the complexities that are attached to both trans*identities and their occupations. Evren Savcı’s (2021) study in Turkey reveals how travestis (Turkish travesti translated as ‘transvestite’) became a social identity coined with compulsory sex work in Turkey (Savcı 2021). In this case, we see another border separating the sex workers from the general public, with sex workers marked by their gender-varient expressions. In light of this complex entanglement of cross-national migration with trans* and sex worker identities, the everyday lives of the TISWs in this research project represent the borderlands in-between binarily constructed genders that is inextricably tied together with their belonging to a minority group and their stigmatised profession in Berlin.

Yet, bordering in and of itself is not sufficient to the analysis of these experiences. The need for an intersectional framework is reinforced as soon as we turn to the terminology to describe TISWs. We employ the term ‘trans*’ to describe a range of identities and gender expressions that fall under trans and genderqueer practices and identities among our participants and refer to the sex/gender transgression which challenges the heteronormative definition of gender identity designated at birth. These identities and expressions are at times conflicting, heterogenous, and developed as alternatives to overcome marginalisation and stigmatisation, that reflect the relevance of multiple categories in constructing the lifeworld of trans* sex workers. Some of our participants used more than five names with differing gender connotations and expressed their gender identities in contextual terms yet their gender expressions fall under the trans*feminine umbrella. Others self-identified as trans women and had access to the vocabulary with which to situate themselves on a Western-centric gender spectrum. Still others self-identified simply as öbür türlü, a Turkish colloquial term that translates literally as ‘other kind’ or ‘otherwise’; a different kind of person. In this sense, our use of the term trans* carries with it a constant erosion of lived reality that is at odds with Western epistemologies concerning gender identities and trans experiences (Stryker and Bettcher 2016; Appenroth and do Mar Castro Varela 2019). At the same time, the varied practices of self-identification reflect the complex intersectionalities within which TISWs shape their sense of self and encounter varied bordering experiences.

Drawing on this scholarship, we offer an intersectional analysis of the entanglement of sex work with trans* and immigration experiences. We argue that bordering experiences derive not solely from the enforcement of national and legal borders and citizenship regulations (Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdakul 2008), but also by means of sociocultural marginalisation imposed by non-state actors in ways that gravely affect TISWs’ everyday lives. TISWs’ everyday lives show that non-state actors everywhere interpret legal and bureaucratic regulation according to particular sociocultural perspectives and play a significant role in the processes of marginalisation and exclusion. This suggests that bordering experiences are intersectional processes; intersectional theory holds that categories of subjecthood and belonging are co-constitutive, with markers of difference shaping each other. Furthermore, these categories of difference do not solely concern individual or group identities but rather varied actors deploy categories of belonging that generate identities, shape institutions and structure power (Crenshaw 1991; Yuval-Davis 2006). As other work has shown, religion, culture, language, and gender practices are key dimensions that co-constitute the label ‘immigrant’ in the European context and shape institutional and structural practices related to bordering (Korteweg and Triadafilopoulos 2015). Our contribution to this scholarship on bordering, immigration and gender/sexuality with a case study of sex work offers an intersectional analysis of everyday bordering through TISWs experiences, with the aim to shed light on the interconnections between sociocultural marginalisation, legal/bureaucratic regulations, and embodied borders (Ham 2017; Vuolajärvi 2019; Oliveira 2019). In doing so, we extend the analysis of bordering experiences from being treated solely as legal/bureaucratic to include the process of sociocultural marginalisation.

Findings

Minority belonging within Bulgaria, EU, and German politics

While Bulgaria became an EU member country in 2007, the first increased Central and Eastern European migration to Western Europe started with the 2004 accession and gained a peak with the global financial crises after 2007 (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018). In Western European countries such as Germany, migration flows from the ‘European peripheries’, including Bulgaria, are mostly deemed dangerous and undesirable (Balibar 2009). Despite being non-deportable, EU migrants face arbitrary and intimidating bureaucratic processes which, in the case of vulnerable migrants, adds to their precarity and undermines the exercise of their EU citizenship (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018).

This is particularly true for sex workers. According to the National Report on HIV and Sex Work in Germany (TAMPEP 2007), the EU enlargement that began in May 2004 resulted in an increase in the number of sex workers originating in Eastern European countries, which resulted in targeted regulation and criminalisation of sex work at the EU level (Økland Jahnsen and Wagenaar 2019; Katona 2019). Contrary to the rules established by the Maastricht Treaty, which introduced the concept of EU citizenship and the right of workers and self-employed persons to work anywhere in the EU, national bordering practices such as sex work regulation take the place of and function not unlike enforceable sovereign state borders, excluding those unqualified to count as desirable working immigrants. Given that borders are enforced through sociocultural processes, bordering in these cases is enacted not only by state authorities but also in everyday, situated, and intersectional encounters at internal borders that reinforce the mutual constitution of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Dahinden, Fischer, and Menet 2020).

The opening up of the EU labour market, including possibilities to engage in sex work in some EU nation-states like Germany, shaped cross-border movements of Muslims from Bulgaria. Muslims are a significant minority in Bulgaria, making up approximately six percent of the population, including Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), Muslim Roma, and ethnic Turks (Popov 2013), yet they have not been granted full belonging, with repressive state policies resulting in extensive border crossings into neighbouring states (Darakchi 2018). For those Turkish communities that remained in Bulgaria, the degree of belonging and attachment to either Turkey or Bulgaria has varied significantly (Alptekin 2017; Parla 2019). This ambivalent (non)belonging to Bulgaria produced by Bulgaria’s repressive assimilation policies still informs the distrust of Turkish and Bulgarian Muslim communities towards the ‘outside world’ today. In recent years, rising unemployment rates and declining agricultural production have strongly influenced emigration trends in the mostly isolated Muslim majority regions in Bulgaria (Darakchi 2018), dividing the community across a range of countries.

During our fieldwork, the themes of transient minority belonging in TISWs’ lives recurred. Some recounted their lives in Bulgaria’s second and third-largest cities, the seaside towns of Varna and Burgas in Bulgaria before they immigrated to Germany. Other sex workers recalled going as children to the local mosques in their villages and receiving donations in the mosques (see also Öztürk and Sözeri 2018). They talked about visiting the local mosque with their families where they felt a strong sense of community with other Muslims. One of our interviewees, Açelya, who came from Varna, insisted that she had no connection to Bulgarians except in the school, as ‘clean Bulgarians’ (she used the term ‘temiz Bulgarlar’) did not intermingle with those that belong to the Muslim minority.

When asked why they had come to Germany, our interviewees described the desire to escape severe poverty in their cities and villages and homophobia in Bulgaria. Some of theTISWs that we spoke with, also see their lives in Berlin as necessary to support their families back home, parallel to the history of labour migration between Bulgaria/Turkey and Germany which have shown a similar pattern of Bulgarian and Turkish parents immigrating to Germany to support their families since 1960s (see also M. P. Smith and Eade 2008). Many also recounted their experience of ethnic discrimination and hope of a better life in Germany. For most, their trans* identity and failed family relations seemed only to worsen their already precarious position in Bulgaria (see also Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah 2016; Nakamura and Pope 2013).

The story of two cousins whom we interviewed, Ahmet and Çiçek, hints at chain family migration to Berlin built around trans* identity. Both of them grew up in the same village in Bulgaria, and they both went to school until their compulsory education was completed in the 8th grade. Ahmet was married and had three children at a young age. Ahmet’s sexual exploration began in a public park in the coastal city of Varna, a site often cruised by gay men. Strongly marginalised in Bulgaria as a member of the LGBTQ community, Ahmet travelled to Germany, leaving his wife and children back in Bulgaria, to join Çiçek, who had also left Bulgaria because she was öbür türlü (referring to her trans* experience). Ahmet continued to support her children financially while doing sex work in Berlin. Ahmet and Çiçek’s stories exemplify how, for several TISWs, their gender identity, sexual orientation, and racialisation in Bulgaria create an internal sociocultural border that became the main factor in their uprooting. They took advantage of the opening up of the EU borders to try and create new opportunities for themselves.

Yet TISWs’ experiences in Berlin confirmed that multiple borders extend beyond Bulgarian society. During an interview, Ahmet looked at us and exhaled, ‘I can’t stay in Berlin, I can’t go back. I’m stuck, and this is my life’. Çiçek affirmed Ahmet’s hopelessness: ‘I regret having moved to Berlin. I regret Bulgaria. I regret Germany. But what can I do? At least I can make five or six euros a day here collecting bottles from rubbish bins’ (When she could not find sex work, she collected and returned bottles for their deposit.). Becoming acquainted with the lived realities of TISWs, we quickly had a sense of the bordering experiences that continue to marginalise them as members of the TISWs community regardless of their location. Because of their non-confirming genders, marginalisation as sex workers, and status as both non-deportable immigrants and non-German citizens, TISWs embody borders no matter where they migrate to.

Encounters with medicolegal institutions

EU regulations enable certain cross-border movements, but EU borders are not the only bordering force in TISW’s lives: the borders separating differently gendered bodies and the bordering practices that determine access to gender transition within nation-states like Germany also impact their lived experiences. Such internal bordering practices are most salient in the context of the legal and medical services trans* people often, though by no means always, seek.³ These services include gender confirmation surgery (GCS) and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as well as a legal change of gender status, name, and sex following medical intervention. By focusing on the case of TISWs in Germany, this section describes how the bureaucratic boundaries of sociopsychological and medical services function not unlike a continuum of national borders, marginalising those who fail to perform an idealised, coherent trans* identity.

Our research acknowledges the heterogeneity of trans* identities and trans* experiences, both with and without legal and medical procedures, yet, such heterogeneity is rarely recognised in the regulatory legal and medical services of transitioning. Though trans* involves a very wide range of expressions, the TISW’s we spoke with see these services as essential in providing TISWs with rights and in minimising the risks caused by homophobia and transphobia they encounter in their work. The procedures shared most often by TISWs when discussing their trans* feminine experiences included medical feminising, breast augmentation, vaginoplasty, and relevant legal actions to change identity documents. These strategies, however, rely heavily on their own resources and for TISWs without, for example, access to steady shelter, become unaffordable. TISWs also defined their access to legal and medical procedures as essential to their profession; not being able to access these services puts TISWs in a precarious position in their street-based work.

Like most other European countries, Germany requires a medical diagnosis of gender identity disorder, real-life test, and long-term supervision in order to access HRT and other medical treatments (Alleyn and Jones 2010). According to German regulations, any general practitioner can prescribe HRT medication at their discretion. Following conversations during fieldwork with trans* activists from Berlin, many psychiatrists will not prescribe HRT medication without an Indikation, a medical referral to them from a non-medical psychological counsellor. This prerequisite is mostly due to their lack of training and experience on this issue. Even with an Indikation, some trans* people have been asked to consult an endocrinologist for the prescription. To get an Indikation from a psychological counsellor, trans* people are expected to convince the counsellor that they are trans, as defined under the American Psychological Association’s definition of gender identity disorder. We found that before providing an Indikation, many psychological counsellors require what is known as a real-life test, a six- to twelve-month ‘trial period’ in which the applicant must live successfully as a member of their identified gender.

While HRT is covered by public health insurance in Germany, access to and maintenance of insurance is a major hurdle. In a conversation, the social worker describes how this process affects TISWs’s access to work: ‘Without a job or registered place of residence, there is no way to access state insurance’. Even when they hold a job, all the TISWs that we interviewed confirmed that they face discrimination in the Berlin housing market, especially when they submit their documents as trans*persons with Bulgarian citizenship. This procedure becomes harder for those who do not have access to legal change of gender status and name (see also Nieder, Eyssel, and Köhler 2020 for more information on legal and medical procedures in Germany). In this sense, TISWs’s access to HRT is controlled by competing economic and administrative bordering practices that function not unlike the state borders which restrict the mobility of undesirable immigrants and exclude those whose economic and social survival depends on the German state.

Even when they formally have access to legal and medical procedures, TISWs’ expression of ‘dissonant’ gender identities troubles the Western epistemologies concerning gender identities and trans experiences and often bars them from qualifying for an Indikation. When we asked her about her gender identity and expression, Çiçek stated that although she wanted to present as female, the transphobia she has experienced from her family and her desire to be a ‘good father’ to her kids forces her to present as more masculine. Serra, whom we met at an event at the NGO, shared five different names that each connoted different gender identities and nationalities. While the use of multiple names is a common personal safety practice in sex work, the variety of gender connotations was Serra’s personal choice. As a result of their fluid and dissonant transgenderism, neither Çiçek nor Serra qualified for an Indikation, which severely limited their access to those medical and legal services that would support their chosen self-expressions. This stands as a bordering practice limiting the possibilities of trans* experiences by prioritising those trans* identities recognised by state or medical authorities over other trans* identities.

In contrast to Serra and Çiçek, Rihanna whom we introduced in the opening vignette, was able to access legal and medical services for transitioning. Rihanna introduced herself as a trans* woman and told us that in Bulgaria she had identified as a gay man before immigrating to Germany. In her experience as a TISW from Bulgaria, moving to Germany was a kind of liberation. She was able to both express her trans* identity and do sex work freely. Unlike others, Rihanna had all her ‘papers’, the legal and administrative requirements to access welfare state provisions in Germany. Gülsen, also introduced herself as a trans* woman, adding that she was saving money for GSC. With state insurance and a psychotherapist in hand, Gülsen had already taken the steps necessary to access the legal and medical procedures for her transition and GCS.

When comparing their experiences, the TISWs who had access to legal and medical procedures do not see their gender identities different from others who had not. Any difference resulted from the lack of educational and cultural tools to ‘qualify’ for HRT and GCS. Serra and Çiçek’s lack of access to medical and legal procedures for transitioning demonstrates the negative impact of bordering practices that block immigrants who do not have these tools. Their bordering experiences begin with discrimination in the housing market when they arrive in Germany, and continue through the multiple and overlapping hurdles they face in both the job market and private clinics as time passes. The ubiquity of their bordering experiences speaks both to their past marginalisation in Bulgaria through their Muslim minority identity and poverty in minority villages or as Muslim minority in larger towns and to the encounter with EU movement regulation and the German state.

By contrast, Rihana and Gülsen’s stories reflected others’ observations regarding normative expectations of medical and legal establishments (Aizura 2006; Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah 2016). Their cases were coherent to German medicolegal institutions and more adaptable to Germany’s regulation of transition. Both speak fluent German, had access to compulsory primary school education in Bulgaria, and were able to find support in NGOs. As a result, TISWs, such as Gülsen and Rihanna managed to overcome the ambivalent bureaucracy of sociopsychological and medical services as they performed an idealised, coherent trans* identity that enabled them to reach their ultimate goal of GCS in Germany and move closer to a sense of arriving home.

New sex work regulation in Germany: The Prostitution Act of 2017

As we witnessed how TISWs negotiated the competing and overlapping layers of intersectional bordering practices, their lived experience led us to the question of who may actually do sex work in Berlin, the final site of bordering practices encountered by TISWs that we highight here. According to European Union law, any EU citizen may legally engage in sex work in Germany. It is an officially sanctioned form of self-employment. But to be legally recognised as self-employed, sex workers must take the following bureaucratic steps: register their place of residence at the Registration Office; have a valid passport; register as a self-employed person either at the Registration Office or the Foreign Office; fill out a declaration that they will earn at least 600 euros and have health insurance valid for Germany, and; register at the Tax Office and obtain a tax number (TAMPEP 2007, 16). Described in the TAMPEP report as ‘simple’, the steps to registration are in fact extremely difficult for most immigrant sex workers to complete given their lack of German language skills, educational background, and strategies for navigating German bureaucratic paperwork.

With the New Prostitution Act of 2017, the German state made registration mandatory. Through the registration of sex workers, the state authorities can control sex workers closely. So long as sex workers fulfil the new requirements of the Prostitution Act, such as ‘good behaviour’, and a ‘self-employment business plan,’ their work is legal in Germany (Hunecke 2019). Although the lawmakers present the New Prostitution Act as a way to protect sex workers, many policy makers and sex work activists criticise it for criminalising and stigmatising sex workers (Hunecke 2019). The governance of immigrant sex workers through this Act brings to the fore a how the state creates illegal immigrants ‘ … by making and enforcing the laws whose infraction constitutes illegality of residence’ (Fassin 2011, 217; see also De Genova 2013; Lafleur and Mescoli 2018). Fassin argues that divergent interest groups produce this complex relationship between illegality and immigration: a financial market that is desirous of a cheap workforce and the general public that is intolerant of and exclusionary toward aliens (Fassin 2011, 218). We argue that TISWs everyday lives reveal a similar dynamic as they are desired on M street where they stroll as sex workers, while their lives elsewhere are made unimaginable by the general public. Similar to the previous findings in sex work research, which labels such mechanisms ‘governing in the name of caring’ (Vuolajärvi 2019), mandatory registration blurs the lines between legitimate and illegitimate work and the rights of TISWs as European citizens. Thus the Act functions as a tacit migration management mechanism to ensure German state control over who is permitted to do sex work in Germany.

Despite the complex bureaucratic requirements, Cansu submitted a successful self-employment application to the German state and received a tax number as a sex worker in Germany. We met Cansu at the corner of M street. We sat together at the tables outside the Späti. She had an energy drink to help her get through the night. It was very cold outside, and she was wearing a short skirt, high heels, and sheer stockings, a tiger-patterned top and a fake fur jacket. Her blond and curly hair framed her heavily made-up face. Originally from Varna, Cansu is in her late thirties and came to Germany ten years ago. When we asked her about the conditions of her sex work, she laughed and said, ‘My Muschi [German slang for ‘vagina’] is my manager. I pay for everything. I have a tax number.’ Proud to have a tax number, she glorified her Muschi as a money-making asset: ‘My Muschi is my manager’. Through our interviews, we found that the provision of a home address and health insurance were the two main requirements many TISWs were unable to meet. The NGO helped Cansu prove to the German state authorities that she had a home address and could earn her living as a sex worker.

While Cansu is a fully registered trans* sex worker in Germany, Seda, who joined us at the table, is in dual transition: first through her upcoming GCS, which will provide her with a new identity as a woman, and second through her application to the Citizenship Office, which will make her a German citizen. In this sense, Seda enjoys far more privilege than other sex workers. Originally from Burgas and in her early thirties, Seda described her multiple transitions that evening. Before recounting her citizenship application process, she flashed us a smile, boasting about the expensive dental work she had received in Germany. Her beautiful white teeth gleamed beneath the shop’s overhead light. Seda explained that she was navigating the citizenship process with the assistance of a social worker and a psychologist, preparing to apply for citizenship as a woman in Germany. Because proving job security is an important criterion for receiving German citizenship, Seda’s social worker advised her to take a job in a clothing workshop sorting blue jeans six hours a day. Until her transition and German citizenship were secured, Seda assured us she would continue working both jobs – sex work at night and jean sorting during the day. Unlike Cansu, Seda is not registered as a sex worker as required by the new Prostitution Act. Her day job provides proof of her steady income in Germany, bolstering her German citizenship application but denying an important aspect of how she makes a living.

We met Lale at the NGO during a gathering at the NGO. She was using the NGO facilities to dye her hair black, wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and plastic slippers, fully at ease in the NGO offices. Unlike Cansu and Seda, Lale possesses neither a passport nor any other official identification documents. She collects bottles for a living and occasionally does sex work. For the past seven years she has been sleeping in a tent at a public park near a major subway station with her alcoholic partner. Her social worker described Lale’s situation to us as a vicious circle: ‘They are required to find an apartment to obtain a registry of residence, a registry of residence to register as a sex worker, and a steady income to find an apartment’.

Where Cansu and to some extent Seda show that some TISW’s are able to successfully navigate the bordering effects the New Prostitution Act has on TISWs, Lale experiences exemplify the exclusionary effects of this bordering: without finding an apartment and securing formal income, it is impossible for trans* women like Lale to register as sex workers, confirming that working as a non-registered sex worker has heightened the precarity of TSIW in recent years.

The impact of the New Prositution Act on the TISWs who participated in our research shows how even among street based sex workers, often seen as the most precarious in the sex work industry, laws like this produce considerable differentiation in access to rights and services within the complex spectrum of sex work (M. Smith and Mac 2018). The New Prostitution Act functions as yet another border management strategy, leading non-registered and paperless sex workers to work less in an effort to avoid police surveillance. TISWs – due to multiple systemic factors or personal circumstances of poverty, homelessness, drug use, and/or mental health – have extremely restricted employment options and are consequently forced to do survival sex work in dangerous circumstances.

Discussion & concluding remarks

As we approached our usual spot at the Späti, we noticed a theatre poster across the street with the title ‘Arab Girl,’ displaying a young girl in headscarf. Predictably, the play recounted the miserable life of an immigrant girl in Berlin. Based on a book by the Turkish immigrant social worker Gülay Balci, it dramatises Muslim girls’ lives as victims of their immigrant communities, subject to abuse by their families and forced to marry Muslim men. These kinds of plays attract white German audiences from middle-class backgrounds: state employees, socially concerned citizens, and high school teachers who must deal with teenagers from immigrant families. For years now, the wearing of headscarves has been made to symbolise the disintegration of German society and the threat to German values and German institutions, especially public schools (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014).

In contrast to the headscarf-wearing ‘Arab Girl,’ in the darkened street we share with TISWs, we witnessed how many sex workers who speak an accented Turkish try to catch the attention of potential customers through flamboyant attire. Here, in the centre of TISWs’ life worlds in Berlin, TISWs pose a challenge to the disintegration tale that has been told about victimised headscarf-wearing Muslim women who allegedly threaten German values. In our work, we approach Muslim identity not as the index of a religion but via the concept of ‘cultural Muslims’ whereby cultural characteristics cluster under the general heading of ‘Muslim’ (Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdakul 2008). This allows us to show how the presence in Berlin of Muslim TISWs who have immigrated from Bulgaria challenges the binary racialisation of LGBTQ people as passive victims and Muslim immigrants as hypermasculine perpetrators constructed by German political discourses and the media in order to justify stringent immigrant integration regimes (El-Tayeb 2011). TISWs do not fit German stereotypes of Muslims. Indeed, Muslim identity among Bulgarian Muslims has been shown to be connected primarily to cultural frames rather than the practice of Islam (Darakchi 2018, 2020). Seen through this lens, TISWs index how EU expansion to Eastern Europe neglects, marginalises, and discriminates against geographies of different Muslim identities and diverse Muslim communities in Europe.

Recent scholarship on LGBTQ migrant access to welfare (Ayoub 2016) demonstrates that neoliberal governments approach the non-heteronormative experiences of migrants with either passive indifference to welfare inequalities or by using ineffective bureaucratic measures that exacerbate exclusion and marginalisation (Barbulescu and Favell 2020). In our research, we contribute to theories of immigration and social policy by generating an intersectional analysis of everyday bordering. Turning to TISWs experiences we illuminate the interconnections between sociocultural marginalisation and legal/bureaucratic regulations.

In our first set of findings on how TISWs negotiate open borders within Europe, we used our ethnographic work to detail how TISWs are stigmatised in complex ways. As members of the minority Muslim community in Bulgaria, they lived in poverty and had been violently forced to assimilate through mandatory registry name change in the late 1980s. Upon their arrival in Germany, they were marginalised by gendered Muslim stereotypes they do not fit but that are nevertheless used to shore up the stringent integration policies toward Muslims that affect them (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014). German state bordering of the EU’s expanded peripheral zones, including Bulgaria, is enacted sociopolitically through the differential treatment of Eastern Europeans that deepen the legal borders and everyday bordering processes (also see Pickering and Ham 2014).

In the second set of findings, we show how some of the overlapping and competing sociopsychological and medical bordering practices that TISWs face in Berlin deter them from obtaining the necessary legal and medical procedures they require to live and fully express their sense of selves. In fact, sociopsychological and medical bordering practices function as institutional inclusion / exclusion mechanisms, which certify who can or who cannot be eligible for GCS. This process undermines the heterogeneity of trans* identities by prioritising a medicalised category of transsexuality. Despite their physical existence on the streets of Berlin, TISWs’s arrival as trans*immigrant sex workers is in fact endlessly postponed, as they strive but often fail to receive medical approval to access legal and medical services.

In the third set of findings on the New Prostitution Act (2017), TISWs showed how difficult it is to navigate Germany bureaucracy that should render sex work, legal work. Furthermore, the stigmatisation of TISWs meant, as our interviewee Gülsen showed, that in order to reach their goal of receiving German citizenship, they must play their cards right by finding, a ‘legitimate’ (non-sex work) job, accommodation, and a social worker who can support them. The hurdles of a complex and reluctant German bureaucracy and a German public that stigmatises sex work are not easily overcome when one lacks social ties, language skills, and an education. This disparity also reveals the complex and heterogeneous experiences of sex workers who are commonly represented as a homogeneous group in the mainstream media. Our intersectional approach has shown that the factors such as ethnicity, educational background, immigrant identity, trans*experience, and Muslim identity intermingle and contribute to the way TISWs experience sex work in Berlin. With their bodies marked and defined by their engagement with multiple borders, TISWs exemplify the complex interembodiment of bordering.

To flesh out the experiences of sex/gender transgressive people, we use intersectional bordering as a necessary analytical tool. As reflections of a marginalised and invisible community, the bordering experiences of TISWs are not singular but plural and profoundly shaped by socioculturally embedded bordering practices: how Bulgaria treats its Muslims, Roma, and trans* minorities; how Germany updates its prostitution laws so it can regulate migration from Eastern European countries; how sex work is considered a stigmatised way to earn a living even though it has been legalised in Germany; how TISWs spend their lives trying to navigate a reluctant German bureaucracy. As the everyday lives of TISWs have shown, the demarcated zones between immigrant and citizen; cisgender and trans*; and being registered and unregistered only highlight the disparity among European citizens and exacerbate the exclusion and marginalisation of sex/gender transgressive people and sex work. Intersecting with sociocultural processes that exacerbate inequalities through racializations and heteronormative understandings of sexualities, the legal-bureaucratic half-life of bordering carries on.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Phillip M. Ayoub, Ursula Probst, Joss Jasmine Gross, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to official records, around 400,000 people are engaged with sex work in Germany (Deutscher Bundestag 2001). Among the roughly 40,000 sex workers registered with authorities at the end of 2019, Bulgarian immigrants are recorded as the second largest group among sex workers after Romanian immigrants (Statistisches Bundesamt 2020).

2 The social worker requested anonimity.

3 Following the literature on critical transgender studies (Stryker and Whittle 2006), our research eschews the normative idea that all trans* people wish to undergo legal and medical procedures to live their ‘authentic selves’.