A few years ago I took part in the highly acclaimed BOOBS documentary directed by Nicola Leddy, a project that went on to screen at film festivals and special events around the world. The documentary explored bodies, visibility, shame, feminism, and the politics of representation through Geraldine Carton’s extraordinary art project painting one hundred portraits of breasts. Long before I publicly embraced escorting as part of my life and work, BOOBS captured something I was already beginning to understand: Irish society is deeply uncomfortable with women and trans people who refuse to remain hidden once bodies, sexuality, and public visibility collide.
I still remember sitting in my kitchen half-listening to the radio when Geraldine Carton came on Liveline in 2023 talking about her idea to paint one hundred portraits of boobs. Not idealised boobs. Not pornographic boobs. Not cosmetic surgery brochure boobs. Real boobs. Different bodies. Different histories. Different women. Different scars. Different lives.
And then came the question. Joe Duffy asked what would happen if a trans woman applied. Not because he was curious about art. Not because he was interested in embodiment or feminism or visibility. He asked it because Irish society remains obsessed with policing who is allowed to exist publicly as a woman once bodies enter the conversation. Especially trans bodies.
That moment stayed with me because it revealed something much larger than one art project. The panic was never about breasts. It was about ownership. About who gets recognised as legitimate. About who is allowed to be visible once sexuality, desire, intimacy, and public femininity become impossible to separate.
And I understand that far more clearly now than I did then. Over the last few months I stopped pretending that the different parts of my life were separate worlds. The activist. The writer. The cyclist. The intersex campaigner. The public speaker. The mother. The companion. The escort. The same person.
That decision changed the way I look at projects like BOOBS entirely because I now understand how terrified society becomes once women openly reclaim ownership over visibility itself.
Irish society loves sexualisation when institutions control it. Advertising controls it. Fashion controls it. Film controls it. Men control it. Algorithms control it. Influencers package it carefully enough to remain commercially safe. But the second a woman openly monetises intimacy, sexuality, companionship, or desire on her own terms, people suddenly rediscover morality. Escorting has made that hypocrisy impossible for me to ignore.
People imagine escorting as some distant underground world populated by stereotypes. The reality is often much closer to modern loneliness. People paying for connection because contemporary life has become emotionally fragmented and exhausted. Men who cannot speak honestly anywhere else. People who want intimacy without performance. Conversation without apps. Presence without judgement. Desire without pretending they are above desire.
And yet society still treats escorts as symbols rather than people. That is why projects like BOOBS matter politically. Because they disrupt the rules governing acceptable femininity. They force people to confront the reality that bodies are lived in. Worked through. Desired. Judged. Sold. Policed. Painted. Touched. Hidden. Surveilled. Monetised.
Bodies are economic realities. Escorting is also work. Materially, directly, unapologetically work. Rent, bills, childcare, survival, independence, autonomy. Society romanticises women’s sacrifice constantly, but reacts with outrage the moment a woman openly monetises intimacy on her own terms rather than through marriage, domestic labour, or institutional respectability.
That contradiction sits underneath almost every public conversation about women’s bodies in Ireland. Women are expected to remain fragmented. Beautiful but respectable.
Sexual but ashamed. Visible but controlled. Desirable but morally contained.
Trans women experience this even more intensely because society already treats us as contested territory. People consume trans women constantly through pornography, fantasy, gossip, politics, and online obsession. But they become deeply uncomfortable once trans women possess visible agency over our own image and economic lives.
That is why the question Joe Duffy asked mattered so much. It exposed the limits of mainstream feminism in Ireland almost instantly. Inclusion remains easy until bodies become materially complicated. Until sexuality appears. Until trans women stop existing as abstractions and become fully visible participants in public womanhood.
BOOBS succeeded because it refused purity politics. It understood that bodies carry histories. Some shaped by motherhood. Some by illness. Some by transition. Some by survival. Some by sex work. Some by violence. Some by pleasure.
None of those realities invalidate womanhood. If anything, they expose how absurd the policing always was. What interests me now is how visibility itself has changed. The internet has collapsed the old barriers between public and private identity. Everybody performs versions of themselves online now. Everybody curates. Everybody monetises attention somehow. Everybody manages image. Escorting simply strips away some of the comforting illusions about how modern intimacy already operates under capitalism.
The only difference is that some forms of intimacy remain socially respectable while others are pushed underground to preserve the illusion of moral order. But I am increasingly uninterested in maintaining those illusions. The truth is that projects like BOOBS frightened people because they made bodies impossible to categorise neatly. And once bodies stop fitting categories, entire systems of social control begin to wobble.
That is why I loved it. Not because it was shocking. But because it quietly insisted that visibility belongs to us too.
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