There is a particular kind of hypocrisy at the centre of Irish public life. People consume sexual content constantly. Entire industries are built around desire, fantasy, loneliness, beauty, companionship, and bodies. Billions circulate through weddings, pornography, dating apps, cosmetic procedures, influencers, escorts, OnlyFans subscriptions, celebrity culture, and carefully managed public sexuality.
But the moment somebody refuses to remain hidden while participating in any of it, the tone changes completely. Suddenly visibility itself becomes the crime.
Ireland is full of people who privately consume things they publicly condemn. Men who spend years searching for sexual content online while mocking the women and trans people who provide it. Politicians who preach family values while building careers inside systems driven entirely by patriarchal hierarchy, performance, image management, and money. Media figures who profit from the sexualisation of women until a woman decides to own it herself rather than being packaged for somebody else’s consumption.
You are allowed to exist as long as you remain fragmented. Women can be intelligent, but not sexual. Political, but not desirable. Visible, but not too visible. Feminine, but only in ways approved by misogyny. Queer, but only when safely contained within LGB.. An escort, but only if you remain anonymous and apologetic.
Over the my lifetime I have existed publicly as many different things at once. Elite Cyclist. Activist. Feminist organiser. Intersex campaigner. Writer. Public speaker. Partner. Parent. Coach. Builder of cycling spaces. Political voice. Community organiser.
Now publicly, I am also an escort. Not hidden behind a fake persona. Not buried beneath deniability and not separated between a secret life and a respectable life.
The same person. And that seems to disturb people far more than the escorting itself. Because Irish society is deeply invested in the idea that bodies must remain categorised and controlled. Especially trans and intersex bodies.
People are comfortable consuming trans women sexually. They are comfortable fetishising us in private. Comfortable debating us politically. Comfortable turning us into headlines, discourse, symbols, and …….. pornography.
What they are not comfortable with is visibility – Especially when that visibility is intelligent, politically articulate, emotionally self-aware, and economically autonomous. The expectation is that we either disappear completely or remain trapped inside roles other people designed for us,
But escorting has forced me to confront something uncomfortable about modern life. Much of contemporary society is built around loneliness. People are starving for connection while becoming more isolated from each other every year. Dating apps have profitised intimacy. Social media has transformed personality into branding. Even friendship increasingly feels transactional.
Under capitalism, people are encouraged to optimise everything except emotional honesty. And yet sex work remains one of the few things human beings cannot fully automate. People still want conversation. Touch. Attention. Desire. Presence. To feel seen by another human being, even briefly.
Escorting is also work. Materially, 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.
The reality is that the internet has already destroyed the illusion of clean separation between public and private selves. Especially for people living in visible or heavily scrutinised bodies. For years, people (me) survived online through fragmentation. Different names. Different platforms. Different audiences. Activist in one place. Escort somewhere else. Public figure here. Private worker there.
But that was always temporary. Pseudonyms do not usually collapse because of hacks. They collapse because we leave traces everywhere. The same language. The same references. The same locations. The same photographs. A recognisable tone. A moment of recognition from somebody moving between worlds.
And once somebody sees this clearly, the separation is over. That reality became impossible for me to ignore the moment a client casually revealed he already knew exactly who I was. Not through investigation. Not through blackmail. Simply because the internet had already connected the pieces.
So I made a decision. If visibility was inevitable, then I would control it myself. Because there is power in refusing the threat of exposure. Power in collapsing the distance between the acceptable self and the hidden one before somebody else attempts to weaponise that collapse against you.
The moment you expose yourself honestly, the blackmail loses its force. And maybe that is what unsettles people most. Not that I am an escort. Not that I am visible. But that I am refusing shame while remaining politically vocal, intellectually present, publicly feminine, sexually autonomous, and impossible to reduce into a single category.
An intersex Irish cycling champion. A socialist feminist. A public political voice. A trans woman. A mother. An escort. A writer.
People want contradiction to invalidate you. But contradiction is what makes human beings real. The internet intensifies all of this. Everybody is expected to maintain masks now. Professional selves. Employable selves. Marketable selves.
Very few people are permitted to exist publicly as whole people. Especially women. Especially queer people. Especially sex workers.
I stopped pretending that politics, feminism, writing, escorting, and public life were separate worlds because they are not separate worlds. Our bodies are political. Visibility is polititical.Who gets to exist safely in public is political.
That does not mean there are no risks. Men will look at me differently now. Some people will reduce me entirely to escorting no matter what else I achieve, or have achieved. Some will mistake visibility for unlimited access. Others will decide public sexuality invalidates feminism, intelligence, motherhood, or political seriousness.
But respectability was never protection anyway. Not for trans or intersex people. Not for women who refuse obedience.
Simply Sorcha is not just a website. It is a refusal to disappear.
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