our team
sex worker leadership
DecrimSWCA is a sex worker-led coalition. The Steering Committee is our main leadership body and is entirely current or former sex workers. Both our coordinator and fundraiser are current or former sex workers. Our allies and partners include individual sex workers and sex worker organizations and allied organizations that are not sex worker-led.
DecrimSWCA es una coalición dirigida por trabajadores sexuales. El Comité Directivo es nuestro principal ente regulador y todos sus miembros son antiguos trabajadores sexuales. Tanto nuestra coordinación como las personas encargadas de recaudar fondos son trabajadores sexuales retirados o activos. Nuestros aliados y socios incluyen a trabajadores sexuales individuales, organizaciones de trabajadores sexuales y organizaciones que no son dirigidas por trabajadores sexuales.
Steering Committee
TS JANE
TS Jane (she/her) is an empowered sex worker, a trans rights and sex workers' rights activist. She is also a contributing member of STRAP (Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines), a non-profit organization who pioneered transgender rights activism in her native country. She advocates for migrant trans sex workers and works with important issues such as safety of sex workers, prioritizing your health as a sex worker, self-care and esteem, breaking the stigma and thriving in the sex industry. She had been invited to speak about her experiences as a sex worker in various delegations and conferences such as ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex Association), Creating Change and World Association of Sexual Health. She also lobbied on Capitol Hill educating representatives about the how SESTA/FOSTA is harmful to the sex worker community. She also has organized with SWOP-USA. She loves to travel, cooking, watching TV and a huge sports fan. She resides in San Diego, California and is currently pursuing her studies in sex therapy, sexual health and sexuality education.
Steering Committee
Fatima Malika Shabazz
Fatima Malika Shabazz (she/her), originally from Brooklyn New York, is a long time resident of Los Angeles and the CEO/President of Fatima Speaks LLC; a Transgender led, African American owned and operated business that conducts cultural sensitivity and competency trainings as well as panel and motivational speaking engagements. She is a member of the DecrimSexWorkCA steering committee where she also serves as the Policy Advocacy movement team lead, and the co-lead of the Conflict Resolution Committee.
Steering Committee
Janelle Luster
Janelle Luster (she/they) is 29 years old and an award winning community organizer and transgender activist native of the San Francisco Bay Area. Janelle has been organizing and advocating for the rights of transgender people, PLWHIV, and sex workers locally and nationally. She strives for the advancement of transgender folks of color, specifically Black transgender women and men. She currently serves as Program Supervisor of Trans Vision, a specialty clinic within Bay Area Community Health-BACH located in Fremont, CA and was recently appointed to the Board of Directors for San Francisco Pride, to bring diversity to a historically white org. Janelle is a member of the DecrimSexWorkCA Coalition Steering Committee where she serves as the Mutual Aid and Fundraising movement team lead, and a co-lead of the Conflict Resolution Committee. She believes that in addition to policy advocacy that mutual aid is a critical tool to address the community’s immediate needs and to help sustain sex workers out of work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Janelle identifies as a formerly incarcerated Black transwoman who has been impacted by the system due to the intersections of her identities. Because of that she is dedicated to empowering those communities through access to services, resources and social empowerment. Janelle has been coordinating Black Trans Lives Matter Protest & Rallies as well as virtual social spaces of empowerment throughout this pandemic and hosted a Virtual Vigil honoring those lost to hate violence. She attended the 2020 Creating Change Conference where she was able to expand her network and build national solidarity. Janelle served as Program Associate and Director of Community Engagement for The Transgender District (San Francisco). In addition she co-leads an annual transgender empowerment retreat, TRANScend Retreat. In 2019, TRANScend Retreat facilitated the Malaysia Booker Travel Fund, partnering with Homobils to bring Black trans women from the south and midwest to join the gathering in Northern California. She also served as ambassador for the 2019 National Transgender March on Washington D.C. and under her leadership as President of FLUX Bay Area Chapter, organized Oakland’s first Trans March.
Luisa Rivera
Steering Committee
Luisa Rivera (she/her) is a Mexican-born Spanish-speaking immigrant rights activist and trans-Latinx sex worker activist who staunchly advocates for her Latinx/LGBTQIA+ community. She takes pride in leading Marcha de las putas SF. This group provides visibility to the Latinx and LGBTQIA Sex Workers community in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. In addition, she is the Founder & Executive Director of “Voces Puteriles.org.” She serves as Policy & Education co-chair for the HIV Advocacy Network (HAN), a grassroots LGBTQ & HIV activist group in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 700 members who advocate for funding-related services for her community, including sex workers. She is also a member of the Decriminalize Sex Work California Coalition. She has supported extensively throughout the US, including in California, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada and internationally in Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, and Guatemala in Central America.
Steering Committee
Michaé de la Cuadra
Michaé De La Cuadra (they/she) navigates this world sin género (without gender). She is a community organizer and artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California (Tongva Land) with familial roots in México and Ecuador. Her work envisions a future free of gender-based violence and imagines the possibilities of a world divesting from our current oppressive systems. She has explored multiple mediums to work toward this world such as visual art, music, building community-led spaces, and engaging in policy change at local, state and national levels. Most recently, Michaé is working with the TransLatin@ Coalition as the Manager of Policy and Community Engagement where she has worked to craft and pass policies on issues related to sex work decriminalization, trans detention and incarceration, housing for trans women, healthcare access, and much more.
Steering Committee
Ashley Madness
Ashley Madness (she/her) is a transgender sex worker based in Los Angeles. Since 2018, she has worked with Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles, where she currently serves as a board member. Before coming out as trans and starting sex work, Ashley attended NYU School of Law where she served as an editor on the Moot Court Board. With SWOPLA, Ashley coordinated the Emergency Relief Fund launch in early 2020 to provide cash aid during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ashley has also helped transition leadership and fundraising models and with coordinating & implementing SWOPLA’s advocacy strategies.
Steering Committee
Lotus Lain
Lotus Lain (she/her) has been a Dominatrix, Cam Model & Adult Performer since 2012. She is now the Community Relations Advocate for the Free Speech Coalition- the adult industry’s trade association; she’s a Producer and Intimacy Coordinator for tv & film; a Sex Work Consultant & an Activist working with ACLU to Decriminalize Sex Work in CA. She continues to work towards influencing change around the way sex workers are portrayed in mainstream media while shifting the perspective of how explicit sex stories are told.
Steering Committee
Cesar Espinoza-Perez
Cesar (he/him) is a sex worker organizer and co-founder of Marcha de lxs Putxs. He advocates for systemic changes such as full decriminalization of sex work, immediate access to emergency housing, community based violence prevention, and against government violence & discrimination. As an HIV activist he volunteers with HAN, the HIV advocacy network on campaigns to prevent HIV & Hep C transmission, support people living with HIV, and supports harm reduction policies & the decriminalization of all drugs.
Steering Committee
Lisseth Sanchez
In loving memory.
Tina Reynolds
Fundraising
Tina (she/her/beloved) is a former sex worker and began consulting with DecrimSexWorkCA in 2021. She Co-founded Women on the Rise Telling HerStory (WORTH) and is one of the Co-founders of the Formerly incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Families Movement(FICPFM). She has published pieces on the abolition of prisons, the impact of incarceration on women and children, formerly incarcerated women and policy change and is an editor of an anthology “Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States”. Tina taught as an Adjunct Lecturer for 10 years in the City University of New York, York College Behavioral Sciences Department. She co-created and taught “Impact of Incarceration of Children and Families and Communities” curricula, which was accepted within the same department. Tina has worked in philanthropy for over 15 years as a Board Member of the Peace Development Fund and the Director of Programs at the Circle for Justice Innovations for a year and a half creating funding programs, facilitating webinars, guiding and offering support to Formerly Incarcerated People, Sex Workers and Drug User organizations. She has developed trainings for organizations, education institutions and health care systems covering topics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, The Impact of Incarceration of Children and Families, Impact of Bias and Stigma on Pregnant and Parenting People who Use Drugs, Leading with Lived Experience Training/Impact of HCV in Black and Indigenous Communities. Tina identifies as a Drug User Human Rights Activist.
Cocoa Makati
Coordination
Cocoa (she/her) is a queer mixed-race femme who has been around the block! Drawing from over 15 years of experience in the industry, she advocates for decriminalization as the best framework to reduce sex workers’ vulnerability to violence, exploitation and trafficking because it allows greater access to health, justice and human rights protections. Cocoa has worked in the US and abroad under a range of legal frameworks, circumstances and conditions. She worked independently and under management, in full-service brothels and escort agencies, as a stripper, and in survival work. Through those experiences she learned the importance of peer education, human rights based approaches to sex work and trafficking, and community-led and evidence-based policy development. She fiercely believes that the movement must amplify, support and center the leadership of Black, Brown, TGNC, migrant sex workers and others most impacted by criminalization and discrimination. Her advocacy and research spans HIV justice, health and labor rights, anti-trafficking and more. She has worked with Red Edition migrant sex workers collective in Austria, the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective in Wellington and Auckland, and in Australia with Scarlet Alliance and SWOP New South Wales. She likes traveling, spicy food, making art and spending time with cats.