“The Power of Language”
CIHS Glossary of Terms
Bad Date, Bad Trick: When a john/trick/date becomes violent. This is all encompassing, whether it is physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.
Bath House: A place where gay men go to have anonymous sex. Male hustlers and their clients frequent these establishments.
Brothel: A house, apartment, or other property where sexual services are sold.
Commercial Sexual Exploitation: Includes both the direct use of children for sex and the use of children in sexual images (pornography).
Decriminalization: The removal of laws relating to communicating and bawdy houses as offences in the criminal code. No other laws at the federal, provincial or municipal level should be introduced.
Exiting: The process of transition the person undergoes as they distance themselves from work in the sex industry and/or sex trade.
Experiential: Individuals who self identify as peoples who are currently, or have in the past supported themselves in part or in full through paid labor in sex work.
Exploitation: Taking advantage of an inequality (i.e. poverty, homelessness, etc.) through force, fraud, coercion, power, finances or exchange.
Hustler: Term often used for male sex workers.
John, Trick, Date, Customer, and Client: Someone who trades or buys sexual services.
Legalization: Permitting prostitution under regulated conditions for example, government control over the lives and businesses of those who work as sex workers.
Massage Parlour/Body Rub: An establishment where men can purchase a massage with a hand release.
Pimp: A person who manipulates and/or controls and uses power over a sex worker for profit.
Pimp Stick: Wire coat hanger used to beat and intimidate a sex worker for example, when their quota for the night hasn't been met.
Prohibition: A legal approach that aims to eliminate all forms of paid sex through making prostitution or certain activities associated
with prostitution illegal.
Stroll, Corner, Track: Well known areas where customers look to buy sexual services – they are usually separated into female, male, youth/kiddy, or transgendered. They are often sub-divided into drug using and non-using, high and low tracks (cost of date or service).
Sex Industry: All encompassing forms of sex work such as web cams, cyber sex, dancing, massage, S&M, pornography etc.
Sex Work: Specific to the work in the sex trade and/or sex industry.
Sex Worker: A sex worker is someone who works in the sex trade and/or sex industry. (Derogatory words and phrases of the past are: prostitute, hooker, whore, ho, scarlet, streetwalker)
Sexually Exploited Youth: Youth or children that are under the age of 18 years old.
Survival Sex: Anyone who can't exercise their right to refuse performing sexual acts for food, shelter, drugs, money, or any other survival necessities.
Trafficking: In “peoples" shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery.
Transgender: Transgender is an umbrella term that encompasses those who trans-identified themselves as: transsexuals (TS, pre-op, post-op), transvestites (TV), crossdressers (CD), male to female (M-F or M2F), female to male (F-M or F2M), tranny, she male, drag queen, drag king, two spirited and inter-sexed. For a more detailed explanation scroll down this page.
Trick Pad: A place where someone is kept against their will and is forced to have repeated sex with many different johns, often secluded and well disguised, usually run by pimps. This word has also come to mean a place where a sex worker will take their car dates.
Urban Dictionary is a slang dictionary with definitions that are not common to a regular dictionary. Click here to learn about more slang www.urbandictionary.com
Glossary of Transgendered-related Terms
The following terms are often used to refer to people who are included in some definitions of the term "transgendered."
- Crossdresser: A person who wears clothing of the opposite sex, usually only part-time. Most male crossdressers consider themselves heterosexual and do not want gender reassignment surgery, though some are bisexual or gay. Many are married. Some transsexuals attempt to live for some time as part-time crossdressers to avoid the cost, disruption and social repercussions of gender reassignment.
- Drag Queen: A gay male, who wears women's clothes and makeup, sometimes in a deliberately exaggerated, "over-the-top" fashion, primarily for entertainment purposes. The female equivalent, less common, but increasingly visible, is the drag king.
- Female Impersonator: A man who dresses and performs professionally as a specific female celebrity such as Cher, Shania Twain, etc. May be of any sexual orientation.
- Hermaphrodite: An older term for an intersexual, inter sexed person; the term is now considered somewhat clinical or even derogatory.
- Intersexual, Intersexed person: A person born with ambiguous genitalia. Many discover they were surgically "assigned" a gender at birth after a cursory genital examination, sometimes with traumatic emotional consequences in later life.
- She-male: A male who has undergone some feminization, such as cosmetic surgery or breast implants, but retains the male genitalia. The connotation is that this has been done for sexual or pornographic purposes; hence, the term is usually considered highly pejorative by other groups within the transgendered community, who stress the emotional rather than sexual aspects of transgenderism. Best only applied to someone who specifically identifies themselves as such.
- Transnatural: a person who lives as a member of the opposite sex, but has decided to forego genital surgery.
- Transsexual: Someone who wishes to be of the opposite sex. Most often applied to those actually seeking gender reassignment. Based on chromosomal sex and surgical intentions or status, transsexuals are further categorized as:
- MTF or M2F: male to female
- FTM or F2M: female to male
- Pre-op, Pre-operative: Intends to have, but has not yet had, genital surgery.
- Post-op, Post-operative: Has completed genital surgery.
- Transvestite: an older word for a drag queen or crossdresser, now considered clinical or pejorative. The term survives in the psychological diagnosis of "fetishistic transvestism", for example.
- TS :Abbreviation for transsexual
- TV: Abbreviation for transvestite (not considered as pejorative as the original term itself)
- Two-spirited: Traditional term used by many Aboriginal peoples to refer to transgendered persons
