SW Learn: Insights from Phase One of a Community-Engaged, Peer-Driven Research Effort to Build Greater Health Equity with Transgender Women of Color in Sex Work

Background and Purpose: Structural forms of discrimination limit transgender (“trans”) women’s
involvement in the formal economy, and community-level stigma drives the need to engage in sex work.
In Los Angeles County (LAC), California, Black and Latinx transgender women accounted for 92% of all
newly diagnosed transgender people with HIV, with transgender women having the highest HIV
positivity rate across all populations surveyed. Despite the clear need for programming to increase HIV
prevention and treatment uptake, few evidence-based interventions for sex workers exist. Those that do
exist focus on cisgender women. Thus reaching and addressing the needs of transgender women of
color engaged in sex work is important to HIV syndemic-related policy.

Methods: Fundamentally grounded by a justice-centered approach to research, the Sex Work Lived
Experience Affirming Research Network (SW LEARN) centers sex workers that identify as Black and
Latinx trans women to address their health and social service needs. Beginning with ensuring active
participation of those identifying with the centered community, Phase One of this research study
focused on a process of establishing a set of common values across the community-academic research
collaborative. Meeting notes documenting group dialogue were maintained throughout the planning
process. Research staff reviewed these notes and identified examples where the collective’s common
values shifted the direction of the research planning process and the final research proposal.

Results: This proposal presents key reflective insights from SW LEARN’s intensive two-day planning
retreat and how the collective’s common values shifted the direction of the project. Common values
include demanding representation of sex workers that identify as trans women of color, placement of
people with lived experience in sex trade in leadership roles, and sustained engagement of community
organizations that have demonstrated commitment to address health and social service needs of sex
workers. Notable insights include equity in budgeting across partners, exploring staffing and leadership
structures to address organizational strengths and weaknesses, expanding on the concept of data
ownership to question claims to knowledge and knowledge production, identifying and leveraging
teachable moments to increase research capacity at the individual and organizational level, and creating
more humanistic modes of collective inquiry.

Conclusions: Our overall aim is to develop a research agenda to improve HIV-related health outcomes
for transgender women of color engaged in the sex trade. This effort provides important takeaways for
researchers to reimagine the roles of transgender people and people engaged in the sex trade to
meaningfully shape the future of HIV research through collective action.