Age verification laws started popping up in the late 2010s in Germany, then in France. The United States craned its neck, furrowed its brow, and started to salivate.

“Hold my beer.” said the US. 

American first age verification law was enacted in 2022 in Louisiana. Put simply, the law requires any service that hosts 33.3% or more of “material that is harmful to minors” (defined as pornography, starting with female breasts), then that site is required to implement a third-party age verification system. There are now over 30 states with some kind of age verification bill on the books or passed into law. It’s such a nice thought, keeping young people away from media they might not be equipped to process. It really is, genuinely. But sex is ideas. Porn is ideas. As Tom Lehrer said in his march for smut, “Filth, I’m glad to say, is in the eye of the beholder.”

There is rampant conflation of sex work and exploitation in an effort to cleasnse the internet of sex work. Get the whores off the law, as it were. There has also been mention about 2SLGBTQ* existence as pornographic. Some of you might still think that’s a stretch, and that we’re just talking about pornography and we know porn when we see it.

Project 2025, the Republican 950 page roadmap for a 2025 Trump presidency published by the Heritage Commission, says the quiet part out loud. The age of dogwhistling these things is over, y’all.

Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries

Project 2025 at Page 1.

And under the section titled “PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN”

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Project 2025 at Pages 3-4.

Yes, registering educators and librarians who allow access to sex education books or novels that simply represent queer existence. Yes, it says shuttering platforms AND TELECOMS PROVIDERS that allow this information to be disseminated. Yes, that’s what that says.

The pornography is trans people, drag queens, queer folks, and comprehensive sex education. Pornography was also contraceptives under Comstock laws – and we’ve already seen a hideous erosion of bodily autonomy in criminalization of abortion in several US states. It’s happening. Even conservative women in states that are now affected by bans on IVF are realizing that by voting for the Leopards Eating Faces Party, the Leopards are now eating their faces. It was just supposed to be poor and queer people’s faces! Oh no!

And just yesterday, Kansas took their age verification bill to that next level. The bill classifies being gay online as sexual conduct. So, any website that allows people to be gay on it will require implementation of a system that ties your browsing history to your identity. Voila. 

Canada’s age verification bill was informed by anti-contraceptive “feminists” and anti-2SLGBTQ*, anti-women hate groups. There are Hansard receipts to back it up. That’s who the sponsoring senator is listening to.

I am reasonably exhausted, and it comes from ongoing conversations about where sex workers shouldn’t be allowed to speak – when we keep yelling these things from increasingly isolated corners of the internet. When you get rid of us, who points these things out?

I hope y’all listen. I hope you have space to take on some of this rage, even quietly. We are the lawmakers and defenders of our future, and this path is a dark one.