About YAS Veterans
YAS Veterans centers and amplifies sex worker-led expertise.
We exist to make sex worker knowledge visible, respected, and resourced, especially in spaces where decisions are made about sex work without sex workers at the table.
YAS Veterans is a project of YAS Work, created to support sex work veterans as consultants, educators, and advisors. Our work challenges the idea that lived experience is informal or anecdotal. Instead, we name sex worker knowledge as professional, strategic, and essential.
Why YAS Veterans Exists
Sex workers are frequently asked to appear in media, research, policy conversations, and cultural projects, but are rarely invited to shape them. When sex worker expertise is excluded, the result is often harm: misinformation, stigma, unsafe practices, and extractive storytelling.
YAS Veterans was created to interrupt that pattern.
We believe that people with lived experience should be leading conversations about consent, safety, care, power, and ethics — not being consulted after decisions have already been made. Our work centers sex work veterans not as symbols or subjects, but as knowledge holders and consultants.
What We Do
YAS Veterans supports sex worker-led consulting across industries and community spaces. This work includes, but is not limited to:
Consent and boundary training
De-escalation and safety planning
Trauma-informed customer and community care
Anti-racism and power-aware facilitation
Digital privacy and ethical engagement
Education and media consultation
Rather than offering one-size-fits-all frameworks, we emphasize approaches grounded in real conditions, power dynamics, and harm reduction.
Sex Workers as Consultants
At the core of our work is a simple truth: sex workers have always been consultants.
Through navigating negotiation, risk, emotional labor, autonomy, and survival, sex workers develop skills that many organizations actively seek, often without recognizing their origin. YAS Veterans names this labor for what it is and creates space for it to be valued on its own terms.
Our YAS Veterans Hub is a growing library that explores how sex workers consult across different areas of practice. It is designed for organizations, educators, researchers, and community members who want to learn from sex workers, not extract from them.
Who We Work With
YAS Veterans collaborates with a wide range of partners, including:
Nonprofits and advocacy organizations
Mutual aid and community-based groups
Educators, researchers, and facilitators
Event organizers and cultural producers
Media and creative teams
We work best with groups that are committed to ethical engagement, shared responsibility, and meaningful inclusion, not performative consultation.
Here at YAS, we wholeheartedly know for a fact that pole dancing was invented by strippers. There is no further arguement.
How We Work
Our approach is rooted in:
Lived experience and community knowledge
Consent, autonomy, and harm reduction
Anti-racist and power-aware frameworks
Respect for anonymity and safety
Sustainable, non-extractive collaboration
We do not require disclosure, trauma narratives, or respectability performances. Sex workers are not asked to sanitize their expertise to make it more palatable.
About YAS Work
YAS Veterans is part of YAS Work, an organization dedicated to producing, supporting, and publishing sex worker-created media and educational projects. YAS Work exists to ensure that sex workers have control over how their stories, skills, and labor are represented and shared.
“YAS” derives from our original project, “Yes, a Stripper Podcast”.
Get Involved
Whether you are looking to learn, collaborate, or rethink how your organization approaches consent, safety, and care, we invite you to start with the knowledge already here.
Explore the YAS Veterans Hub
Read our consulting library
Follow along as the work grows
Sex worker expertise isn’t new, it’s just been ignored. YAS Veterans exists to change that.