The way I was hooking at the time required no electronics. A short skirt and gorgeous legs still do a lot of the work for me, but at that time those assets were all I had. (The breasts would come, thankfully, just later.) I disliked social media, knew little of advertising as an escort online, and preferred choosing my clients by spotting them across the bar or, more frequently, the pool table, rather than inviting inquiries from men who were holding their phone in one hand and…not their phone in the other.

Doing sex work in this modality—the inspeak is “freestyling”—has no need for electronic money. You simply note the location of the nearest ATM and make sure he has a debit card in case he doesn’t already have enough cash on hand to make you give up your seat at the bar for whatever thrill lies with lying with him somewhere else. The rest is all handled in the good, old fashioned analog world.

I really like the analog world. Physical proximity can feel like a drug. Experiencing music, sounds, lights, views, smells, someone’s touch or just the feel of my clothes, or his when mine are already off, is the point of being alive. I’d rather touch a joystick than a keyboard, and I know you know what I mean because even my most terminally online reader doesn’t live online. You can’t. The Internet is not a place for bodies.

Moreover, as a trans woman, I spent most of my life feeling deeply uncomfortable in my analog body. But now, having (organically!) grown the breasts I always wanted, I can’t get enough of myself, nor of myself with others. I bask in the curvature of my new silhouette, the brush of my long curls sweeping across my cheeks when I’m dancing, or fucking. That’s one of the things I love about techno; it’s the same rhythm as my sex.

Fast forward three years and draw a Venn diagram in which “hacker,” “hooker,” “trans woman,” and “financial guru” are circles, then throw a dart towards it. If you hit the bull’s-eye, you find me.

My hooker origin story is not one of technical prowess or Hollywood-style hacks. There’s no moment in my past when a shadowy figure wearing a hoodie says, “we’re in.” But perhaps this supposed banality, what on the surface may appear to be simple necessity rather than extravagance, is part of what makes my story all the more impactful.

I didn’t adopt cryptocurrency because it was cool, or profitable. I did it because it was private, and powerful. I did it because when I finally did put up that dick sucking ad, all the horny guys who were otherwise easy enough to send to an ATM on our way to the hotel could only pay deposits with electronic money. And that pulled me back into a world of dystopian financial surveillance, personal doxxing threats, predatory payment services, and debanking risks.

I am special, but only because I am first. I am the new thing, a whore with a cryptocurrency wallet you can’t trace. I am the shape of things to come. I am showing you the thing more and more of us will be, by necessity even if not by desire. With me, it’s both.

Trans people make great hackers. We’re not all Matrix-inspired computer proteges. We don’t have to be, because hacking is not only about breaking into systems. Hacking is about breaking out of them, too. And the trans people still alive today have been doing that since birth.

We have broken out of oppressive gender systems. Systems that limit our experience and thus our comfort with the “opposite” sex. I cherish the time I spent during my youth as an effeminate boy because of how it taught me to enjoy the madness that fills a testosterone-fueled sex drive. We’ve broken out from under the control of computer systems designed for bureaucracy and corporate profit, rather than the beauty of interpersonal connection. And so is it really any surprise that, looking at the Venn diagram of who I am, I would find a way out of the rigged and corrupt financial system?

Pre-hooker and pre-transition me hated money. (I still have mixed feelings about it.) But looking back on things, it makes a lot of sense that as I’ve journeyed closer to femininity, my proximity with womanhood would lead to needing to break out of financial constraints. Doing that by combining sex and technology is, after all, among the most predictable of disloyal paths.

This blog will not be a tell-all. Discretion is the core business process, after all. This blog is simply a story.

Mine.