Mister Prime Minister,
My name is Anna Kouroupou, I am a trans woman and for around 40 years in a row, I have been making a living as a sex worker.
In turn, you could very easily and with naivety, ask me why I chose this profession. I am sorry. I am sick of explaining it after all these years. There is no point. No meaning whatsoever. Your question will be a mere typicality, just like all the things you stand for.
I will say it again, I am tired of explaining the basics! I am no longer interested in convincing you of anything.
Mister Prime Minister, whatever I have received all these decades from each government and especially from your own institution, from this seat in which the same people alternate, has been discrimination, repression, a pimping exhibiting the same “qualities as those of a trafficker”, humiliation, degradation, and a violent refusal of whatever I am entitled to as a citizen of this country.
For this reason, I am saying, I am no longer trying. I can’t stand explaining what I am and particularly, why. Mr Mitsotakis, the qualities I got from my parents – two wonderful people who raised four children while being deprived of a lot – did not let me lose my path, as a being, as a human, as a citizen of the democratic country I had the misfortune of being born and raised in.
In sum, I don’t owe anything to your “house”. I don’t owe a thing to your state. And whatever belated debts I had, I paid back in full and with interest. In contrast to you. You owe me.
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Hundreds of nights that you stole from my life, spent in dirty cells in inhumane conditions, with inhumane guardians of order. So, so much money, which you forced me to pay for whatever prison sentence for an offence, which ALL OF YOU showed me in the worst possible way was the only thing I deserve, the only thing I am good for and to which you all pushed me harder and harder.
NO, I do not demand my mental stability from you. Because you are simply incapable of seeing the results of your decisions. That’s not your job.
Mr Mitsotakis, in the latest health crisis which hit the whole planet and reached our doorstep, I was once again a model citizen, doing exactly what you asked for, whether of your own volition or institutionally, through Mr Tsiodras. I didn’t even take advantage of my two dogs, to find an opportunity to get out of my house. I obeyed, as I deemed it right to do, to those who know better than me on this matter.
The only exceptions, the times I went out with Positive Voice’s Street Work Project team, offering whatever help I thought I could offer, to people more vulnerable than myself. Yes, they do exist.
Yes, Mr Mitsotakis. I became a sheep again, putting the people I love and care about above my own ego.
This f*cking personal responsibility, which you threw in my face when you didn’t even respect your own self, your voters, your children, and did exactly the opposite to what you preached with fiestas and honorary marble plaques without ANY security measures.
Mr Prime Minister, I am very angry.
Mr Mitsotakis, I am desperate.
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For forty years – I repeat – I have been solid in my responsibilities towards you. All of you. And yet I am left hanging more than ever.
I cannot work. You won’t let me and rightly so.
In the specific work – you may know – the measure of distancing does not hold! YET Ι am not entitled to a single euro, as financial aid, benefits – whatever name you give it – although prostitution, as the legislation calls it, is LEGAL in our country, and with your antics all these decades it is rendered illegal, with your own stamp of approval.
Mr Prime Minister. In a few days I will go hungry. My bills, as normality dictates, keep arriving. Colleagues of mine are already starving. Your indifference is provocative. Flashy, I would say. Mr Prime Minister… I am tired. You have made me tired.
You are destroying me a little more each day. With the same sadism I previously talked about.
Take a look around you. Don’t act like you are wearing blinders, because you are not. Do something. I demand that you see me, like you saw me when you emptied my dirty pockets.
With no respect whatsoever,
Anna Kouroupou
Director of Red Umbrella in Athens
