Trans Prostitution in Ireland

Ruhama is a government-funded Irish organisation that tells us its mission is to “support and empower women impacted by prostitution”. Recently, Ruhama has been supporting two sadistic, serial sex offender men who have taken to claiming that they are prostituted women. These men go by the names Samantha Otto and Barbie Kardashian.

I’ll start with Otto. Six years ago in Dublin, Otto, then aged 58, was up in court for pouring boiling water over another man’s face in an unprovoked assault. The victim was a young man to whom Otto had developed an attraction which was not reciprocated. Having stalked and harassed his victim for weeks, Otto eventually followed the young man into an amusement arcade where he found him sat playing at a slot machine. Otto got a cup of boiling water from the kitchen, came behind his victim, yanked his head back and poured the boiling water over his face. Our media lied to us that this was a woman-on-man attack. Otto got a suspended sentence.

Otto’s offending didn’t stop there. In October of 2022, he sexually assaulted an 18-year-old man in a laneway. In January of 2023, he sexually assaulted a 20-year-old autistic man in a laneway. In the first laneway case, Otto gestured at his victim with his penis; the victim photographed Otto, which led to his later being arrested and charged. In the second case, Otto forced his victim down the lane with his arm held behind his back before he forcefully removed his lower clothes and performed oral sex upon him. As he left, Otto got the victim to accept a “payment” of €20.

Otto is a brutal, sadistic, serial sex offender. So why, when he came to trial for the laneway sexual assaults, was Ruhama in court to support him? “A document from Ruhama, an NGO providing support to sex workers, was handed into court”, we are told. Otto’s counsel claimed that his client was, through poverty, forced to earn his living “on the streets”. So Ruhama was in court in support of Otto, we can surmise, because they had chosen to accept his claim to be a prostituted woman. Otto is neither a woman nor a prostitute.

Otto is a man. The court agreed that Otto is a man. When it came to sentencing, Judge Pauline Codd noted that Otto is not in possession of a gender recognition certificate to say he is a woman (we don’t know why he doesn’t have a GRC, as these are available on request under Irish law). This, the judge said, would prevent her from sending Otto to a women’s prison. Judge Codd further stated that the trans identity of the prisoner would cause a “difficulty” for that person while in prison, which she would take into account in sentencing. This was disturbing stuff from Judge Codd. The implication is inescapable that if Otto had had a GRC, then she would have sent him to a women’s prison, just as has happened with other men, including sex offender men, before him. And the further implication is that Otto got a lighter sentence than would have been the case had he not said he was a woman. Judge Codd’s remarks make it clear that men facing a prison sentence now have a strong pragmatic reason to claim that they are women. Otto got three years in prison for the first laneway assault and, at a subsequent trial for the second laneway assault, with a different judge this time, he got a further five consecutive years.

Even the media was forced to admit this time that Otto was a man. The Irish Times, which had shamelessly told its readers that the boiling water sadist was a woman, would, without explanation or apology for its previous lie, now describe Otto as a man. I expect the gesture Otto made when, as the court heard, he had “cupped his penis” at his victim, presented an insurmountable challenge to those journalists who had previously used only female pronouns when reporting on Otto.

And Otto is not a prostitute. He is too old. I learned a long time ago that the only male prostitutes are young male prostitutes. Let me tell you how I learned this.

It was in the summer of 1996 that a radio producer in RTE asked me to do some work on male prostitution in Dublin. I said I would. I had done a lot of work over the years speaking to prostituted women, so now I would look to speak to prostituted men. Obviously, I thought to myself, it would be a somewhat different type of prostitution scene to what I had been used to. Those buying would be gay men rather than straight men. Those selling would be desperate, drug-addicted men, rather than desperate, drug-addicted women. But, I thought, it would be basically an all-male version of the sort of prostitution scene I had been reporting on for years. As it turned out, I had got that all wrong.

I drove to the Phoenix Park of an evening and parked in the car park at the hollow near the Magazine Fort, which, I had heard, was a place where I might find the activity I was looking for. As soon as I parked, a prosperous-looking, middle-aged man who was sat in an SUV parked beside me started signalling to me to join him. I ignored him. No, Mister. I’m here to meet men selling sex, not buying it. I also found it surprising that he should mistake me for a seller. Surely, I didn’t look the part?

After a few minutes, I got out of my car and climbed the hill up to a wooded area overlooking the hollow. Near the brow of the hill, Caspar, who was with me, started barking excitedly into a thicket. Caspar was my dog. I looked beyond the thicket and saw two men (both fully dressed, I’m relieved to tell you) standing, looking over the car park below. Both were big, fit-looking men in their thirties. Both wore black leather jackets, the significance of which I had yet to grasp. When I introduced myself, they were friendly and jovial, and both spoke with strong rural accents. My first thought was that they might be undercover gardaí (policemen) keeping watch for possible illegal activity in the car park below. (Traditionally, in Ireland, policemen have been big, fit-looking men who speak with strong rural accents.) When I told them I was working for RTE, they started asking me about people they knew in my place of work who they wondered if I might know too. A typical Irish conversation, I thought. Then after a minute or two the penny dropped that they weren’t asking about random work colleagues of mine. They were asking about gay men.

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No, these two men would not be recording any interviews with me. They were here for the “action,” they told me. No money involved. Stay until nightfall, they said, and I would see plenty of action. “Married men are the best”, they assured me.

With that, Caspar and I headed back down to the car park and sat on a bench where, over the next several hours, I was repeatedly approached by men I had never met before who wanted to be sexually intimate with me. Many wore black leather jackets which, I now realised, was a signal to other, similarly inclined men as to why they were there. As men paired off with each other, some would make their way together into the surrounding woods. Others went back to one or the other of their parked cars, the steamed-up windows of which would soon attest to the vigorous activity going on within.

I presented my report on RTE Radio a few days later. My report included interviews with gay men from Britain who had heard that this was the place to come to in Dublin to get sex. I found no Irishmen willing to speak on the record. And, as I would tell programme host Myles Dungan, I saw no evidence of prostitution taking place.

That evening in the Phoenix Park was an eye-opening experience for me. I had gone looking for prostitution and what I had found instead was unrestrained, promiscuous, male, consensual sex.

There is no heterosexual equivalent of the Magazine Fort car park. Women are not interested in having sex with strange men. Before a woman will have sex with a man, she first has to like him. (Never mind the urban legend of “swinger parties” that no one ever seems to have actually gone to.) If there were places where straight men could call in on their way home from work, where they could meet women who just want to get naked and have sex with them, then those places would be popular. There are no such places. If straight men want anonymous sex, they have to pay for it in places known as brothels.

So straight men have to pay for sex, but gay men do not. That’s why I could not be a prostitute. Why would any man pay for the use of my body for sex when there are so many more men willing to provide their bodies for free? But, I have come to realise, I could have been a prostitute if I had started young enough. An older male body is not marketable for sex. A young male body is. Such young males have been known for centuries as rent boys.

Before I left RTE some years ago, I compiled a number of archive programmes of my work, one of which included interviews I took with former rent boys whom I had met at a homeless persons’ welfare office, then at Charles Street in Dublin, in 1990. A middle-aged man I met there told me how, in the 1950s, as a kid who had fled his home in Cavan, he had arrived in Dublin with nowhere to live and learned to earn his money at the public toilets at St Stephen’s Green. A teenager I met, Thomas, had exited prostitution much more recently. He had run away from home due to an impossible situation with his mum’s new boyfriend. Thomas took me to the public toilets that were then at Burgh Quay in Dublin City centre, and showed me where he had earned his money in the cubicles therein. Thomas got out of prostitution with the help of one Sister Fiona, to whom he remains eternally grateful whenever I have met him since, which I have done several times, by chance, in Dublin City centre over the years.

So rent boys can make money through prostitution; older men cannot. Only in his dreams is Samantha Otto, a man in his sixties, a prostitute. It seems to me to be a common fantasy of trans-identified men that they are an object of desire to heterosexual men. No doubt Otto gets satisfaction out of having his fantasy validated by the media, the legal profession, and by groups such as Ruhama, and even in one case, by a government minister. There is a disturbing picture online in which Otto is posing with the then-Justice Minister Helen McEntee. Otto is holding a copy of a Ruhama report which was published in December of 2023, and this looks like a photo taken at the launch of that report. Otto was already under a suspended sentence for the boiling water attack at that stage, and he was facing charges for two sexual assaults. If our Justice Minister wants to pose with violent sex offenders, then there are plenty such men available in our prisons, but she won’t do that because those men don’t wear dresses. Otto shows us how a sadistic sex predator can transform himself into a victim simply by claiming to be a woman.

Now let’s move on to Barbie Khardashian, another male sex offender who says he is a prostituted woman and who, like Otto, has been receiving support from Ruhama. Barbie is a young man, forty years younger than Otto. It seems to me to be at least plausible that there are men out there who would be willing to pay Barbie for sex, but I still don’t believe he is a prostitute.

After Barbie was released from prison in October 2025, he got council housing in the town of Enfield, County Meath, an adjacent county to Dublin. This seemed surprising to many observers at the time that a single young man should be allocated a whole house to himself when there are many families in Ireland homeless at the moment. But I expect the council had its reasons, not the least of which would be that Barbie, as a sex offender, would be a vulnerable person in hostel accommodation. (I suppose we should be thankful that Barbie wasn’t sent to a women’s hostel, which is what happened with a previous trans-ID man on his release from prison, with disastrous results for the women therein.

Barbie loves publicity and, since his release, he has given lots of interviews to journalists, starting with me as he exited the prison gates. Barbie has since then been telling journalists that he is making money as a prostitute. He claims to have been bringing men to his house and making pornographic videos with them for publication. He is now facing eviction by the council for breach of his tenancy agreement, and Ruhama has been making representations on his behalf to prevent that eviction.

Barbie is nothing if not a fantasist. Unlike Otto, who attacks his victims physically, Barbie’s speciality in prison was to subject captive women to detailed descriptions of the gruesome, sexualised tortures he would like to inflict on them. “I like hearing women cry, that gives me pleasure”, he told me. He further told me, as he spoke to me outside the prison gates, that it was his intention to now become a porn star; he would get a designer vagina and have himself filmed having sex with lots of men. I don’t believe that Barbie has had his male parts cut off and replaced, no more than Otto has done. So my belief is that Barbie’s brothel in Enfield and related porn-movie business is just another of his fantasies.

Real brothel-keepers don’t disclose their location in interviews with the newspapers, as Barbie does. And men visiting brothels do that furtively; the last thing they want is to have someone filming them. But not the men at Barbie’s brothel, it seems. Barbie tells us: “during some of the encounters I asked the men if they could let me film ourselves having sex and they said yeah and that I could put the videos up online”. This is a totally implausible story. And yet Ruhama says they believe Barbie. As with the Otto case, with Barbie we are seeing a sadistic sex predator manage to get himself accepted as a victim merely by putting on a dress and claiming he is a woman.

So let’s talk about real trans-identified prostitutes. As I write this, I’m looking at a website of “transgender escorts” currently available in Ireland. There’s 51 of these men in all on this website. They all furnish details about themselves to prospective buyers.

In their photographs, many of the men look grotesque, as men in drag generally do. Others look more feminine, although we can’t know how much those photographs correspond to reality. They flaunt big breasts, which they presumably have as a result of hormones they have been taking. They mostly provide the length and girth of their penises. (“Victoria” from Spain tells us: “Penis 10″ long, 5″ girth”.) A few give their penis description as “pre-op”. None of these men have had their male parts removed. Under “anal preference,” many list both “anal giving” and “anal receiving”. No sane person can believe that these men are women.

Under “sexual orientation”, these men who say they are women variously describe themselves as “hetero”, “homo” or “bi”, all of which is mind-boggling. Most say they are “young” although some are into their thirties, which makes me realise that the shelf-life of a male prostitute can be extended beyond the rent boy years if he is willing to dress in drag. All seem to be of South American or Spanish nationality, and they describe themselves as “on tour” in Ireland. They charge anything from €100 up to several hundred for a visit or an overnight.

To help myself try to understand this type of prostitution, I put a query out on X (Twitter) about what people might know. A woman asked to Direct Message me. Her story is a sad one. She left her husband because of his obsession with trans prostitutes and moved to Britain to make a new life without him. She writes:

My now ex-husband was purchasing sex from these kinds of men as far back as 2011, that I know of. Maybe further back, who knows? But you need to understand it’s not just Dublin, Cork, etc. It’s small towns ALL over the country. Many of them will live in the UK or the Netherlands or somewhere, set up loads of appointments in advance, and then either travel (or are trafficked??) to Ireland to spend a weekend or a week at a time. One of the hotels was in the small town I lived near, the kind of place you’d bring your granny on a Sunday for a carvery and that most locals would have had their wedding receptions and Christenings…

This is a bit of a stream of consciousness, Paddy, hopefully it makes sense:

It made me question my self-image and my femininity. It muddled my mind… I was destroyed; I was depressed, my self-esteem and self-confidence were shattered, and I ended up with crippling agoraphobia.

Was I that unattractive that in some way I drove him to these hyper-feminine-presenting men?

I wasn’t capable of sleeping in our shared bedroom anymore. Or changing in front of him. Because was I so disgusting to him that I drove him to seek out these men?

I think there’s a lot of denial tied up in some of the “purchasers’” minds, to be honest, Paddy. I asked him why, if he was gay, could he not have left and lived a happy life without ever dragging me into it and wasting my childbearing years?

He denied he was gay. So I said “OK, bisexual, then”, but he denied that too. When I said that men who have sex with men aren’t straight, so it’s one of the two, he kind of spat back at me that they WERE women to him, because, basically, they’d had boob jobs.

But I haven’t really gone into the pornography I’d found on all the devices in the house before I ever found out about the escorts… “tranny” type stuff.

Very hyper-feminine-looking young men with really convincing boob jobs.

Christ above knows, I didn’t have a clue until I was finding all this crap on our laptop and tablet those years ago!!!

All this stuff tied up with youth. I wouldn’t say any of those young guys was over 25 to be honest.

I think the woman writing to me here is right to say there is denial going on with these men; from both those buying sex and those selling. The buyers get to pretend that they are straight men and the sellers get to pretend that they are women. A male homosexual act has now been converted, to the satisfaction of both parties, into a heterosexual act. You wonder how Ruhama and all the other trans-rights supporters can subscribe to homophobic rubbish such as this.

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Now I’ll tell you about my own experience of Ruhama’s history of dishonesty in dealing with the public. In August of 2009, Ruhama made the astonishing claim that there had been “an increase in street-based prostitution among Irish women since the economic downturn… due to poverty”.

I was gobsmacked by Ruhama’s claim, and more than a little sceptical of it. All the women I had ever met in prostitution were there to pay for their addiction, which was sometimes alcohol but more often heroin. I had never yet met a prostituted woman whose family had decided that, faced with household bills, Mum should dress up in high heels and a mini-skirt and totter along by the canal at Baggot Street in Dublin of an evening to call out “Do you want a good time, love?” to male passers-by and then provide those men with same, as if prostitution was just another way of earning a bit of extra money. But the newspapers, especially the tabloids, chose to believe Ruhama, which was to be expected as prostitution makes good copy.

I wrote to Ruhama and asked them what evidence they had to support their claim that there had been an increase in street prostitution. I got no answer, to begin with. Next, I took to Baggot Street with my recorder to spend some evenings walking the canal bank, and speaking to women I met there. A few days later, I presented my report and interviews on RTE Radio. All the women I spoke to were there to pay for their addiction. And, as I told programme host Pat Kenny, my own strong impression over the years was that the level of street prostitution in Dublin was not increasing but was in steady decline. And I was able to report that I had finally got a response, if not an answer, from Ruhama about what evidence they had for their claim about “ordinary” women turning to prostitution. Ruhama told me they didn't have the resources to do the research I wanted, and that I would have to do it myself. Of course, I had not asked them to do any research for me.

Rumaha had no evidence to back their claim. The economic recession came and went with no sign of there ever having been a surge in street prostitution. Then, in 2017, the purchase of sex was made illegal in Ireland; any man caught kerb-crawling to buy sex is now liable to find himself up in court. That effectively killed off street prostitution, but it had been in decline long before, as it was replaced with the use of the mobile phone and online websites to make arrangements between sellers and buyers. Immigration has further undermined street prostitution as foreign-staffed brothels have become plentiful and ubiquitous in Ireland. This has led Ruhama to claim, in recent years, that 97% of prostitution in Ireland now involves non-Irish women. I expect they’re right about that when it comes to indoor prostitution, but they are gravely wrong, in my opinion, to say that prostitution among Irish women is diminishing.

I have been reporting on crime and drug abuse for more than forty years, and I have never before found myself meeting so many prostituted Irish women. Crack cocaine has taken over from heroin as the most destructive drug on Ireland’s streets. And whereas heroin-addicts are generally a fairly torpid lot once their daily fix has been sorted, crack-addicts seem to need their drug every few hours and, accordingly, their behaviour is reckless, volatile and desperate. “Smack” is a street term for heroin and I tell you that in order to explain a piece of street wisdom with which I concur: a crackhead is worse than a smackhead.

Crack-addicted men will beg and steal to feed their habit. Crack-addicted women will beg and steal and then, through desperation, may engage in casual prostitution. I met Teresa, 49, recently at a homeless person’s social welfare office in Dublin. She was carrying a clear plastic bag with her possessions in it that made it obvious that she had just been released from prison that morning. Teresa told me on my podcast that she no longer does street prostitution, so now, to feed her crack habit, she begs. But, she says “If I’m sitting for hours and hours outside a shop and a fellah comes along and offers €200 to go back to his place, of course”. More recently, outside the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin, a homeless woman who had just been up for trespassing told me that the reason she had been sleeping on the landing of an apartment block was that if she slept in a laneway she would be constantly harassed by “men looking for blowjobs”. Crack-addicted women generally in Dublin tell me that the main reason that they don’t accept homeless hostel accommodation is that they have to be in by a certain hour, while the most lucrative opportunities for getting money from men occur after the late-night pubs of Camden Street and the Temple Bar are emptying out.

So just because Ruhama can’t see it doesn’t mean that Irish women are not being prostituted. These are the women who Ruhama needs to “support and empower” rather than looking to trans-identified sex offenders as a new growth area to justify their existence.

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