Billie Lee, Former Vanderpump Rules Star and Trans Activist, Redefines Empowerment: Embracing S*x Work Amidst Unemployment Challenges" - lulu

Billie Lee.Credit : 

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Billie Lee is opening up about the impact of her gender identity on her employment history.

The Vanderpump Rules alum, 41, discussed the setbacks she faced as a transgender woman in the job market during a recent appearance on the Oldish podcast. When she first moved to Los Angeles and applied for serving jobs, Lee said many restaurants hired based on attractiveness. 

“They would love my resume because I have all this serving experience from college,” she explained. “And then they would see me and then be like, they wouldn't hire me. They were just like, ‘No, we don't know what the hell this is.’ ”

“Even when I worked at SUR on Vanderpump, it was about being attractive, being sexy, wearing sexy clothes,” she noted of her brief stint on season 6 of the hit Bravo show.

Billie Lee.

Oldish Podcast/YouTube

Shocked by her admission, cohosts Brian Austin Green and Sharna Burgess asked how Lee supported herself, and she shared that she turned to sex work.

“Because our unemployment rate is so high — it still is — for trans people, a lot of us do lean on sex work,” she explained. “Because we are all so fetishized and over-sexualized.”

Lee then defined the “sex work” she was doing in her early 20s as being “paid to do sexual things.”

“I find it very empowering now,” she added. “I'm a pleaser — I'm a people pleaser, which is hard if someone's mad at you —  but I'm also just a pleaser in general. So whenever I became a sex worker, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I can get off pleasing these men and also get paid.’”

While she doesn’t do sex work anymore (Lee recently wrote a book, hosts a podcast and does stand-up comedy), she still remembers the satisfaction she used to feel from her time in the industry.

“Like, the other day, I was charging my car and some guy was hitting on me,” she recalled. “And if they notice that I'm trans and I don't accept, they're like, ‘Oh, give me your Instagram or your phone number.’ Then they'll be like, ‘Well, how much?’ And the back of my head is like, ‘Oh, I could make some easy money right now.’ ”

“There's something empowering about wanting to lean back into it because that was kind of what we had as survival, and it just became a way of life for me,” Lee continued. 

Billie Lee.

 Michael S. Schwartz/Getty 

She went on to say that being transgender can often feel like “society is beating you up,” so having sex with a man who treated her like “a queen” boosted her confidence in times when she wasn't secure in her own body.

Still, Lee admitted that things were also “scary” at times.

“I have to say, I was pretty blessed when I came to sex work,” she acknowledged. “There were times when I would first enter a hotel room, you do certain things that you learn. Like, I would check-in to make sure that the front desk saw me. And I would check and make sure where the cameras were, security cameras. And then I would have a pocket knife up in my coat, like, in my coat sleeve. I would do a check throughout the entire room, like in any cabinets in the bathroom and stuff like that, before I would get on the bed. So you do like little things to protect yourself in that way.”

“But I had really amazing clients who like treated me with respect and wine and dined me,” she concluded. “I was in hotels in Beverly Hills, you know, so I wasn't on the street, which a lot of my sisters are.”