Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics

COYOTE is an American rights organization. Its name is a backronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, a reflection of the fact that sex work tends to be stigmatized primarily because of society-imposed standards of ethics. COYOTE's goals include the decriminalization (as opposed to the legalization) of prostitution, pimping and pandering, as well as the elimination of social stigma concerning sex work as an occupation.

COYOTE provides counseling and legal referrals for sex workers, and assistance in leaving sex work for different careers.

COYOTE provides expert advice and sensitivity training for social service and law enforcement agencies that deal with sex workers. COYOTE members have testified as expert witnesses during trials. The organization works to educate the general public about sex work, and promotes education about safe sex, AIDS and sexually transmitted disease among sex workers, their clients and the general public.

COYOTE was founded in San Francisco in 1973 by Margo St. James, a feminist and former sex worker, along with Jennifer James, a Seattle-based professor of anthropology. Margo St. James had previously been arrested and convicted of a prostitution offense at age 25, but overturned the conviction after studying law for a year at Lincoln University San Francisco. She chose the name COYOTE because novelist Tom Robbins called her a "coyote trickster" and came up with "Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics" to fit the chosen backronym. St. James believed that sex work should be considered labor equivalent to any other career, writing in 1977 that "to make a great distinction between being paid for an hour's sexual services, or an hour's typing, or an hour's acting on a stage is to make a distinction that is not there."

...
Wikipedia