What’s the Best Way to Protect Sex Workers? Depends on Whom You Ask.

There are two competing bills in New York: One would punish pimps and customers, while the other would decriminalize the entire trade.

TS Candii first traded sex at age 13, after she was forced out of her family home in Tennessee. To survive, she decided to lie about her age, she said, taking refuge with a group of older transgender women who became her mentors. They taught her how to support herself through sex, warning that she would have few options in the formal economy, which is often intolerant of trans people. Now a New Yorker, Ms. Candii, a 27-year-old trans woman, has since tried to find other forms of work, but at each of the jobs she has held, including managing a gas station and working as a private investigator, she has faced some combination of discrimination, docked pay and termination in response to her identity, so she has always ended up back in the trade. “Sex work saved my life,” she said. Shaquana Blount’s perspective is different. She also entered the sex trade as a teenager, but not by choice. In Brooklyn, she was coerced into selling sex by someone who presented himself as her boyfriend and found herself drawn further into “the life,” working with different pimps over time. When she was 16, a date with a violent client landed her in the hospital; later, working at a strip club, she endured racial abuse from patrons that eroded her self-esteem. “It began to break me down as a person,” she said.