Anything that is going to be good for sex workers is going to be good for women across the board. Less women in jail is going to be good for all of us.

Everyone's politics are born of self-interest, particularly around sexuality. We just have to own up to that.

The biggest difference in what's going on in New Zealand versus the rest of the world, aside from the decriminalization of sex work, is that sex workers were actually part of the decriminalization process. There was a provision in that legal change stating sex workers would be part of an evaluation committee, and in 2008, they were, they were a part of the committee determining whether or not decriminalization worked. They are continually regarded as stakeholders - in their communities, but also in the legal process. That's such a different way of operating.

Almost everything I've learned about journalism has been from other friends who are journalists, taking advantage of the money I hope they don't think they threw away at j-school. I studied comparative literature, but the professional vagaries of journalism I've learned through other people's trial and error, and my own.

This is the hardest thing to articulate: I think that there is a legitimate space for sexual commerce. And like every other industry, particularly the service industry, the workers are getting the short end of the stick. Are there some industries that just shouldn't exist? Yes. But I don't think the sex industry is one of them. As it currently operates it's not damaging, necessarily, but it might itself be damaged. It's busted.

Look at how successful the domestic workers movement has been. But it's different when it's your husband hiring someone. Domestic workers quite literally say, "You need to get your house in order. You can't join this movement unless you look at yourself." And they're very forgiving, amnesty for everyone. "You haven't been paying into your nanny's unemployment insurance? That's cool, we'll teach you how to get right and go from there." What would the parallel be around sex workers? I don't know if there can be one.

Looking at the huge number of transgender women of color who have been murdered since the beginning of the year - that we know of - the number has reached seven or eight at this point, maybe even nine, since the start of 2015. The number of those women involved in sex work is not a piece that gets lifted up in news reports. Sometimes people want to bury that, because they don't want to say anything that might make it seem as though those women were asking for it. We're still living with the idea that sex work somehow marks people as acceptable targets for violence.