I've moved away from writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work, whether mine or anybody else's, because the culture is obsessed with the behavior of sex workers. They want to figure out why they do what they do and who they are. What I'm trying to do is to shift the focus onto the producers of the anti-sex work discourse: the cops, the feminists, the anti-prostitution people. Those are the people whose behavior needs to change.

I've moved away from writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work, whether mine or anybody else's, because the culture is obsessed with the behavior of sex workers. They want to figure out why they do what they do and who they are. What I'm trying to do is to shift the focus onto the producers of the anti-sex work discourse: the cops, the feminists, the anti-prostitution people. Those are the people whose behavior needs to change.

Most people aren't encouraged to think of their labor as very valuable. We usually think of it as the necessary thing we engage in in order to survive. We live in a world where our ability to survive is connected to our ability to draw a paycheck. But there are other ways of organizing labor and culture. For example, people who are pushing for fixed universal base income, or a welfare system that separates wage labor from the compensation required to survive. It was only when I thought of those alternatives that I was able to really understand what we mean when we say sex work is work.

It doesn't service anyone any to say, "This is a terrible violation in any circumstance always," because that robs us of our ability to write our own lives. I've had people cheat on me and it's been devastating, and I've had people cheat on me and felt that it showed their true colors.

When I interviewed the evangelical Christian youth group who were protesting the Village Voice, I wanted them to feel they could freely tell me things like, "Did you know that 90 percent of prostitutes don't want to be doing it?" Is that unfair? That's sort of an invisible privilege for me.

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.

In New Zealand, sex workers are regarded as workers, as people who are members of the community, people who have a stake in the community - not just in the workplace, but in the broader community. They aren't objects to be controlled and regulated. They are not collateral evidence of a crime. They are human beings.