One of the biggest things going on in London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York right now is gentrification. Every major city is dealing with gentrification, and it's always the sex workers they come for first. Cities feel they have to clean up their image and make themselves more attractive for tourism, more attractive to businesses. The Gezi Park struggle in Turkey a few years ago, for example, was a popular movement defending public space and land. What I found when I was digging into the goings on there was that the park was a place where transgender sex workers felt safe.

Work doesn't have to be great in order to dignify it as work. Work just is. It's quite value-neutral. The issue is about what kinds of power and control you have at work as a human being. That's the commonality. It's not necessarily what the task is.

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.

I wouldn't advocate for a feminism that's buttoned-up and divorced of the messiness of our real lives. Your feelings are your feelings, but you're not going to litigate your feelings about my body. The feminist ethics that I signed up for were respect for my bodily autonomy, that my experience is my experience, and that I'm an expert in my own life.

Sex workers are the last women police stand in to protect. Sex workers are the last people that room is made for in many ways. You get a different kind of feminism if you put people at the margins at the center. It's a recently resonant lesson, but black feminists have been saying this for decades. Now when I talk to people engaged in sex workers' rights advocacy and people who identify as intersectional feminists, this is the air they breathe. We can't just make feminism about improving the lives of all women. Because there is no such thing as all women and universal female experience.

One person was basically saying that feminists aren't interested in criminalizing prostitutes, that they don't want to do that. I responded that whether or not they want to, that is what is happening on the ground.

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.