 Being trans, everyone doesn't have that look that you can walk in the daytime, or you can go and have a regular nine to five jobs. There is a lot of transgender people doing sex work because they don't find any job. It's a survival thing. I immigrated to this country when I was 14. When I get to New York City, I don't have no family here. I don't have no friends or place to go. Piani Garcia is a trans woman and activist who grew up in the Mexican city of Veracruz. In 2005, she paid a coyote to smuggle her across the border. She was hoping to find a community that would accept her sexuality. After living on the street for months, Garcia says she was taken in by middle-aged Columbia men who used her immigration status to intimidate her into working for him as an underage sex worker. I do sex work for him. He always takes the money. He doesn't give me money to me. He forced me to do it because he was, you know, treating me by calling the police. She eventually escaped and landed a job busing tables at a Manhattan restaurant. When Garcia started taking hormones to begin transitioning, she says her changing appearance caused her to lose her job. I was looking for a job for three months and I didn't find anything. I had to pay my bills, rents and everything. I decided to do sex work. But at this time, no one was forcing me to do it. I keep the money and I really decide who I want to, like, you know, have sex with. It's a survival thing. Today, Garcia works for the non-profit Make the Roe, New York, INDS campaign to decriminalize prostitution, which would prevent law enforcement from intervening in the selling of sex, between consenting adults. Decriminalization bills have floundered in New York and Washington, D.C. And in recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted attention away from the issue. But advocates hope that the latest push for criminal justice reform could re-energize the movement. The first step is for policymakers to acknowledge that, for many people, selling sex is their best option for survival, and criminalizing that choice only makes their lives more difficult. Survival sex is just that. It is survival. I have no other alternative. I need this money. I'm going to do it. That is a cognizant choice. You may not have had the best of options on the table, but you made a choice. Nat Pa is a formal policy chair for National Survival Network. She says lawmakers and advocates conflict consensual sex work by adults with human trafficking. If you're making a conscious choice, it is not trafficking. If there are elements of forced fraud or coercion, and you have a third-party controller who is doing the forced fraud or coercion, that is when it becomes trafficking. Yes, there is the possibility that someone is trafficked and forced into those situations. But the vast majority of consensual sex work is just work. People are surviving, needing their day-to-day needs by selling sex. The federal government has earmarked funding to local police departments to crack down on trafficking, but local law enforcement agencies often use that money to run sting operations that lead to the arrest of sex workers who are over the age of 18 and acting voluntarily. In December 2019, members of the nonprofit Honor Individual Power and Strength organized a Kiki Ball in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. We're having an amazing time. End violence against sex workers. Kiki Ball is here, D.C. Number 17. We love you. Come on. Charisse Monay is a former sex worker and advocate, supporting the trans community in the D.C. area. And he's gonna give power to clap their hands. I need you to clap your hands. With sex work, you know, a lot of people don't see it as survival work as I do, because being trans, everyone doesn't have that look that you can walk in a daytime, or you can go and have a regular nine to five jobs, so they turn that 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sex working job where it's safe. We don't get misgendered. We don't get harassed for coming to a workplace. We don't get questioned about what bathroom we use, and they have to change the bathroom sign. You're in your own home. You deal with one individual. So be it, it's a nasty dance, but it's a dance that is done every day. In 2019, two of Monay's friends are Shanti Carmen and Zoe Spears, who are also trans sex workers, were shot and killed in the D.C. suburbs. So one never knows what actually transpired that evening, other than they were murdered senselessly. Last year, Garcia was attacked with pepper spray on the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens. You can get beat up on the street and you cannot go to the police to do a report. That's unfair. In New York, sex workers are sometimes arrested because of a 1976 law that criminalized law uterine for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense. Within the sex worker community, that law is known as walking white trans. In 2019, a handful of New York state senators introduced legislation that would have repealed that law, but the efforts did not succeed. I can only imagine what it was like to be walking down the street and to be pulled out and being harassed by police officers. Clearly, we need to do something now. Garcia has had several interactions with the criminal justice system, including serving time for assault in 2010. Although she says she was acting in self-defense during a homophobic attack, she served time in Rikers. They put me in a male facility. I was 19 years old at that time and it was so difficult. They didn't give me hormones, no women's clothes, nothing like that. As a survivor of sex trafficking, Garcia says the criminalization of sex work only makes it harder for victims to report abuses. When I was forcing to do sex work, the option of going to the police passed by my head, but I was afraid of going because of the work that I was doing. I know that it's illegal and they can arrest me. Decriminalizing sex work is going to help those who are getting trafficking to not feel afraid of going to the police. If you are not afraid of one, forcemate, if you're not afraid of going to the police because you're no longer the target, in theory, police would then be able to focus on the abuse instead of just these massive street sweeps. When Garcia got out of jail, she joined to Crime New York, a new coalition that helped draft the bill to decriminalize sex work in the state. I have many conversations with people that do survival sex work. I can say that most of the people that are saying decriminalizing sex work is not okay are people that never in their lives have the experience of settling their body to eat. With sex work, I pay my mom's bills. I pay my mother's rent. I pay my mother's insurance. And doing that type of work, the stigma can be heavy on you. But for yourself, you're not sitting there saying that I give up. I am hustling. I'm surviving.