The Right to Work

Across the US, the decriminalization of sex work has become increasingly popular, provoking intense debates within communities. But what role, if any, will the police play?

Tamika Spellman grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, the child of a steelworker father and a homemaker mother. Although both of her parents were devoutly religious, when the teenage Spellman—who hadn't yet begun her gender transition and was still living as a male—impregnated her girlfriend, their main concern was that she wouldn't finish high school. They offered to help support her child, who was living with his mother, but Spellman's older brothers also relied on the family to get by, and Spellman hated feeling like a burden. "That's my kid," she said. "My parents didn't raise me to shirk my responsibilities."

For a while, Spellman had trouble finding a part-time job—unemployment plagued upstate New York in the 1980s. She moved between low-paying gigs, struggling to make enough money to care for her baby while continuing her schooling, but eventually graduated and began plotting her next move.

One night, on a whim, Spellman had sex with an older man who gave her some money as he left. That brief, surprise exchange, both exhilarating and casual, revealed what seemed like a practical path to survival, one she was willing to follow without self-judgment. Recalling it, she channels her younger self. "I was like, hmmm," she said. "Pretty sweet."

Spellman didn't think of herself as entering "the life," a preconceived idea of sex work that would take over her own, or assuming an identity that would eclipse everything else about her. Sex work was, simply put, work. And in the time since then, Spellman, who is now fifty-four, has supported herself, her son, and, eventually, her widowed mother largely through sex work. She used sex work to pay for college, and, later, for her gender transition. When she had another baby, she began supporting him as well. She stayed close with her parents, despite her mother's refusal to call Spellman by her chosen name ("I cannot change her," Spellman told me, "I can only change me."). Over the past decade, she has become one of Washington, DC's most visible activists for sex-worker rights. In her work as an advocacy coordinator, and now as head of the department, at Honoring Individual Power & Strength (HIPS), a DC-based harm-reduction organization, she has addressed more politicians and lawmakers than most Americans could likely name, and has been featured in so many news articles that she has often had to take to Twitter, where she is prolific, to tell journalists she needs a break.

Spellman's work as an activist is rooted in her conviction that sex work helped her forge her own path—economically and otherwise—but that it remains a profession fraught with unnecessary peril. In 1988, three years after graduating high school, Spellman joined the military, thinking "it would look good on a résume" and because she wanted the benefits. One night, while out at a bar trying to get some side work—"I knew this particular spot had a thing for military personnel," she said—she was drugged and raped. At the base, she told her commanding officer what had happened and was dismayed by the response. "All they wanted to know was, did I know anyone else at the base who was gay?" she said. Discharged and far from her family, she felt "completely lost." Since then, as a sex worker, she has struggled with drug addiction and homelessness, and has been the victim of anti-Black racism and transphobia, losing out on jobs she felt she deserved and enduring discrimination in the jobs she did get; before becoming an activist, Spellman's only consistent work was in fast food restaurants where, she says, she was relegated to the kitchen with...