Sex Trade
Exploring the lives of transgender women on the street
By Baynard Woods
Published: September 5, 2012
http://citypaper.com/news/sex-trade-1.1368203If you drive up Charles Street past North Avenue late at night, you're likely to glimpse the seamy world of prostitutes and the johns who pick them up. Many of the women standing on the street corners and (in the words of one frustrated resident) "draped over" the cars began life as boys and turned to prostitution around the time they made their transition to womanhood, feeling that, as one of them put it, "it's the only way [for a transgender woman] to survive." Eventually, however, the perspective often flips around, and they come to see that getting off the street is the only way to survive.
For this story, four transgender women, each of whom had very different experiences of prostitution and the transition to living as a woman, told us their stories and allowed us to take portraits of them. They try to support each other as part of the Beautiful Me Sorority. Though these stories are in no way representative of the entire transgender community, we feel they offer a glimpse of lives rarely seen in print. We allowed them to use the names they use on the streets or web sites where they ply their trade.
