Inside a world of danger: Life as a transgender sex worker

EVERY MORNING, in the empty hours between midnight and dawn, a thousand stories are told on Old York Road. Tales of desperation, isolation, resignation.

Above all, tales of danger.

Transgender women, about a dozen at a time, wrap themselves in body-clinging outfits, their nails long, hair crimped. They coo at passing drivers, greet them with a smile.

At first glance, it's easy to reduce these women to caricatures of grinning prostitutes eager to trade their bodies for a few bucks. But take the time to talk with them - as the Daily News did this week - and more complex realities emerge:

* A teen forced to drop out of high school because of her classmates' harassment.

* A young woman driven from one job and unable to find another for the same reasons.

* A woman pushing 50, set in the only lifestyle she's ever known.

For them, sex work is not an option, but a reluctant necessity.

Kiesha Jenkins lived and died in this world. In the pocket of Hunting Park where she was gunned down during a botched robbery Oct. 6, women still walk the streets. Jenkins was a member of their community; her loss cut them to the core.

If anything positive could come from her brutal slaying, maybe it could be the impetus for illuminating the tumultuous underground world of transgender prostitutes, mere blocks from the bustle and congestion of Broad Street.

Jade, 21, says she's "wasting her youth" on the streets. She regrets quitting her job at Burger King - but she'd felt trapped, bullied by co-workers and customers.

"I wasn't going to leave on their terms," she says, her eyes trained on the cars that crawl past. "At the end of the day, I felt enough stress in my life without those people harassing me."

The streets of Hunting Park are not where she expected to be working while she was growing up in Paramus, N.J., across the river from Manhattan.

"A lack of options pushed me into this," she says. "I'm a human being, I'm someone, too. I shouldn't have to feel like I'm below human."

She hates how degrading sex work is, how the men belittle her, telling her that she "needs their money."

It's gotten to the point where she only comes out a few times a month, when her accounts are low and she needs to eat. Her job applications have gone unanswered.

"I'm being pushed out for being who I am," she says. "It's like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I be myself?"

When she was a manager at a Wawa in South Jersey, Cee Cee didn't have to wonder if her next customer would demand his money back. Or try to kill her.

But when she started her hormone therapy, she had days when people would "clock" her - make comments on her appearance as a transgender woman.

"I was a girl that was against this," she says, gesturing to the other women walking the vacant streets near Old York Road. "I wanted a regular life, but I needed money, I wanted my surgeries fast."

A former high school track star, she hopes to raise the $20,000 she needs to complete her transition in the next three years. She'll get body implants, and she'll have her trachea shaved to surgically reduce the cartilage in her throat and make the shape more feminine.

And then, she says, she'll walk away.

"I want to do the regular white-picket-fence stuff," she says. "I want Christmases, I want a family, I want to have a house.

"I figure I can come out here, get my money and move on."

Cee Cee, 25, has been in this lifestyle for a little more than a year, during which she has been screamed at, taunted.

One night, the driver of a van threw a fork wrapped in tin foil at her. Another time, a client who claimed he didn't know she was transgender demanded his money back, then put his hands around her throat until she agreed.

Last week, a client who wanted half his money back after a dispute chased her down the street with a gun.

"I don't think he wanted to kill me, because he could have shot me in the car," says Cee Cee, who called upon her glory days as a runner to escape that violent john. "He probably wanted to rob me, figured I was carrying cash on me."

According to a Pennsylvania survey in 2011 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 74 percent of transgender people surveyed were harassed or mistreated on the job; 26 percent had lost their jobs for being transgender.

"The discrimination forces them into all kinds of alternative work, or causes them to fall back into the closet, to feel as if they can't live in their gender identity," said Levana Layendecker, the Philly-based deputy executive director of Equality PA, a statewide advocacy group pushing for increased legal protection from transgender discrimination.

"Having to live outside the mainstream economy makes it difficult, almost impossible to do basic things like pay rent or get a credit history, things that make life possible to live," she said. "And the choices outside of regular employment can be devastating."

Exact statistics about violence against transgender prostitutes are difficult to nail down.

"Because these trans women are engaging in sex work, when they're robbed, assaulted or raped, they don't report it to police; they don't want to be criminalized," said Naiymah Sanchez, coordinator of the TransHealth Information Project at GALAEI, a gay Latino social-justice organization in North Philly.

"The things that get reported are murders, because they have to be reported."

Through GALAEI's outreach-and-support programs, Sanchez has had countless conversations with transgender women who engage in sex work.

They give her a variety of reasons: lack of support from their families, discrimination at work or in school, a desperate need for income.

"I don't tell them to do anything. I only show them what their options are," Sanchez said. "I can't pass judgment or say, 'Change your life, stop sex-working.' "

Instead, Sanchez helps the women develop a backup plan to get out of that lifestyle. And she gives them advice for staying safe during that process.

It's firsthand experience: Sanchez herself was a sex worker, walking the streets until a run-in with an undercover vice cop landed her in the back of a police van.

It was a wake-up call: She got a college degree and dedicated herself to changing opinions about transgender people.

"Discrimination doesn't just affect people in this lifestyle, but the people surrounding them, too - their family and friends," Sanchez said.

"You're targeting her mother; do you want her to struggle and cry over her child?"

Sanchez is glad that attention was drawn to the transgender sex workers in the wake of Kiesha Jenkins' slaying. But she said it shouldn't take such an extreme act to raise awareness.

"You should care, just like you should care if anybody gets murdered," she said.

"No one deserves to be killed. If I deserve to be killed for being a transgender women or for being a sex worker, then someone else deserves to be killed for being a bad father or for going to jail."

Dakar's been "on the stroll" since 1979, when she was 13. Back when the sex workers congregated at Old York Road and Duncannon Avenue, near a park they jokingly called "Fire Island," a reference to the New York island that is popular among gays.

"No one in my family thought I'd live this long," she says. "They gave me until I was 16, tops."

Now she's pushing 50. The longevity isn't from sheer luck.

On a warm July night in 1986, two of her friends were in the back seat of a pickup truck that pulled up to her at 13th and Sansom streets in Center City.

The girls, Tina and Tonya, pleaded with Dakar to join them. But something seemed off, she says - she didn't like the way the men in the front seats were looking at her.

Days later, cops in Bucks County found the charred, mutilated corpses of Tina Arroyo and Tonya Streater near a Little League baseball field. The case remains unsolved, but investigators believe they were killed by clients who snapped after realizing they were transgender.

"Back then, we had to be deep, deep underground," Dakar says. "We paved the way for this generation, for these girls who can go up to cars and say, 'I'm transgender.' "

If a man is cruising Old York Road looking for company, he's well aware of who's out there, according to Dakar. There are, she says, "no surprises."

And, in turn, the women whom these men pick up, who watch night after night as they circle the blocks looking for company, know what they're getting into.

"There's danger out here, but there's danger everywhere: It's nothing that a strong, rough-and-tumble woman can't handle," Dakar says. "But some women out here think it's a game. They do it for fun."

She's candid about her reasons for staying in sex work even after earning an associate's degree in behavioral health and human services from Wilberforce University in Ohio.

"It's an addiction: I got addicted to the money," she says. "There'll be times when I'm sitting at home, having family time, and I think, 'I'm losing money.' "

Or her friends will call her to brag about their night, to ask why she isn't out there with them. And back out she goes.

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