Recently in Phoenix, Arizona, a woman was arrested for walking down the street, engaging other pedestrians in conversation. This was a blatant case of profiling, because police accused the woman, a transgender woman of color, of soliciting sex work. For those who don't know, transgender means a person's experienced gender identity and their assigned sex at birth are incongruous. I was assigned female at birth, but from a young age I felt that was

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"Whore is maybe the original intersectional insult," writes journalist and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant. In her new book Playing the Whore, part of a series by Jacobin writers published by Verso Press, she explores the sex industry from the perspective of the workers themselves. That includes strippers, porn performers, and prostitutes, whether they work on the street, in clubs, or even at home as independent porn performers. What she found was unnerving:…