With a bag of condoms and a stack of business cards, Tamika Spellman began a route she knew by heart, peering out the window of her Lincoln sedan at dark sidewalks where she once stood. West Virginia Avenue. K Street. Eastern Avenue.

Street corners and alleyways where women wait for a steady trickle of clients, for quick cash to pay the rent. Spellman knows these streets, and these women, better than most: She used to be one of them. Now she was on a mission to help them, to help prevent the next black transgender woman from being killed at the fringes of the nation’s capital.

“Hey love, you need condoms?” Spellman called out the window. On the passenger side next to her sat Emmelia Talarico, a fellow advocate for sex-worker and transgender rights.

For transgender sex workers in the District, everything seems to be escalating. Threats to safety, police intimidation, rising rents that have pushed so many to take to the streets to survive. Spellman has been going on these drives every weekend since Zoe Spears, a black transgender woman, was shot and killed in June near the Eastern Avenue strip just outside the District, less than three months after another black transgender woman, Ashanti Carmon, was fatally shot blocks away.

The deaths became a local paragon of the dangers faced by transgender women of color across the country. At least 18 transgender people nationwide have been fatally shot or killed in 2019, according to the Human Rights Campaign; the American Medical Association has called violence against the transgender community an “epidemic.” Read more via Washington Post