Listen, everyone should care about Stormy Daniels. She is a witty and charming adult industry performer, who has long been embroiled in a serious legal scandal with a sitting president whom we'd all like to oust. However, we also need to care about her—and other sex workers—even when they aren't politically convenient to us.
Everyone should take issue with the police state attempting to intimidate and silence her with arrest, and not just because we want Daniels to speak out about crimes committed by the Trump campaign team. We need to care because law enforcement often uses arrests and bullying tactics against sex workers as a means of silencing them, and taking away their measures of safety.
Sex work is a broad industry, encapsulating many different types of careers—most of which are legal in the United States. Strippers, phone sex operators, performers in pornographic films, kink service providers (dominatrices being the most commonly known kind), and escorts all fall under this umbrella, along with many others. Many sex workers hold a variety of these jobs, or combine them with other mundane part- or full-time positions.
Society's entire relationship with sex work is a hypocritical one. We create the demand for this specialized labor, only to then demonize and denigrate anyone who specializes in that field. This is especially true in communities that are already marginalized. We’ve created employment conditions where transgender people face rates of unemployment that are three times higher than the average U.S. worker (even higher if you are both trans and a person of color). In one- half of the U.S., it is perfectly legal to discriminate based on gender identity, and in the rest it is incredibly challenging to legally prove an intent to discriminate. With such limited opportunities in the non-sex job market, sex work is often a means of survival for trans people who have been excluded or ejected from other work environments. Sex work offers a means of income that isn't guarded by prejudiced hiring managers, or dependent on expensive credentials from institutions that are also free to discriminate.
We have created these working conditions as a society, so it’s our fault that these people cannot gain or keep "traditional" jobs. Yet, if you've ever watched TV in the past 30 years, odds are you've seen a transgender sex worker serving as one of two plot devices: a transphobic joke or a corpse.