Phoenix Calida Breaks Down The Attack On Trans Women In Sex Worker Tamika Spellman talks with D.C. police officers who were responding to a call about a fight between two sex workers late one night in August. Spellman often makes rounds to check up on such women. (J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post)By Samantha Schmidt andMarissa J. LangSeptember 16 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. It was just past 11 p.m., at West Virginia Avenue in Northeast Washington. A tall, thin woman stood on the sidewalk, wearing a short red skirt and a white tank top. Like most of the women they see on these drives, Spellman and Talarico recognized her. Spellman passed her a card and told her to call if she needed anything. “Try to work with somebody else,” said Spellman, who by day works for the D.C. sex-worker advocacy group HIPS. “I don’t want y’all walking by yourselves. It seems like they’re escalating.” 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.” [She had turned to sex work to survive. Then she was killed.] But Spears and Carmon had something else in common: Both women had at some point in their lives turned to sex work, a dangerous profession that has over the past year become even riskier — especially for those who are black or brown or trans.