Why would anyone propose such a law? Why would the California State Legislature pass it? I asked the bill's author, San Francisco--based state senator Scott Wiener. The answer he gave is the one that he supplies for so many of the bills he authors: it was necessary to advance the rights of LGBTQ people. "If you are standing on the sidewalk with high heels, and you wear your hair a certain way, and you wear tight clothing, an officer can say, 'I think you're loitering with the intent to commit prostitution' and arrest you," Wiener said. "That is not how we should be doing things in the United States of America--arresting people for how they look," he continued. "And when you do that, not surprisingly, it's only certain kinds of people who actually get arrested: it's trans women. It's black women. . . . It's an inherently profiling law," he said. "Randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women for how they look is not protecting potential victims of human trafficking."
But were the police indeed "randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women"? The anti-trafficking advocates I spoke with dispute this. For starters, Wilson, Powell, and Russell (all of whom are African-American) say that biological women and girls--not transgender individuals--constitute the vast majority of those trafficked. Nearly every report on human trafficking by global human rights organizations confirms this observation.
