On an August afternoon in Philadelphia, 23-year-old Jara Krys is drinking iced tea in an upscale bottle shop, the kind of place where men in bespoke suits stop on the way home from corner-office jobs and linger in front of the beer case. Krys, who’s taking time off from a bachelor’s degree in economics and international studies at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, might earn in three days what some of those men make in two weeks. Every so often, she glances around the room, as if she’s expecting to see someone she knows. It wouldn’t be a stretch for her to run into one of her clients in this neighborhood, a tony enclave of BMW-driving execs and their yoga-mat-toting wives, although she won’t reveal any names. That kind of discretion is protocol in the upper echelons of finance occupied by her Wharton peers, but in Krys’s line of work, the stakes are different: She’s a high-end transgender escort who charges a base rate of $500 an hour and plans to double that amount later this year. She’s also in the process of revamping her brand, which she describes with the calculated fervor of a tech CEO.

Krys talks with her hands, throwing disco-ball spots of sunlight with her long, varnished fingernails. In spite of the 90-degree heat, she’s dressed in all black: a black crop top, black jeans, and black Michael Kors wedge sneakers. Her hair is shoulder-length and shaved on one side. With her blue-green contacts and pale skin, she looks vaguely like a punk Disney princess.

Her attention is birdlike, lighting on one thing after another. At one point, she reaches into her purse and takes out a pressed powder compact. She checks her reflection, dabbing at a shiny spot on her nose. “I’m just a perfectionist,” she sighs. Krys oozes ambition, and it doesn’t seem to faze her that there’s no blueprint for what she’s setting out to do: Use her Penn education to advance her career as an escort and, once she’s made a name for herself, become a powerful advocate for sex worker rights and trans equality.

Krys first entered the sex trade as an orphaned 18-year-old in Las Vegas with few practical options for making ends meet. She was living on her own as a senior in high school, covering expenses that far exceeded what she would have been able to earn from any minimum-wage, part-time job. But for many trans people, even a minimum wage job can be out of reach. A 2013 study released by the Human Rights Campaign found that the unemployment rate for transgender people is twice as high as the rate for the general population, and they’re four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000 a year. Faced with this bleak economic situation, coupled with the high cost of transitioning, some transgender women turn to sex work.

While there are no hard numbers on the trans female sex worker population in the U.S., The National Transgender Discrimination Survey, released last December, found that more than one in 10 of the 6,400 transgender adults polled had engaged in sex work. Black and black multi-racial respondents were the most likely to have been involved in the sex trade, followed by Hispanics and Latinos. As a group, transgender female sex workers are at high risk of contracting HIV, and they’re disproportionately affected by violence.

But Krys, who’s Latina herself, feels that there’s a fundamental problem with the sex work narrative. “There’s a huge stigma associated with being a sex worker,” she says. “It puts the blame on the women who become sex workers and not on the system that forced them into sex work, which makes it impossible to affect any real change.” Krys believes that sex workers shouldn’t be categorically pitied, nor should sex work be seen as a disgraceful way to earn a living. Her candor defies preconceptions about the underground nature of the sex industry. She’s talked about her work in several Philly news outlets and on social media, where she lists her profession as “transgender model and entertainer.”

As the fight for trans equality has gained momentum, at least one prominent transgender person has spoken publicly about having been involved in sex work: writer and television host Janet Mock. “I do not believe using your body — often marginalized people’s only asset, especially in poor, low-income, communities of color — to care after yourself is shameful,” she wrote in a blog post in January 2014. And there are other former sex workers, like Melissa Gira Grant, who have brought their stories into the open to fight for destigmatization.

Krys, for her part, aims to take that openness in a slightly different direction: She wants to achieve her business goals through escorting. Her plan, in pidgin Whartonese, is to leverage her diverse client portfolio to amass capital for future ventures, which might include a regular show on YouTube, a professionally designed website with an online store for trans-friendly sex toys, and, if all goes according to plan, a line of gender-non-conforming clothes and lingerie. She doesn’t want to be a merely well-to-do escort and entrepreneur. She wants to be the most elite transgender escort in the world.

Being able to talk openly about her trade is, in itself, a privilege, which Krys readily owns. Her hard-won financial stability shelters her from the violent reality faced by many transgender women, especially those involved in sex work, and it’s precisely that advantage that drives her to speak out. But her unique position isn’t always easy to maintain. On one hand, she feels a kinship with the vast community of sex workers who so often are denied the right to advocate for themselves; on the other, she’s determined to set herself apart from them, from everyone.