Most Americans don’t personally know a transgender person. In that ignorance gap, Republicans have vilified trans people as a bogeyman to the public. Tired of this trend, Imara Jones saw an opportunity to change people’s hearts and minds.
She founded TransLash Media, a journalism and narrative non-profit whose content seeks to shift our current culture of anti-trans hostility. TransLash has produced award-winning documentaries, animation, writing, and social media presence that aggressively tells trans stories in an accessible way.
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Jones led a discussion about fascism and authoritarianism on Thursday evening at Creating Change, an annual activism conference organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force. The event is one of the largest single gatherings of LGBTQ+ people, and Jones saw the discussion as a “really important opportunity” to talk to the community about what’s happening and how to accurately respond to it.
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The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LGBTQ Nation: What’s most present for you considering the sweeping transphobic new administration?
Imara Jones: What’s most present is the predictability of everything that’s happening. Yeah, that’s what I’m sitting with. I know it’s a short answer, but no, it’s good.
What do trans individuals who are feeling a lot of fear and anxiety urgently need to know right now?
I think there’s one thing they need to do: Trans people need to survive and have faith that they’ll make it. Right now, it’s literally a fight to survive.
We have an administration that is trying to say that trans people don’t exist and therefore should not have access to the basic rights that everybody else has, and they are being very aggressive in that.
I don’t think that they’re fundamentally going to be able to erase history and go against where modernity is — it’s how much pain they’re able to cause in the process. It is the reaction of the people writ large that will determine how much pain and suffering is caused by what they’re trying to do and what they are doing. Like, they are doing these things. They’re going to remove trans rape prevention measures from prison. There are literally going to be trans people that are raped as a result of what this administration is doing.
What is the desired endgame for Republicans’ obsession with trans people? Where are they trying to take the country on this issue?
The endgame is they want a white heterosexual patriarchy and within that, there’s no way, there’s no space for trans people — trans people undermine the very fundamental idea of that. They also want to prey on the transphobia that exists across society in order to draw people closer to their project: We’re talking about people that they would never be in conversation with — suburban moms, Black churchgoers, etc.
But the people that really responded to this message in a really powerful way were men between the ages of 18 and 35 who are marginal political players and voters. So they used it successfully to galvanize a group of people to turn out to the polls for them, and at the same time, made inroads in some really important communities as well, using this issue.
The thing that people always miss about this, is that it is both a tactic and a strategy at the same time. People often want to say, ‘Oh, [transphobia] is just a political thing to get votes, and then once they’re in [office], they’ll be normal.’ That’s the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. That Republican Party is no more — it is gone.
That modern Republican Party is one that is Christian Nationalist in nature [and its project] is white, heterosexual patriarchy, which is what they believe they are reasserting through everything that they’re doing.
Do you feel like either the Biden administration, trans rights organizations, or major LGBTQ organizations have done enough on trans issues? I hear criticisms of them, but rarely suggestions of what they should have done instead.
I think that the criticism is that they were just too timid on the issue. And it’s not only timid on policy but it’s timid in explanation. There was a desire to pretend that somehow — by not talking about trans rights publicly or by not countering the conversations about trans rights forthrightly — that somehow you would avoid the idea of the party being tagged with trans rights and, thus, perhaps being unpopular.
The fascinating thing is that you do the exact opposite — you signal to this other side that there’s a vulnerability that can be exploited when you do that. So I think that they were just too timid and it didn’t pay off.
Would you extend that criticism to LGBTQ organizations and trans rights organizations?
Not at the local level, but I don’t think that a lot of the national groups took this threat seriously, did not take this link between the anti-democratic nature of this movement and the authoritarian movement and its attack on trans rights seriously. And if and when they did, it was way too late.
The biggest right-wing transphobic talking points have centered around children and sports. Does that obligate the trans rights movement to respond directly to those attacks, or are there better ways to change hearts and minds on this issue?
Yeah. You have to talk about it. And if you are not the Republican Party or the Christian nationalist movement, then you have to be talking about it in a way that makes sense for everybody else. Otherwise, the only messages, conversations, and stories that get out are the intentional disinformation campaign around trans people as part of this larger political project.
There’s a huge deficit here, and it doesn’t seem like anyone’s learned that message. I mean, what I keep hearing is that the Democratic establishment, for example, keeps saying that what they need to do is to not talk about trans stuff. That’s actually how you got here in the first place. And so if that’s going to be your strategy, then you’re not going to go anywhere.
But does the trans rights movement need to specifically develop messaging to counter right-wing talking points about ‘child surgeries’ and trans people in sports trying to take away women’s advancements?
No. I don’t think that it’s generally a good idea to play on the ground that other people want you to. What should be happening are conversations about the basic humanity and dignity of trans people.
If you go into conversations about these other things… you’re having the conversation that they want you have. It’s kind of like when your dog grabs something and then you grab the other end: You’re engaged in the exchange and the context that your dog wants to have at that moment. It wants you to pull and push, so your reacting isn’t getting you out of the conundrum. It’s actually feeding into it.
Honestly, there’s a lot of amazing families who just want to play sports, and they’re not listening to them and not heard. So that’s also the issue. It’s not only that there hasn’t been enough work in doing that, it’s also that that those people and places are not listened to and not heard, and that’s a broader society problem.
Are there any other individuals or organizations that you think are making the right steps towards positive outcomes or resistance for change?
At this time, local groups are doing really powerful work. You know, equality, Texas [and] Equality, Ohio are two that I think about, and there are many, many others… They’re forming coalitions. They are doing things outside of just centering trans rights within a broader coalition and [are having] conversation about [trans rights] being an extension of rights to human dignity. They’re being aggressive about communication. They’re doing outreach to local communities — contextualizing and building bridges — and being very aggressive and committed. That’s really important in this moment.
One thing I want to add: The fact that people who aren’t trans wake up to the threats posed by anti-trans policies to everyone, and that also will help to end this era that we’re in.
So there’s a responsibility that people who are not trans have right now in understanding what’s going on and not believing that this is somehow going to just affect one community, and that because of that, they can somehow stay safe or prevent things from happening to them, because that doesn’t work.
You’re saying that transphobic policies will end up harming cisgender people if they don’t get involved and actively combat it?
[Those policies] are a harbinger for what’s coming for everybody.
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