In the Eye of the Hurricane With Imara Jones

Imara Jones is clear-eyed about the critical moment we’re in. She had no illusions back in 2018, either, when she traveled the country, sharing her own story and telling others about being trans during the first Trump administration. The resulting docuseries provided the framework for TransLash Media, the independent news organization of which she is founder and CEO. It’s a cross-platform (it also produces zines, animated films, documentaries, and three podcasts) nonprofit journalism and nonfiction storytelling organization. In other words, “We tell trans stories to save trans lives, and to protect democracy.” Jones joins host Samhita Mukhopadhyay (former Teen Vogue executive editor, current Cut contributor, and author of The Myth of Making It) on the In Her Shoes podcast to discuss her work sharing those stories, and why it’s more important now than ever: “We’re in the eye of a hurricane. This is as easy as it’s going to get for many years.”

To hear more, listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can also read highlights from the interview below.

On not compromising:

When you’ve been on the inside, you understand that the story they’re telling is never the real story. Politics is not about any of the things that you’re taught in history or in political sciences classes. You learn the way in which personalties, worldview, and narrative shapes everything; politics is policy. I left because I knew that in order to be successful, I would have to make choices that I didn’t want to make. I also understood that if we really wanted to have an impact on the trajectory of the country, that people had to be informed and they had to be informed well. That’s why I decided to go into communications and then journalism, because I was like, this is where we actually preserve Democracy. There’s a reason why our profession is the only profession that’s written in the Constitution, because it is essential to the functioning of Democracy.

On anti-trans rhetoric:

It’s a result of a plan. There’s nothing accidental about this, because organically no one would be talking about one percent of any group of people. The organizations that are behind the anti trans push are the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Focus on the Family, for example, and they’re some of the most powerful forces in American politics. And there’s a push because races are close in America. And they know that you can’t really use anti-trans ads or anti -trans rhetoric in races where there’s a blowout because it doesn’t really move that many votes. It moves one or two voters per precinct, which is kind of all you need in really close races. That was how much by Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016. You don’t actually need a lot. So they dumped so much money in this race because the race was so close.

On looking for a silver lining:

I would say that [the election] was the emergence of perhaps a mortal threat to American democracy, and at the same time, some lights in that Democratic lighthouse may have not totally gone out. We have two Black women who were elected to the Senate. We have Sarah McBride going to the House of Representatives. We had some important abortion protections put in place in the states. In New York, we had an amendment which included protection in the Constitution for and based on gender identity, among other things. All of those things are really important. So I do agree that there was hope that was displayed. I also think that it is quite clear that the darkest and the ugliest elements of the American experiment reasserted themselves. Just how damaging that will be, only time will tell.