“We Deserve Human Rights Equal to Everyone Else”

“People constantly try to refer to me as an activist when I don’t identify as one,” says Imara Jones ’94. Her statement stops short my note-taking. It’s April and we’re talking about what’s been most challenging in Jones’ trailblazing career; I both register her objection and mentally run it against my research, where I’ve indeed seen that word a lot. Jones can otherwise be described as a journalist, political analyst and one of TIME’s 100 most influential people for 2023. Notably, she is also the founder of TransLash, a media nonprofit dedicated to reporting about the transgender community.

Jones explains that people didn’t always take TransLash seriously as a news platform, especially in its early days. Dismissed her as an activist. She draws a bright line to clarify her point: “There are people who do that work,” she says. “It’s their job; they spend their career doing that. The people who run Planned Parenthood — those are professional people.” She pauses. “I just think people are so [not] used to trans issues being spoken about in a way that’s forthright that they think that’s activism. I really think that’s more of a reflection of where our society is on our issues than on me.”

Jones launched TransLash in 2018 with a docuseries chronicling her transition and life as a transgender person in America. In the six years since, she has steadily built it into a prolific, cross-platform source of news and nonfiction storytelling. Its mission: telling trans stories to save trans lives. The work takes many forms, including articles, personal essays and short films that highlight the joys and complexities of trans lives (one docuseries focuses on the power of trans artistic expression; another, the challenges of navigating body autonomy and other medical issues). Perhaps most prominent, however, are TransLash’s podcasts, including an eponymous biweekly series hosted by Jones, which garnered a GLAAD 2023 Outstanding Podcast Award.

Jones’ rising profile has largely followed step with her organization’s expansion. In 2022 she both received the Journalist of Distinction Award from the National Black Journalists Association — the first trans person to receive the honor — and was named one of Politico’s 40 power players at the intersection of race, politics and policy in the United States. Last year, in the TIME article highlighting Jones, artist and activist Tourmaline observed that Jones’ work “takes the media narrative beyond where it usually goes by cultivating our awareness of and desire for Black trans futures. … In a moment when anti-trans violence is on the rise and there are those seeking to legislate us out of existence, Imara’s work declares loudly and proudly not just that we get to have a future, that our aliveness deserves to extend beyond this moment — but also that it can be pleasure filled.”

Indeed, the urgency of Jones’ work has become even more acute as the number of anti-trans bills under consideration in the U.S. has reached new highs. It spiked from 174 to 600 between 2022 and 2023, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker website, and this year is on pace to surpass that number. One of the more prominent flash points has been the push to ban gender-affirming care — for example, blocking hormone therapies for kids under 18, and imposing felony penalties on health care providers who would administer treatment. But collectively, these bills, some of which have already passed, would curtail rights and limit freedoms in every corner of trans people’s lives: from dictating the sports teams they can join, to the public bathrooms they can use, to whether they can serve in the military; in schools, teachers would not necessarily be able to use a student’s preferred pronouns or give lessons that speak to gender identity or related topics.

Jones is clear about what TransLash’s mission means to her. “My belief is that all of the terrible things that are being done to trans people is because people don’t believe that we are human. And an antidote to that is to put our humanity front and center, and to convince more and more people that we are real, that we deserve human dignity, and that we deserve human rights equal to everyone else.”

In the summer of 2018, when Jones turned the camera on herself for that first docuseries, she found it to be a deeply uncomfortable experience. “I’m so much more at ease interviewing other people,” she says. “But [it was] also incredibly vital. It underscored for me the importance of telling our own stories. There is a magic in it, and a liberating quality. And I don’t mean liberating as in unshackling. I mean you can liberate the meaning of your life by telling your story.”

Today, Jones has seemingly overcome that self-consciousness; she is open about how she became her true self, describing the process like “water on stone.” She grew up in an Atlanta suburb, where her mother owned an insurance business and her stepfather was a fire chief. She knew that she was trans “probably from around 5 or 7” and recalls becoming aware of gender in kindergarten, when the class was asked to form two single-file lines, one for boys and one for girls. “That was weird to me,” she says.

“We all forget that we are actually taught gender,” she adds. “That’s not to say that people don’t have characteristics that are natural for them. Yes, there are some girls who gravitate toward dolls or pink. But what society does is tell you that’s what it means to be a girl, rather than that’s what it means to be you. It’s not imposed as strictly [until] you begin to enter into formal education.”

As she got older, Jones realized that how she felt on the inside was the opposite of how people perceived her. “That gap, that isolation, is a space that is acute and really hard to describe — a separation that you have from the world,” she says. “So then I had to cultivate in myself my own alternate reality. I did that through a variety of ways. I reimagined my days as a girl, which is common. I had to create a space that I could retreat to that was way outside the world, in order to preserve myself and who I really was.”

She was also acutely aware of the contradictions around her. On the one hand, she says, Atlanta’s large Black community offered a range of role models. But also, “Being a person who was queer and trans, I never saw positive images. Not only did I never see anyone who was like me, I only heard ridicule and threats and mocking of anybody who was in any way different in sexual orientation, with gender identity being even more so. In that respect it was really hostile for me. I grew up with this contrast of there being possibility, and at the same time there being extreme limitation, erasure.”

Indeed, the urgency of Jones’ work has become even more acute as the number of anti-trans bills under consideration in the U.S. has reached new highs.

Recognizing those barriers, Jones knew that she wanted to leave the South for college; the double impact of Columbia and New York City proved eye-opening. “Everything was influential,” she says. “Being in class with these highly intelligent people operating at a really high level constantly pushed my thinking, constantly forced me to break through any limitations in my mind.” Life outside the classroom, meanwhile, introduced her to “the incredible array of different humans from everywhere, and every type and shape and possibility.

“And then New York City was my teacher,” she adds. “Again, the idea of possibility and chance and metamorphosis. The power of diversity and the power of difference — all those things deeply informed me.” Jones pursued a double concentration in history and political science and was in student government for three of her four years, becoming class president her senior year. With visions of running for office, she earned a master’s from the London School of Economics and in 1998 joined the Clinton administration as part of the Office of the United States Trade Representative. But while there, through some work with the USTR press team, she discovered the power of communications.

“It was during the time that Oprah was drawing audiences of 40 million people,” Jones recalls. “I thought, that’s another form of civic engagement. Change doesn’t only occur in the political system; the political system responds to what people are talking about and what they bring up.” In 2001, she shifted to corporate communications at Viacom. Her work originating — and later running — the company’s “Know HIV/AIDS” campaign earned her both an Emmy and a Peabody Award.

Another turning point came in 2011. Jones had started blogging while taking time out to care for her mother, who’d fallen ill. A journalist friend encouraged her writing and ultimately signed her as a freelancer covering economic justice for a small publication, Color Lines. Soon Jones was writing for other outlets and doing guest spots on television and radio. At one point, she says, it dawned on her that there wasn’t enough reporting about or for minority populations.

“I remember telling people, we have to change the news business. We need to begin to find ways to engage marginalized communities in the conversation about their lives,” Jones says. “Because when people believe that they are important, they participate; and if you tell people they aren’t important, they are not going to participate, and you’ll really set yourself up for shady democracy.”

Jones reflects on what she readily acknowledges was a winding path. “Often we prize the idea of the child genius, the Mozart fantasy; that we are given an idea early on in life and then that’s what you do,” she says. “I think it’s just as powerful when the things that we are supposed to do in life come to us over time.”

Jones has said on more than one occasion that Black trans women are essential to creating the future, calling them some of the most progressive and visionary leaders within social justice movements. Marsha P. Johnson, for example, was a key figure in starting the Stonewall Uprising, which catalyzed the modern LGBTQ+ movement. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, another Stonewall participant, has for decades been instrumental in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

“When you are outside, you have perspective,” Jones explains. “You understand where the fractures are, you can begin to see what needs to be done. And that perspective gives you the ability to push things forward in a way that people who are wedded to the way things are can’t ever see. When the world isn’t working for you, you can imagine it anew.”

She describes a pipeline of common trans experience — from bullying and harassment in school, which undermines education; to graduating with less earning potential; to being able to afford only less stable or insecure housing, which in turn increases exposure to violence. The statistics bear out the narrative. Just last year, the Human Rights Campaign decried the “epidemic of violence” against the transgender and gender-nonconforming community, reporting that at least 33 transgender and gender-nonconforming people were killed between November 2022 and November 2023. The majority of those victims were people of color.

One of Jones’ most important projects has been her investigative podcast, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality, which garnered an excellence in podcasting award from the National LGBTQ+ Journalists Association. The first season aired in 2021, sparked by Jones’ desire to understand what was behind the dramatic increase in anti-trans legislation. In it, she explores the funding sources, people, right-wing organizations and extreme ideologies driving anti-trans sentiment, as well as (in season two) the ecosystem through which disinformation is spread.

Her latest effort, launched in March, is the subscriber-only podcast The Mess: Imara’s Guide to Our Political Hellscape. The tone is “less NPR,” as Jones puts it — a chance to cut loose more and speak to “the absurdity of the political atmosphere right now while also analyzing and breaking it down for people, [identifying] what they should be paying attention to.”

She also sees the show as a way of addressing an absence of voice. “Trans people are a huge political topic right now, but we are not represented in any political conversations,” she says. “There are no trans people on any of the Sunday morning shows, there’s not one trans contributor on any cable news show, there are few trans people in major newsrooms — and the people who are talking about us politically are not us. That doesn’t make any sense; it doesn’t make sense to have a community not be able to have a voice in a political season.”

With so much happening — including this past summer’s nationwide broadcast of her PBS documentary, American Problems, Trans Solutions, as well as the debut of TransLash’s new website — I can’t help but wonder how Jones keeps balance in her life. “I’m a big believer in taking vacations,” she says, adding with a laugh: “Do not call me unless it is an emergency on the level of 911.”

She says that reading also keeps her centered, especially biographies. “Just understanding the sweep of history and the sweep of time can contextualize what feels for us unprecedented and overwhelming,” she says. “I did a ton of reading during Covid on the French Revolution, revisiting that period. Their whole world fell apart, and people were still going to work and getting paid and doing all the normal things. It helps to have a sense that things can break, and they can actually come back together again. I really do believe that we are in one of those great turning points in history.”

Asked what’s been most surprising about her work with TransLash, Jones takes a long pause. “That I get to do it,” she says. “Really. That I get to do this at all and that it matters and it’s important and it’s extremely challenging and it’s stimulating and scary and all the things.”

She takes a step back to consider the holistic view: “Every day, everyone gets trapped in the humdrum of their jobs. The person who doesn’t respond to email, the thing you need to do. We all get that; I get that. But then there are things that puncture that. Like the person who wrote in anonymously several years ago saying they watched The Future of Trans and it stopped them from committing suicide. Or, ‘I saw what you did on X, and it helped me understand what my partner who is transitioning is going through.’ And ‘What you’re doing about our issues in Texas is giving us hope.’

“All of those things, where [you realize] what you are doing in the world does matter and is touching people. That continues to surprise me.”