‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

Imara Jones, founder of Translash Media. ‘We would love to focus on telling the positive stories that surround trans people, but the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.’ Photograph: Richie Shazam

Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.

A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.