PBS’s Amanpour: Pro-Life Autocrats Here and Abroad and the ‘Anti-Trans Hate Machine’

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Amanpour & Co.

3/23/23

1:47 am ET

AMANPOUR: And the insidious chipping away human rights is happening all across the world with women, minorities, and the LGBTQ particularly vulnerable. In a moment, we will look at the crackdown on women’s rights in Afghanistan. But first, to Uganda where parliament has applauded the passage of a bill making it illegal to identify as LGBTQ. And in the United States where the Georgia legislature has just passed the latest in this string of anti-trans bills. Our on next guest says this is no coincidence. Imara Jones is founder of TransLash Media, an independent new site focusing on transgender issues. She joins Michel Martin to breakdown what’s behind the onslaught of this anti-LGBTQ laws across America and around the world.

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Imara Jones, thanks so much for talking with us.

IMARA JONES, JOURNALIST AND CREATOR OF TRANSLASH MEDIA: Thank you so much for having me.

MARTIN: The specific thing we wanted to start with today is that in 2023 alone, this is according to the ACLU, more than 426 bills that have been identified or described as anti-LGBTQ laws have been introduced in state legislatures across the U.S. And this is a market contrast from a few years ago when this was not a small number, but in 2019, there were some 60 some bills. This is, of course, also according to the ACLU. So, first of all, I wanted to ask you, what are the scope of these bills? What are some of the things that these bills would do?

JONES: In terms of the scope of these bills, I think what we have to understand is that the scope is increasing and becoming ever more aggressive. So, we started out essentially in the time period that you laid out with the anti-trans sports bills and the anti-trans bills that would people equal access to medical care for trans youth, what people called Gender-Affirming Care. And that kind of was where the universe of things started. And what we’ve witnessed over the past year is a far more aggressive and wide-reaching range of bills. That include, I’m mandating the use of certain pronouns that are on your birth certificates, that would ban drag performances, and in some cases would make it illegal for trans people to walk down the street and the clothing of their gender identity by extension. And increasingly, a ban on the medical care for all tran people, including adults. And now, most recently in Florida, a bill that would legalize family separation in the cases of parents who accept their trans children. So, what we see is a dramatic increase in the aggressiveness and a range of these bills.
MARTIN: How do you understand this? I mean, the fact of the matter is that people often introduce, you know, attention getting bills into state legislatures and the vast majority of them, you know, never see the light of day. You know, people want the headline, but they don’t necessarily

fight for the result. But given the sort of the dramatic increase in the number of bills, the types of bills, the kinds of things that they address, how do you understand this? How do you see this movement?
JONES: Well, I think that the thing to understand about this conversation is that we did get here by accident. The fact is that trans people are only 1.5 percent of the population. A tiny group of people. But have found our way into the center of the debate in American political life in this moment. And that’s makes roughly decade-long plan executed by the far-right and the Christian Nationalist Movement to bring us to the point of this conversation. You know, you don’t go from a handful of bills in 2019 to hundreds of bills in two years without there being a pretty wide range in infrastructure that includes nonprofit organizations, thinks tanks, political groups, religious organizations, billionaires funding it and a religious ideology motivating it. And so, I think that what we have to understand is that we’ve gotten here not by accident, but by design.
MARTIN: And here you are drawing a lot of the work that you’ve been doing over the last couple of years as the creator of TransLash Media, which is a nonprofit news organization. As you put it on your website, it produces content to shift the current culture of hostility towards transgender people in the U.S. Talk a little bit more about how you started reporting on what you see as this movement and what are some of the sort of the pillars of it.
JONES: When I saw in 2020, the second of these bills in Alabama. The first one I noticed was in Idoho, my ears picked up. And that’s because, you know, I have enough experience to know that when you see the same type of thing appear in a totally different part of the country with a totally different set of actors, that made point to the fact that that’s not just a coincidence, right? I think as the line from “The Majorettes” goes, I believe in coincidence, I just don’t trust in coincidence. And so, I put together a team or investigative journalist and we just started digging and just started asking the questions about, well, who are the people behind these and where are they? And I not only do we come up with links, you know, of similarities, but then, we basically uncovered what we could only describe as the anti-trans hate machine.
That’s why we labelled the investigative series that, because there is an interlocking group of organizations and systems that are driving these bills. They are in conversation with each other, they are in coordination of each other. They are testing these bills, parts of their universe. Have focused grouped this issue. That’s actually one of the ways that they landed on trans youth was because of a series of focus groups in 2018. So, I think that what we have to understand again is that vastness of the intent here to drive the conversation about trans people along specific parameters into public life. There’s nothing organic about this conversation.

MARTIN: You also have written about the relationship between laws targeting trans people at the medical care that they can receive the institutions or, you know, places, public places that they can use or be seen. You also draw a connection to anti-abortion laws or laws that would restrict abortion rights that are also very much a part of the political moment. What’s the relationship there that you see?

JONES: Well, it’s the same groups. You know, it’s the lines, defending freedom, it’s the Heritage Foundation, it’s the Family Research Council and focus on the family, sort of these main stains of the rightly movement that have decided to put a lot of their weight behind these issues. And for them, you know, control over bodies, people’s ability to control their bodies is really about control over society. And it is because – and we know we’re really uncomfortable talking about this in mainstream media or in journalism in general, but it’s motivated by a very specific religious ideology and a religious essentialism that they believe has to animate public life in America. And a part of that is anything that is the exclusion of anything that is not biblically sanctioned for them, anything outside of the gender binary and anything outside of patriarchy, which for them is defined by God is actually a deep problem for the American body politic that they want to rectify. And so, it’s the exact same groups that are driving,…