This Pride season, why not take a moment to feel proud of your period? 

For the past four years, Mass NOW, a feminist organization in Massachusetts, has been working with other groups to organize Trans Period Pride, a space for open and honest conversation about what it’s like to be a trans person who menstruates. This year, the event has, unsurprisingly, attracted the ire of right-wing news. But this only highlights the importance of these conversations—and of period equity for all genders. 

This episode features a conversation with two of the organizers of Trans Period Pride: Mass NOW Executive Director Sasha Goodfriend and Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition Kelsey Grunstra.

This week’s Trans Joy features Melani Midas, a Caribbean-American fashion designer and DJ. 

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As anti-trans laws pass across the country, more and more trans folks are leaving their home states for better access to legal protections, healthcare, and safer social environments. Today, we’re hearing from two LGBTQ advocates in progressive cities about what’s needed to support the internally displaced trans people in their communities. 

Jessa Davis is a co-chair of the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, which issued the state of emergency recommendation. Honey Mahogany is the Director of the Office of Transgender Initiatives in San Francisco. 

This week’s Trans Joy features Caro Caden, a theatre artist, oral historian, and archivist.

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Today’s episode is all about The Twinks vs. Dolls Olympics, a gnarly, nasty, and very queer competition that’s taken New York—and the world—by storm. 

Twinks vs. Dolls was created in 2022 by the Brooklyn gay bar Singers; videos of the lube wrestling and cigarette smoking contests from that year went viral. Since then, it’s exploded in size and notoriety and similar queer physical contests have sprung up all across the country. 

Today, we’re speaking with Twinks vs. Dolls co-creator Erik Escobar and 2025 champion Tasi Taimanglo to get the inside scoop. 

This week’s Trans Joy features Madeline Clere, a Junior Vocal Instructor at the Seattle Voice Lab, which specializes in voice lessons for trans students looking to experiment with or change their voice. 

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With trans people under attack like never before, trans people need to be resourced like never before. Today, we’re hearing from two people working hard to secure those resources. Elisa Crespo is the Executive Director of the Stonewall Community Foundation, a nonprofit that invests in LGBTQ+ organizations, projects, and leaders. Rickke Mananzala is the President of New York Foundation, which funds community organizing and grassroots advocacy led by and for people who live in NYC. Both Elisa and Rickke draw on their identities and ties to their communities to inspire their work.

This week’s Trans Joy features Randy Truong, a Memphis-based organizer and civic changemaker.

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This week, we explore the controversy surrounding Amy Sherald’s painting Trans Forming Liberty, which depicts a Black trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty.

In the summer of 2025, Amy Sherald canceled her highly anticipated and historic exhibition, American Sublime, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery after Sherald said she faced pressure from museum officials to remove Trans Forming Liberty and show a video of it instead.

Rather than compromise, Sherald pulled the show and brought American Sublime to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it became the museum’s most attended exhibition since 2000, drawing more than 80,000 visitors.

Explaining her decision, Sherald said, “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility, and I was opposed to that being a part of the American Sublime narrative.”

First, we hear from Grace Byron, an art critic who wrote about the chilling effect of Trump’s anti-trans executive orders on trans artists in a piece for the New Yorker called “The War on Trans Art.” 

Then, we hear from the model depicted in Trans Forming Liberty, Arewà Basit, who is also an artist herself.

This week’s Trans Joy features Gericault De La Rose, a Chicago-based artist.

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This week, Imara sits down for a vulnerable conversation with Minnesota State Representative Leigh Finke, the first trans woman ever elected to the MN House of Representatives. In her time in office, Finke has focused on policies that expand housing and healthcare access and cement civil rights protections, most notably a trans refuge law that includes some of the strongest legal protections for gender-affirming care in the nation.

But Rep. Finke’s time in office has been filled with turmoil. In June of last year, her friend and MN House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in a politically motivated murder. And, more recently, Minneapolis was besieged by ICE, which resulted in the killing of two citizens. 

In this episode, Rep. Finke gets real about how hard it is to be a trans legislator in today’s political environment and what motivates her to keep fighting.

This week’s Trans Joy features Trina Tate, an educator who develops mindfulness curricula for public school students.

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What does it mean to be seen by millions and still be figuring out who you are? For multi-hyphenate artist Dylan Mulvaney, it means letting go of the pressure to be palatable.

Dylan was already a touring theater actress when she  first gained global attention on TikTok with her viral series Days of Girlhood and has worn many hats since, including a playwright and now, a Broadway performer.

This week on the TransLash Podcast, Imara Jones sits down with Dylan for a wide-ranging conversation about her journey from internet sensation to starring as Anne Boleyn Six the Musical and what it means to step into her next chapter on her own terms.

Dylan opens up about what people often get wrong about her rise,  how she’s always been a theater kid at heart and in practice and how social media both created opportunity and challenged her sense of self. 

Together, Imara and Dylan explore the tension between visibility and privacy, the pressure to be “palatable,” and what it means to move from people-pleasing to self-definition while exploring why softness and earnestness can be powerful in a cynical world.

This week’s Trans Joy features Ticket Knowlton, a theater director, dramaturg and dancer from Atlanta, Georgia. Send your trans joy recommendations to translash_podcast @ translash [dot] org

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You can get tickets to see Dylan in Six the Musical here: https://www.broadway.com/shows/six

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On March 31st of this year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a therapist in Colorado who argued that the state’s ban on conversion therapy violated her freedom of speech. While the ruling does not endorse conversion therapy, it does allow the practice to continue, despite the fact that conversion therapy has been widely debunked as pseudoscience and dramatically increases the risk of depression and suicide in queer and trans youth. To understand the ruling and its impact, we hear from Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly, who has been following the insidious rise of anti-trans conversion therapy, and Shannon Minter, the Legal Director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, who has been at the forefront of the legal battles for queer and trans rights for decades. 

This week’s Trans Joy features River King, a registered nurse at a queer community clinic in Brooklyn, NY.

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Check out our guests on social media: 

National Center for LGBTQ Rights 

@nclrights

Madison Pauly

Bluesky: @msjpauly.bsky.social

River King 

Instagram: @riv.king

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In this two-part series, Imara sits down with Ayman Mohyeldin of MS Now to break down the history, politics, and power dynamics between Iran, the United States, and Israel. 

In this second episode, we take a deep dive into Iran’s complex relationships with its Gulf neighbors and examine how political narratives and dehumanization contribute to misunderstandings within U.S. foreign policy and the White House’s approach to Iran.

This week’s Trans Joy features Matice Moore, an organizer and project director at The Brown Boi Project! Check them out at https://www.brownboiproject.org/staff.html 

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Check out our guest on social media: 

Instagram: @aymanm @msnownews 

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What’s really happening in the Iran war…and why does it feel like we’ve seen this before?

After a little over a month of war, a fragile ceasefire is now in place between the United States, Iran, and Israel. But the question isn’t just what happens next; it’s whether we’re repeating the same mistakes that led us here in the first place.

In this two-part series, Imara Jones sits down with MS NOW’s Ayman Mohyeldin to break down the history, politics, and power dynamics between Iran and the United States. 

If you’ve been trying to make sense of the Iran war, the ceasefire, and the risk of a wider regional conflict, this conversation gives you the context you’re not hearing anywhere else.

This week’s Trans Joy features Addye Susnick, an organizer, zine artist, and PhD candidate in political theory at the University of British Columbia.

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Check out our guest on social media: 

Instagram: @aymanm @msnownews

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