Hey, fam, it's Amara.

Welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives.

Well, February is Black History Month, and starting just days after the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday is a time when our country looks back at the history of African Americans here, including the fight for civil rights.

The idea of black civil rights has been reduced, however, to the idea of a change in specific laws during the 1960s, which prevented

African Americans equal access to everything from bathrooms to education.

Sound familiar?

But it also included the ideas of what we now call Black Liberation, a specific revisioning

of what our society should look like

steeped in racial justice. Consequently, we can see that the civil rights movement never

totally succeeded and has a tremendous amount of unfinished business that we live out every

single day. That's why we wanted to talk with black trans leaders about what a new

agenda for black civil rights should look like, centering these struggles of both past and present

in a much larger, less fragmented tapestry. The unmet needs of all black people, cis and trans,

remain great.

That's why this week we're going to bring you two critical black trans voices filling in the gaps.

First, we speak with Queen Jean, founder of Black Trans Liberation.

Liberation is a daily affirmation.

It is a declaration to the rest of the world that we are on a mission for our freedom.

Next, we speak to Kayla Gore, co-founder of My Sister's House.

A lot of organizations, a lot of individuals, they want to continue the work until they can say, oh, we've been doing this 400 years.

And that's not my plan.

My plan is not to do this work 400 years.

...