The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the third event in its 2024 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series feature world-leading transgender scholars discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by Christoph Hanssmann, and will celebrate the publication of his recent book Care without Pathology How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). The event will also include a moderated discussion with CATS Executive Director TJ Billard.

Trans depathologization has often centered around the claim, “we’re not sick.” However, activists’ efforts to push back against psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly being identified as ableist in their work to distinguish trans wellness and sanity from “true” forms of mental pathology. Given these critiques, what’s useful now about thinking with depathologization? Rather than focusing solely on disavowals of disability, this talk examines depathologization as a more expansive set of phenomena. Drawing on ethnographic and document-based research in New York City and Buenos Aires between 2012-2018, it analyzes varying strands of trans depathologization activism, their specific objectives, and their dispersed effects.

The talk will take place from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://cats.events/hanssmann

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the second event in its 2024 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series feature world-leading transgender scholars discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by Zein Murib, and will celebrate the publication of their recent book Terms of Exclusion: Rightful Citizenship Claims and the Construction of LGBT Political Identity (Oxford University Press, 2023). The event will also include a moderated discussion with CATS Executive Director TJ Billard.

LGBT political movements in the United States have been successful in expediting the growing acceptance of sexual and gender minorities and increasing public support for LGBT rights. However, not all segments of what has come to be called the "LGBT community" have benefited from these gains; even marginalized identity groups have internal hierarchies that determine whose political claims are heard or ignored. In this talk, Zein Murib advances a theory of “rightful citizenship claims” to explain why only certain members of the group benefit from political wins and puts forward ideas for political tactics that benefit as many people as possible.

The talk will take place from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://cats.events/murib

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the first event in its 2024 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series feature world-leading transgender scholars discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by stef shuster, and will present work from their recent book Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (New York University Press, 2021). The event will also include a moderated discussion with CATS Senior Fellow Avery Everhart.

Drawing on interviews with medical providers who work with transgender and nonbinary patients, stef shuster examines how providers manage challenges to their expertise, given the prevalent uncertainty they experience in this medical field. shuster found that providers often rely on cultural norms and gut instincts to craft their treatment plans, interact with patients, and make medical decisions. But providers are not a homogenous group. Some took on an “uncertain expert” stance by leaning into the uncertainty pervasive in trans medicine and flexible in their approach to care delivery. Others took on a “self-assured expert” stance by doubling-down on their authority and the need for patients to convince them that they were “really” trans. As a consequence of these various strategies, providers may unintentionally perpetuate healthcare inequities.

The talk will take place from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://cats.events/shuster

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the next event in its 2023 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series feature world-leading transgender scholars discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by alithia zamantakis, and will celebrate the launch of her new book Thinking Cis: Cisgender, Heterosexual Men, and Queer Women’s Roles in Anti-Trans Violence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). The event will also include a moderated discussion with CATS Senior Fellow Alex Hanna.

The fear many women have for their safety when out in public is heightened for trans women of color. Scholars have long examined what it means to be trans in a cisgender society, how trans people experience everyday life and violence, and how trans people make sense of and cope with that violence. However, it is necessary to turn to those most likely to perpetrate it: cisgender people. Through extensive interviews and focus groups with cis-heterosexual men and cis-lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, Thinking Cis examines how cis people make sense of gender, attractions to transgender women, and the murders of Black trans women. Thinking Cis analyzes how the social construction of cisness shapes how we think about race, gender, sexuality, and who we consider worthy of living. In doing so, it argues that it is not simply transphobia that gives rise to murders of trans women but fear and hatred for what it means to love and desire trans women.

The talk will take place from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSDL6

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the next event in its 2023 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series feature world-leading transgender scholars discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by Joanna Wuest, and will celebrate the launch of her new book Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The event will also include a moderated discussion with Executive Director TJ Billard.

Across protests and courtrooms, LGBTQ+ advocates argue that sexual and gender identities are innate. Oppositely, conservatives incite panic over “groomers” and a contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children. Yet, as this debate rages on, the history of what first compelled the hunt for homosexuality’s biological origin story may hold answers for the queer rights movement’s future. Born This Way tells this story, bridging past fights against pathological accounts of queer desire and searches for a “gay gene” with ongoing scientific and political conversations about what it means to be a man or a woman, gay or straight, cis or trans. The book reveals how scientific and medical professionals came to bolster the fight for civil rights, how conservatives have fought back against equality and science alike, and what pitfalls biological narratives of identity present trans advocates today.

The talk will take place from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSDL-5

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the next event in its 2023 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series feature world-leading transgender scholars discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by CATS founder and Executive Director TJ Billard, and will celebrate the launch of their new book Voices for Transgender Equality: Making Change in the Networked Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2024). The event will also include a moderated discussion with Senior Fellow Oliver Haimson.

During the uncanny presidency of Donald Trump, transgender issues became the latest flashpoint in the so-called culture wars. Faced with unrelenting hostility and an increasingly complicated media system, transgender activists crafted new communication strategies to fight for their equality. Voices for Transgender Equality offers an insider’s view into how trans activists in the nation’s capital fought back during the first two years of the Trump administration, stalling attempts to undermine their rights and winning the support of large swathes of the public. Drawing on extensive on-the-ground observation at the National Center for Transgender Equality, Voices for Transgender Equality shows how activists navigated the complex flows of information and ideas among these different domains of the communication system as they worked to shape the national conversation on transgender rights.

The talk will take place from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSDL4

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host its Spring 2023 Big Ideas panel. Events in this series feature a small panel of speakers discussing timely topics of mutual interest to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working across a range of disciplines. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.



This panel, “Trans Data Ethics: Collection, Analysis, and Dissemination,” will bring together three trans social scientists—Stats Atwood, Zack Marshall, and Charlotte Tate—to discuss what data can do when collected by or in collaboration with trans people and interrogate the limitations of data for addressing some of the issues trans communities face. The panel will be moderated by Avery Everhart, Director of Finance for the Center.



The panel will take place from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM Central Daylight Time.



To register for the panel, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSBIP2

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host its Fall 2022 Big Ideas panel. Events in this series feature a small panel of speakers discussing timely topics of mutual interest to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working across a range of disciplines. These events are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.



This panel, “Where Trans Activism and Abolition Meet,” will bring together three brilliant scholar-activists—Qui Alexander, Blu Buchanan, and SA Smythe—to discuss the relationship between trans rights and abolition activism. The panel will be moderated by Erique Zhang, Managing Director of the Center.



The panel will take place from 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM Central Standard Time.



To register for the panel, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSBIP1

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the third event in its 2022 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series will feature the Center’s Fellows discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events will be virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by Senior Fellow Aniruddha Dutta, and will be entitled “Suturing and Disrupting the State: Indian Trans Activism in the Aftermath of COVID-19.”

Transgender and gender non-conforming people, particularly largely working-class and Dalit (oppressed-caste) communities such as kothis and hijras, are among those hit hardest during the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The pandemic has been exacerbated by the policies of the Indian state, which demonstrate an unstable assemblage or conjuncture of neoliberal and developmentalist tendencies, in keeping with long-term systemic patterns in the region. The talk situates contemporary Indian trans activism within the context of the neoliberal-developmentalist assemblage that characterizes governance in contemporary India, and examines the variable ways in which such activism negotiates fractures and contradictions within state apparatuses and modes of governance. Trans communities and activists from varied and unequal class/caste backgrounds engage the state in multiple ways, sometimes bolstering and suturing neoliberal and developmentalist modes of governance and sometimes challenging or undermining them and even playing them against each other. The talk will trace these varied negotiations and analyze how they not only enable the survival of trans-kothi-hijra people through the pandemic but also demonstrate ways in which activists may push back against the state’s simultaneous regulation and neglect of their communities.

The talk will take place from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSDL3

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the second event in its 2022 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series will feature the Center’s Fellows discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events will be virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This lecture will be given by Junior Fellow Florence Ashley, and will celebrate the launch of their new book Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis (University of British Columbia Press, 2022). The event will also include a moderated discussion with Kelley Winters, PhD.

Survivors of conversion practices—interventions meant to stop gender transition—have likened their experiences to torture. In the last decade, bans on these deeply unethical and harmful processes have proliferated, and governments across the world are considering following suit. Florence Ashley’s new book Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis considers the pivotal concerns for anyone studying or working to prevent these harmful interventions. What is the scope of the bans? How do they differ across jurisdictions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of legislative approaches to regulating trans conversion therapy? In answering these questions, Ashley demonstrates the need for affirmative health care cultures and detailed laws. Banning Transgender Conversion Practices centers trans realities to rethink and push forward the legal regulation of conversion therapy.

The talk will take place from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSDL2

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host the first event in its 2022 Distinguished Lecture Series. Events in the series will feature the Center’s Fellows discussing their own original research with a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons. These events will be virtual, free to attend, and open to the public.

This inaugural lecture will be given by Senior Fellow Austin H Johnson, and will be entitled “Applying Trans Studies, Building Structural Competency: Using Community Based Research to Support Trans Youth in the U.S. Southeast.”

Some estimates place more than 500,000 trans people in the South, making the region home to over one-third of the US trans population. A region with more anti-trans policies and fewer protections for trans people than other areas of the country, the South has become a kind of test kitchen for conservative attempts to enact anti-trans legislation through state and local governments. These policies are aimed at restricting trans people’s access to healthcare, education, recreation, accommodations, and public facilities like restrooms, bathing facilities, and emergency housing.  

This trend peaked last year, as lawmakers around the country, yet concentrated in the South, proposed more anti-trans legislation than in any other year on record. States across the region have also renewed their efforts at legislating so-called “religious exemptions,” attempting to implement pathways for faith-based discrimination against trans people in state-funded service agencies and organizations. In some cases, legislators went so far as to introduce anticipatory restrictions that block and in some cases punish local officials who enact their own protections for trans people in their communities.

In most cases during the 2021 legislative sessions, local organizers across the region blocked these proposals. Yet, we are already witnessing the renewal of this legislative harassment in 2022. Whether they become bills or not, these proposals contribute to a hostile social climate for trans people. Trans youth are especially vulnerable to this legislative harassment, and their experiences of identity related stress are more likely to contribute to increased anxiety, depression, and suicidality. In this presentation, Johnson makes the case for using community-based research to build structural competency among grassroots, non-profit, and public service organizations who are developing interventions to support trans youth in the South.

The talk will take place from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the lecture, visit: https://bit.ly/CATSDL1

The Center for Applied Transgender Studies is proud to host its first virtual symposium, co-organized by Senior Fellows Oliver Haimson, Alex Hanna, and Anna Lauren Hoffmann and co-sponsored by:

• Northwestern University (NU) Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing,

• University of Michigan (UM) School of Information,

• UM Digital Studies Institute,

• UM Institute for Research on Women and Gender,

• NU PhD in Technology and Social Behavior,

• The Sexualities Project at Northwestern, and

• NU Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

This event highlights existing and emergent connections between applied trans studies and the critical and cultural study of technological design, development, application and use—especially in the domains of digital studies and critical data studies. Importantly, the event conceives of these connections as multifaceted and multidirectional. Rather than merely identifying trans lives and subjects within the existing matrices of study, we ask how the precepts and commitments of an applied trans studies challenges how we think about and understand data and digital technologies today.

SESSION 1: Applied Trans Studies X Critical Data Studies

In this session, we will hear from scholars on entanglements of gender, surveillance, and data technologies—in particular, computational techniques predicated on capturing, classifying, labeling, sorting, bounding, optimizing, and visualizing data in various contexts. Particular concern will be paid to the practical and material effects of these processes on trans lives and livelihoods, as well as the ways trans subjects make evident the assumptions of organizing logics of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and beyond.

Moderator: Alex Hanna (Google)

Panelists: Avery Everhart (University of Southern California), Jack Gieseking (University of Kentucky), Mar Hicks (Illinois Institute of Technology), Morgan Klaus Scheuerman (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Nikki Stevens (Dartmouth College)

KEYNOTE: How To Stuff a Wild Duck: Configurations of Transness in Corporate Computing

(sponsored by the Labor Tech Research Network)

In this keynote, we will hear from Dr Cassius Adair (University of Minnesota), who will bring us closer to a trans history of computing through an analysis of IBM.

SESSION 2: Applied Trans Studies X Digital Studies

In this session, we will hear from scholars who work at the intersection of applied trans studies and digital studies. We will explore the past, present, and future of trans technologies like apps, social media sites, health resources, games, and internet forums to understand some ways digital technologies do and can help to address challenges faced by trans people and communities.

Moderator: Oliver Haimson (University of Michigan)

Panelists: Alex Ahmed (Carnegie Mellon University), Moya Bailey (Northwestern University), Tee Chuanromanee (University of Notre Dame), Avery Dame-Griff (Washington State University, Pullman), and Whit Pow (New York University)

The symposium will take place from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM Central Standard Time.

To register for the symposium, visit: https://bit.ly/CATS003

We’ve launched a Center for Applied Transgender Studies. But what exactly is “applied transgender studies” and why do we need it? In this inaugural public event, the Center’s founders, TJ Billard, Avery Everhart, and Erique Zhang, issue an urgent call to action, laying out a vision for the Center itself, as well as for a new orientation within the field of transgender studies. Join us for an exciting conversation hosted by Paisley Currah.

The panel will take place from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

To register for the panel, visit: https://bit.ly/CATS001