It’s our birthday!
One year ago today, on Transgender Day of Visibility 2021, the Center for Applied Transgender Studies publicly launched with 30 incredible Fellows from across the globe. What began as a mere fantasy I shared with my co-founders Avery Everhart and Eri Zhang was finally real. And the public reception was more than we could have hoped for. Our launch was covered in the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets, and we were quickly inundated with media inquiries, invitations to join coalitions and partnerships, and requests from countless academics who wanted to join our ranks. We had a lot of decisions to make about what to do and how to prioritize the opportunities we were presented with. And I think we made the right choices.
Our first year was a busy one and we achieved a lot during it. To recap just a few of the highlights:
We held our inaugural public event featuring the Center’s three founders—myself, Avery, and Eri—in conversation with transgender studies titan and founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Paisley Currah.
We organized the (virtual, free to attend, and open to the public!) Applied Trans Technology Studies Symposium, which featured 15 leading scholars speaking about their innovative research with a broad audience of over 500 scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons.
We launched our monthly Distinguished Lecture Series, which features the Center’s Fellows discussing their own original research. Like the Applied Trans Technology Studies Symposium, these lectures are virtual, free to attend, and open to the public, and intended for a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and interested laypersons.
We partnered with Northwestern University Libraries to launch the very first platinum open access journal dedicated to transgender studies, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. The journal is free to read, free to submit to, and free to reuse content from (for noncommercial purposes), and it boasts an all-star, all-trans editorial board from across the globe. We will publish the inaugural double issue of the journal in June 2022.
We worked as part of a broad coalition of LGBTQ rights organizations, including Equality Illinois, Pride Action Tank, AIDS Foundation Chicago, Howard Brown Health, the Center on Halstead, and Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), among others, to advocate for inclusive gender data collection practices in Illinois state agencies. Thanks in part to the coalition’s tireless work, on August 20, 2021, Governor JB Pritzker signed SB 2133 into law. The law requires ten state agencies and the Illinois State Board of Education to report out on the aggregated age, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and primary or preferred language demographic data of individuals who utilize major services administered by state government. Now we’re keeping the pressure on to make sure state agencies implement the law in a manner that serves the trans community’s needs and addresses the community’s safety concerns.
Our Fellows appeared in no fewer than 30 articles and broadcasts from media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, USA Today, PBS, Cosmopolitan, Mother Jones, Télérama, and The Verge, among others.
Our Fellows published no fewer than 75 books, academic journal articles, and chapters in edited volumes across a number of fields in the social sciences, humanities, medical sciences, and beyond.
Our membership expanded as we recruited 10 excellent new Fellows who joined the Center in January 2022.
And those are just the accomplishments we can talk about publicly right now!
As I reflect today, on Transgender Day of Visibility, I am filled with hope and excitement. Already we have done much at the Center to promote the welfare and wellbeing of trans communities across the globe through justice-oriented research and public education. And with your support, we can do even more. So please, as we enter our second year, consider donating to the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. It would mean the world to me and to everyone at the Center.
Yours in solidarity,
TJ Billard
Executive Director
Center for Applied Transgender Studies