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Founded | January 29, 2021 [1] |
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Founders | TJ Billard, Avery Everhart, and Erique Zhang |
Type | Nonprofit research organization |
86-2111392 [2] | |
Legal status | 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization |
Purpose | Academic research, policy advocacy, and public education |
Location | |
TJ Billard [3] | |
Revenue (2021) | less than $50,000 [4] |
Website | www |
The Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS) is an independent nonprofit research organization founded in 2021 in Chicago, Illinois. [5] The organization works to promote empirical academic research on issues of relevance to transgender populations globally and mobilizes scholarly knowledge to engage in both policy advocacy and public education. [6] [7] [8] [9] Together with Northwestern University Libraries, CATS publishes the platinum open access peer-reviewed academic journal Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
Within the transgender movement, CATS is best known for combating widespread misinformation about transgender health and politics. [6] [7] [14] [16] [17] Within academia, the organization is best known for its development and advancement of applied transgender studies as a key area of scholarly research. [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]
The Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS) was founded on January 29, 2021, by academic researchers and transgender rights activists TJ Billard, Avery Everhart, and Erique Zhang. [1] [4] The three founders formed the organization’s initial board of directors, with Billard serving as the organization’s first executive director. [3] V Varun Chaudhry and Ryan Karnoski later joined the board as at-large representatives. [25] The organization was publicly launched on March 31, 2021, in commemoration of International Transgender Day of Visibility. [6] [7]
CATS launched as a closed membership organization whose members are referred to as Fellows. [7] [25] Members join the organization at one of two different ranks: Senior Fellow (meaning the member holds one or more terminal degrees) or Junior Fellow (meaning the member is enrolled in a terminal-degree-seeking program). [26] At the time of the organization’s launch, CATS consisted of 30 Fellows, 20 of whom were Senior Fellows and 10 of whom were Junior Fellows. [6] [9] This cohort of Fellows included scholars working in five countries and at a variety of research institutions, including Google, Johns Hopkins University, NASA, New York University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, and the University of Washington. [7] [8] [3] In July 2021, CATS opened competitive applications for new members, who were evaluated and appointed by the organization’s board of directors. [26] In December 2021, the organization announced that 10 of the nearly 200 applicants were selected to join CATS as Fellows, with four new Senior Fellows and six new Junior Fellows joining. [27] These Fellows included scholars from Stanford University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University. [27] CATS prioritizes the principle of “by trans people... for trans people,” and thus all of the organization’s Fellows are transgender. [7]
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Discipline | Transgender Studies |
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Language | English |
Edited by | Thomas J Billard |
Publication details | |
History | 2022–present |
Publisher | |
Frequency | Quarterly |
Platinum open access | |
License | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (by-nc-nd) |
Standard abbreviations | |
ISO 4 | Bull. Appl. Transgend. Stud. |
Indexing | |
ISSN | 2769-2124 |
OCLC no. | 1260250007 |
Links | |
On August 2, 2021, CATS announced the launch of its flagship publication, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. [28] The journal is published by Northwestern University Libraries on behalf of the organization. [10] [11] [15] [29] The Bulletin is the first open access journal dedicated to transgender studies and the first journal dedicated to empirical research on transgender social, cultural, and political issues. [10] [11] [12] In contrast, Transgender Studies Quarterly (published by Duke University Press) focuses on humanistic inquiry, [30] while Transgender Health (published by Mary Ann Liebert) and the International Journal of Transgender Health (published by Taylor & Francis) focus on health research, and all three journals are paywalled.
The Bulletin is led by founding editor and CATS executive director Thomas J Billard and an interdisciplinary editorial board consisting of scholars from eight countries on four continents. [10] [11] [13] [15] [29] All of the journal’s editorial board members are transgender, making it the first academic journal to have an all-trans editorial board. [10] [12] [13] [14] Notable board members include Alejandra Caraballo, the second trans woman of color to teach at Harvard Law School, the first openly trans community board member in Brooklyn, and a former staff attorney at the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, [31] [32] and Paisley Currah, founding co-editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly and founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.
The Bulletin's inaugural double issue was published on June 13, 2022, featuring research from scholars across a range of academic disciplines. [33]
The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) is a nonprofit social equality organization founded in 2003 by transgender activist Mara Keisling in Washington, D.C. The organization works primarily in the areas of policy advocacy and media activism with the aim of advancing the equality of transgender people in the United States. Among other transgender-related issue areas, NCTE focuses on discrimination in employment, access to public accommodations, fair housing, identity documents, hate crimes and violence, criminal justice reform, federal research surveys and the Census, and health care access.
John Michael Bailey is an American psychologist, behavioral geneticist, and professor at Northwestern University best known for his work on the etiology of sexual orientation and paraphilia. He maintains that male sexual orientation is most likely established in utero.
Jamison "James" Green is a prominent transgender rights activist, author, and educator focused on policy work.
A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. Some transgender people who desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another identify as transsexual. Transgender is also an umbrella term; in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex, it may also include people who are non-binary or genderqueer. Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a third gender, or else conceptualize transgender people as a third gender. The term may also include cross-dressers or drag kings and drag queens in some contexts. The term transgender does not have a universally accepted definition, including among researchers.
Donna M. Hughes is an American academic and feminist who chairs the women's studies department at the University of Rhode Island. Her research concerns prostitution and human trafficking; she was a prominent supporter of the campaign to end prostitution in Rhode Island, and has testified on these issues before several national legislative bodies. She sits on the editorial board of Sexualization, Media, and Society, a journal examining the impact of sexualized media.
Paisley Currah is political scientist and author, known for his work on the transgender rights movement. His book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity examines the politics of sex classification in the United States. He is a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was born in Ontario, Canada, received a B.A. from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario and an M.A and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an American entrepreneur, filmmaker, visual artist, blogger, writer, and scholar based in Oakland, California. His artistic and academic work focuses on queer/trans issues, body image, racialized sexualities, gender, performance and black queer theory.
Bali White is a researcher and writer interested in African, environmental, and gender studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As trans woman, she is also a community organizer and advocate addressing transgender identity, legal, health care and social concerns at the national, state and local levels. Her research and activist work around transgender advocacy and ballroom community youth has been influential in the field of public health. She previously served on the National Advisory Board for the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health and managed the CDC-funded initiatives for young trans women and MSM in the ballroom community at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Transgender health care includes the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental health conditions, as well as sex reassignment therapies, for transgender individuals. A major component of transgender health care is gender-affirming care, the medical aspect of gender transition. Questions implicated in transgender health care include gender variance, sex reassignment therapy, health risks, and access to healthcare for trans people in different countries around the world.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering transgender studies, with an emphasis on cultural studies and the humanities. Established in 2014 and published by Duke University Press, it is the first non-medical journal about transgender studies.
Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, scholar, and archivist. They have written extensively on black and trans visibility, black trans aesthetics, racial capitalism, and queer, trans and black radicalism, resistance and abolition.
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a term referring to an unevidenced phenomenon where adolescents identify as transgender and experience gender dysphoria due to peer influence and social contagion. ROGD is not recognized as a valid mental health diagnosis by any major professional association, who discourage its use due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence for the concept, major methodological issues in existing research, and its stigmatization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The paper proposing the concept was based on surveys of parents of transgender youth recruited from three anti-trans websites; following its publication, it was re-reviewed and a correction was issued highlighting that ROGD is not a clinically validated phenomenon. Since the paper's publication, the concept has frequently been cited in legislative attempts to restrict the rights of transgender youth.
Holly Lawford-Smith is a New Zealander-Australian philosopher, scholar, researcher, author and Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne.
Emi Koyama is a Japanese-American activist, artist, and independent scholar. Koyama's work discusses issues of feminism, intersex human rights, domestic violence, and sex work among many others. Koyama is best known for her 2000 essay "The Transfeminist Manifesto", which has been republished in many anthologies and journals for transgender studies. She is a founder of the advocacy group Intersex Initiative.
Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population. A variety of explanations for this have been proposed, such as prenatal hormonal exposure, which has been linked with both sexual orientation, gender dysphoria and autism. Alternatively, autistic people may be less reliant on social norms and thus are more open about their orientation or gender identity. A narrative review published in 2016 stated that while various hypotheses have been proposed for an association between autism and gender dysphoria, they lack strong evidence.
Histories of the Transgender Child is a 2018 transgender studies book by the transgender author and academic Jules Gill-Peterson. The book is an exploration of transgender childhood in the United States throughout the twentieth century. It received the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the 2018 Children's Literature Association Book Award.
Florence Ashley is an academic, activist and law professor at the University of Alberta. They specialize in trans law and bioethics. They have numerous academic publications, including a book on the law and policy of banning transgender conversion practices. Florence served as the first openly transfeminine clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada. They are a winner of the Canadian Bar Association SOGIC Hero Award.
Ruth Pearce is a British sociologist who is known for her research in transgender studies. Her work explores issues of inequality, marginalisation, power, and how communities of marginalised peoples can work to transform their lives. She is a senior fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies and a lecturer in community development at the University of Glasgow's School of Education.