Next semester, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will be the site of a groundbreaking event: the Big Ten Trans Research Symposium. This gathering promises to showcase cutting-edge research and scholarship focused on transgender studies, drawing from institutions across the Big Ten conference.
The symposium, initially promoted by the University of Oregon’s Graduate Studies division, is scheduled for March 27th and 28th. It’s designed as a forum for a diverse range of academic voices, actively soliciting proposals from scholars and students across all disciplines whose work engages with trans studies.
Beyond simply presenting research, the symposium’s organizers explicitly state a commitment to resisting what they describe as “authoritarian efforts” aimed at diminishing or eliminating trans lives. This reveals a clear activist component woven into the academic framework of the event.
This symposium isn’t a spontaneous undertaking; it’s the culmination of a three-year project backed by the Big Ten Academic Alliance. A substantial $30,000 in grants was pledged as early as 2024 to bolster “trans studies” initiatives throughout the conference’s universities.
The initiative originated with a collaborative grant application spearheaded by Toby Beauchamp, chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, and the University of Minnesota. Beauchamp expressed excitement about the grant’s potential to foster a stronger intellectual community for trans studies scholars.
The symposium’s submission form articulates a core tenet of trans studies: a challenge to traditional academic structures. It argues that by centering transgender perspectives, the field fundamentally alters the very nature of knowledge creation and its underlying assumptions about gender.
This event isn’t isolated. A similar symposium, focused on “Pre and Early Modern Trans Studies,” was recently hosted by Boston University in March, indicating a growing trend of dedicated academic spaces for this field of study.
The rise of these specialized symposia signals a deliberate and expanding investment in trans studies within major universities, fostering a concentrated environment for research and the development of new academic perspectives.
