Just Research?: Trans Futures in Health and Scientific Knowledge is a trans and two-spirit-led team of community organizers, university faculty, and students in California working at the intersections of gender, racial, economic, and disability justice. Our goal is to increase access to public research university resources for transgender, two-spirit, gender-expansive, and intersex communities’ (TGI)  and to align these resources with the needs of these communities. We recognize an ongoing history of harm enacted against TGI people in pursuit of health and scientific knowledge in the academy. We also recognize that TGI people and community organizations have developed research and knowledge-making practices outside of universities. We dare to envision and enact a more ethical and justice-oriented role for public research universities in the pursuit of TGI-related scholarship. 

This initiative has cultivated a network of scholars and community leaders interested in strengthening the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and in building capacities for community-driven and justice-centered research in alignment with our fight for liberation. We work for a future in which research about TGI people is relevant to and rooted in the knowledge, priorities, and practices of TGI people and communities and in which community researchers are valued, well resourced, and credited.

Toward that aim, we are conducting a qualitative study to gather the insights of TGI organizers on the research they conduct, in concert with and independently from, university-based researchers, and their analyses of institutional relations of power in these collaborations.

For more information, contact justresearch@women.ucla.edu.

Just Research?: Trans Futures in Health and Scientific Knowledge is proudly supported by the Hub for Health Intervention; Policy and Practice; UCLA Office for Research and Creative Activities; UC Humanities Research Institute; UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services (CHIPTS); and Gender Justice LA.

Cydney Brown, Workforce LGBTQ+ Development Specialist, Denver Health

Dannie Ceseña, California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network

Mel Y. Chen, UC Berkeley

Chris Hanssmann, UC Davis

Grace Kyungwon Hong, Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center, UCLA

Sid Jordan, Portland State University

Ezak Perez, Gender Justice Los Angeles

Vanessa Warri, PhD Student in Social Welfare, UCLA