A national initiative centering on advancing trans and nonbinary scholarship is underway, and its roots are in San Francisco. Titled "TEN:TACLES," it's the brainchild of Susan Stryker, Ph.D., trans studies scholar, author, historian, and city resident.
"I literally woke up one morning, and it was like I had dreamed of the acronym. It was like, 'TEN:TACLES — Transgender Educational Network, colon, Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment and Service' — that is a kick-ass acronym. Thank you, unconscious, for giving me that,'" said Stryker during a phone call with the Bay Area Reporter.
The initiative is made possible by a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of its Higher Learning Program that provides funding to humanities and cultural studies scholarships in the U.S. that affects social transformation.
Stryker, a trans woman, shared that the nine-letter acronym she conceived of was initially without any specific projects attached to it. Then, the Mellon Foundation opportunity presented itself: "When they invited me to submit an application for a grant proposal, I thought, 'Ah, here it is, the TEN:TACLES initiative.'"
Stryker, 63, is a professor emerita of gender and women's studies at University of Arizona and a distinguished visiting faculty member at Stanford University's Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She's written several published works, including the book, "Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution" and is the Emmy Award-winning director of the documentary, "Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria" (2005).
Her current role as the director of TEN:TACLES is purposeful, she said.
"What I like to do, as best I can, is just sort of move money from where there is too much to where there is not enough," Stryker said. "And so the goal all along for me was to use the TEN:TACLES initiative to try to take some of the Mellon Foundation's largesse and put as much of that money as possible in the pockets of people who are doing really grassroots, community-based activism that was somehow in dialogue with humanities and cultural studies scholarship."
Stryker credits the Mellon Foundation and its senior program officer for higher learning, Carolyn Dinshaw, Ph.D., for getting the idea of financially supporting trans scholarship off the ground.
"Within [Mellon's] funding and higher education, the idea was like, 'Well, what areas of higher education — where there could be a social justice contribution — are we not doing a good job with yet? And Carolyn said, 'I see three things. I see disability studies, I see Indigenous studies, and I see transgender studies.' And so I started working with Carolyn about two and a half years ago to help lay the groundwork for the Mellon Foundation to start giving in this area," said Stryker.
Dinshaw did not respond to a request for comment.
Stryker then went through the regular channels for her TEN:TACLES grant proposal to Mellon, and the rest is (trans)history.
The initiative
The TEN:TACLES Initiative will provide three rounds of funding to trans-centering projects over the course of three years — 2024, 2025, and 2026 — to selected participants whose work promotes accurate narratives about the trans and nonbinary community. The pilot round grantees, 21 in total, were announced in September.
The grants range in size from $2,500 up through about $40,000 for the year, according to Stryker.
"It's a multimillion dollar commitment to helping develop the field and to helping get transgender scholarship plugged into activism and social change efforts," she said.
The money will be administered by the GLBT Historical Society, an organization that collects, preserves, and exhibits LGBTQ+ historical artifacts. Its small museum, where various exhibitions are shown, is located on 18th Street in the Castro, and its LGBTQ+ archives are stored in a separate mid-Market district office building, formally known as the Dr. John P. De Cecco Archives and Research Center.
As the B.A.R. was the first to report in late September, Mayor London Breed announced that the city is planning to purchase the building at 2280 Market Street for a freestanding LGBTQ museum that is a project of the historical society. Initially, the society would occupy the vacant second floor.
Historical society officials are excited about the project undertaken by Stryker, who previously served as the first executive director of the organization (1999-2003).
"We are thrilled to be working with Susan Stryker on this groundbreaking project. At a time when our trans and nonbinary communities are under sustained attack, it is so important for us to be able to support this vital work. We are incredibly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for making this investment, and excited to see what Susan and the project participants bring to life," commented Roberto Ordeñana, a gay man who's the archival group's current executive director, in an April news release announcing the initiative.
For Stryker, funneling the grant money through the nonprofit made sense.
"The grant needed to be based at a 501(c)(3)organization, and I picked the GLBT Historical Society not only because I'd worked with them before, but [also because] I thought it would help build their profile," she said. "Because they get a 20% overhead for administering the grant, it would allow them to develop their own organization. So that was a way to support an organization that I cared about."
The society received another grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2024, totaling $150,000, for relocation and digital infrastructure rebrand planning, according to its website.
Stryker shared that she devotes a few hours each week to TEN:TACLES in a supervisory capacity, and a full-time program manager, Cameron Lucas, helps oversee the initiative's mission.
"I am extremely excited to be working on this groundbreaking initiative to fund some of the absolutely stellar work being done in the field of Transgender Studies," Lucas, who identifies as queer, wrote in an email to the B.A.R. "It is an honor to help to bring Dr. Stryker's vision for this project to life and to be able to build something like this with her and the amazing and dedicated members of our steering and advisory committees. There are so many impactful things being done by our grantees, and I am thrilled to see the ways their work will make it out into the world in the coming years."
Stryker reached out to five trans and nonbinary scholars, all people of color with doctorates in their respective fields, to join TEN:TACLES as steering committee members and weigh in on the project selections per round.
"I thought, 'They've got good sensibilities. They think about how to use scholarship for social change activism in some of the same ways that I do,'" she said.
They are Harrison Apple, Ph.D., an interdisciplinary artist and historian based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the co-founder of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project; Jian Neo Chen, Ph.D., associate professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University; Ian-Khara Ellasante, Ph.D., assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine; Claudia Sofía Garriga López, Ph.D., an assistant professor of queer and trans Latinx studies at California State University, Chico; and LaVelle Ridley, Ph.D., assistant professor of queer and trans studies at Ohio State University.
A seven-member advisory committee provides oversight and mentorship to TEN:TACLES project grantees.
"Since what we're trying to do is to infuse trans scholarship into social change activism in a way that can change public perception and false narratives about trans lives, we wanted to have a slate of professionals who work in different industries, maybe not trans people themselves, but people who were sympathetic allies who had good community and industry connections," Stryker commented.
The advisory committee includes Sydney Baloue, a trans man, and a writer, dancer, and producer; Anjali Singh, a publisher; Leah Reis-Dennis, vice president of content strategy and business development at Audacy; Irene LaZaridis, an event and show producer; Zackary Drucker, a trans woman and an independent artist and cultural producer; Mx. Pussy Noir, a performance artist; and Jenni Olson, GLAAD's social media safety program senior director.
Stryker explained, "We can show them the slate of projects that we're doing and say, 'Hey, there's something here that is of interest to you. Can you maybe help the people who are doing this find a larger audience?' or 'Can you give some kind of advice to them on what it is that they're doing?'"
Olson, for one, recognizes the significance of the initiative and of her involvement as a committee member.
"Politically-motivated anti-trans hate and lies are currently being weaponized at unprecedented levels, to dehumanize trans people and retract basic civil rights," wrote Olson, a lesbian, in an email to the B.A.R.
"Championing trans culture, scholarship, and activism — and the creation of accurate narratives about trans lives — is exactly what we need right now. I'm really proud to be part of this work," she added.
First round underway
For the first round of projects (now underway), steering committee members were given small stipends for their help with selecting and shepherding the projects through the pipeline. After using a portion of the Mellon grant for the stipends and overhead and staff hiring costs, approximately $900,000 of the initial $1.5 million remained, allotting approximately $300,000 worth of direct grants per year of the initiative.
Stryker said, "It was just like, 'How can we use a big chunk of change to put money into the networks, into the systems that pay people for the work that they're doing, and help support scholars and support activists who are using trans cultural production and scholarship at some level to advance a social change agenda?'"
Grant recipients in the first round include Félix Endara, a transgender New York-based independent filmmaker, for his project, "Body Alchemy," involving consulting on a documentary film about transmasculine photographer Loren Cameron; Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Ph.D., a nonbinary Puerto Rican poet, for his project "We had nothing to lose," involving the translation and bilingual publication of trans icon Sylvia Rivera's speeches and writing, along with public presentations and workshops on "translating transness;" and Portland Outright, a youth-led LGBTQ+ organization in Maine, for its "Breakfast of Champions" monthly free brunch program that will feature trans scholars discussing their work in social justice activism.
"We wanted a slate of projects to be as geographically and ethnically diverse as possible, and also projects that were doing different kinds of things, and projects that run from small one-offs to seed money for what might be multi-year projects," Stryker said.
Another first-round project is the "Trans Psychedelic Humanities Planning Grant," with Sam Claude Carmel as the grantee.
Carmel, transmasculine, is the founder and executive director of the trans-centering gallery Liminal Space SF located in the South of Market neighborhood and a recovery services specialist at the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center.
The $5,000 grant they received from the TEN:TACTLES initiative will support the development of "an advisory and planning cohort to lay the foundation of a future conference dedicated to the establishment of Trans Psychedelic Humanities as an academic field of research," Carmel shared in an email to the B.A.R.
"Trans people have always been deeply intertwined in the development of art and culture, and psychedelics have profoundly influenced and shaped our perspectives and practices. This funding enables trans people and our friends and collaborators to envision what a multidimensional conference looks like that centers Trans Psychedelic Humanities as an emerging field of study," wrote Carmel.
While the first round was by invite-only, the plan is to announce a call for proposals for the subsequent rounds, with the round two call for proposals slated for January. Down that project-funding road, Stryker intends to hand over the initiative's reins to those involved, with the steering committee playing a more active decision-making role.
"I just kind of like to seed the ground and tend to it and cultivate it enough to get things going, and then stand back and see what happens," said Stryker. "I don't want to be the person who dictates what happens. I want to watch it evolve organically."
For more information, visit the TEN:TACLES website at www.tentaclesinitiative.com or on Instagram at @tentaclesinitiative. To subscribe to the TEN:TACLES mailing list, go to tentaclesinitiative.com/home.
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