Last summer, a group of scholars and activists gathered for an online symposium hosted by the Black, Indigenous, & Trans of Color Histories Lab entitled “Trans Joy, Pleasure, Freedom.” The keynote address, by Rutgers University doctoral student and “porn activist” K Anderson—whose academic interests include “the formal emergence of the trans pornographic genre”—explored the topic of “Black Trans Pleasure.”
Beyond their interest in transgender ideology, many of the event’s attendees had another thing in common: generous backing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2024, the event’s host received a $460,000 grant from the foundation. Joshua Reason, the lab’s co-lead for events, was a Mellon undergraduate fellow and then received a Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Alejandrina M. Medina, another co-lead, received a Mellon-funded “Trans Studies at the Commons” fellowship; Anderson, the keynote speaker, was also a recipient.
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The symposium offers a snapshot of how a massive charitable foundation, hand-in-hand with a nationwide network of scholars, has worked to elevate “transgender studies” to the status of a legitimate academic field.
For the past few months, I’ve reported on how Mellon has transformed itself into a vehicle for social justice activism. The foundation’s investment in trans studies stands out as perhaps its most striking attempt at “transforming the academy.” I’ve acquired a trove of grant proposals via public records requests and reviewed CVs, job advertisements, and grant announcements. The documents reveal how the Mellon Foundation has sought to institutionalize the bizarre and highly politicized form of pseudo-scholarship that is trans studies.
Mellon boasts an extensive trans studies portfolio. In recent years, it has given half a million dollars each to Penn State University, for a project titled “Widening the Arc of Trans History”; Northeastern University, for its “Digital Transgender Archive”; and UC Davis, for a project on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism”.
One grant proposal states that it will use the funds to pay San Francisco State University professors to take a course on incorporating “trans and queer ethnic studies” into their teaching. Another promises to support “tribal and Indigenous communities” through “Two Spirit and Indigenous Trans Studies curriculum and service” at Fresno State University.
In practice, the field is inescapably political—as is Mellon’s funding of it. In 2023, the University of Kansas (KU) received $1 million for the “Trans Studies at the Commons” program, which seeks to transform the university’s “local and regional landscape to be more transliberatory,” in part by funding a cohort of “scholar-activists.”
KU’s grant proposal, which I acquired via public records request, notes: “We want to make use of [the] liberal past of Lawrence”—the city where the university is located—“to galvanize efforts aimed at transforming the cultural and social landscape in favor of social justice today.”
Many grantees come off as more than a bit fringe. One Syracuse University project summary declares that self-identified transgender scholars “are born into a diasporic condition—not quite ever grounded in the heterosexual, cisnormative, white-supremacist nuclear family.” The project aims at “hatching trans resistance in response to fascism’s many guises.”
The primary effect of Mellon cash is the creation of more academic jobs. At KU, the Mellon program funded a new trans studies professor. The Syracuse program hired a two-year postdoc in “Trans Diaspora Studies.” Earlier this year, Dartmouth University announced that it was hiring a Mellon Teaching Fellow in Transgender Studies.
This financial support appears to be a part of a broader strategy. For one project, aimed at training “emerging trans Indigenous creator[s]” at Simon Fraser University, the grant announcement explicitly identifies it as part of “the Mellon Foundation’s Trans Studies initiative.” While Mellon’s website makes no reference to such an initiative, Susan Stryker, a prominent trans studies advocate, described in a 2024 interview how Carolyn Dinshaw, Mellon’s senior program officer for higher learning, has made the burgeoning field a funding priority.
“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,” Stryker told the Bay Area Reporter.
Mellon’s giving closely mirrors a strategy developed by Stryker in a 2020 journal article. In it, she argued that “a traditional academic program” is not “viable for transgender studies right now,” instead proposing “a more distributed model, with scholars and students dispersed across any number of institutions” and collaborating periodically.
Stryker has advanced this mission personally, winning a $1.5 million Mellon grant for a program called “Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment and Service”—or TENTACLES.
This unsavory acronym fits the foundation, which has created a loosely connected group of graduate students, postdocs, and professors throughout the academy but united by a common funder.
The TENTACLES program itself illustrates Mellon’s network. For example, Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, who sits on its steering committee, was a postdoc at the Mellon-funded Race, Risk, and Resilience project at Florida International University and a research fellow at the Mellon-funded Arts Research in Communities of Color Initiative.
In fact, most Mellon trans studies projects involve repeat Mellon beneficiaries. PJ Depietro, a former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, now runs the “Trans Diasporic Study” program at Syracuse. The grant’s co-investigators include Dylan Blackston, a fellow at the KU trans studies program, and Abraham Weil, director of that program. Marina Segatti, a postdoctoral fellow for the Syracuse program, was previously a Mellon-funded graduate student instructor at UC Santa Cruz.
The Mellon Foundation doesn’t just create demand for trans studies scholars; it also boosts supply. Emory University graduate student Victor Omni Ultra has received an undergraduate fellowship, a fellowship through the TENTACLES initiative, a dissertation research fellowship at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a “trans theory” fellowship at KU, a dissertation writing fellowship at the Center for Engaged Scholarship, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Hemispheric Institute—all funded by Mellon. Ultra’s scholarship, much of it published in the Mellon-funded Transgender Studies Quarterly, tackles topics like “Ballroom Culture’s Latin and Black Erotics” and “Black Queer/Trans Vernacular Grammars.”
Academia deals in lifetime appointments, which makes faculty packing as consequential for higher ed as court packing is for the Supreme Court. Americans increasingly see higher education as out of touch and untrustworthy. Universities, for their own survival, should be much more skeptical toward funders like Mellon that traffic in pseudo-disciplines like transgender studies.