(The Lion) — The federal government is spending nearly $250,000 to document the stories of older transgender adults thanks to a grant awarded a few months before President Donald Trump took office.
The National Endowment for the Humanities, a government agency, granted Central Washington University $247,000 in October to “digitally capture” the stories of transgender-identifying Americans over 50.
The taxpayer funds support “celebrating the lives of transgender older adults who live in or have strong ties to rural areas and small towns in the Pacific Northwest,” The TransRural Lives Project website says.
Besides questioning the use of taxpayer money on a controversial topic, some critics wonder why it’s necessary to subsidize this sort of storytelling in the social media age.
“Everyone – even the most ardent Progressive – must be asking themselves why such a grant would be issued when anyone can preserve any story with their own YouTube, TikTok or podcast channel for free,” David Boze, communications director for the Washington Policy Center, told The Lion.
So far, the initiative has told the stories of 12 transgender-identifying people in rural Washington state.
“This digital project seeks to document and make accessible these understudied narratives and the transgender histories they reveal through an interactive website,” says the NEH grant program page.
“TransRural Lives offers analytical examinations of thematics related to transgender older adults and rural living left out of prevailing socio-political discussions,” it adds.
While the project’s first phase will focus on Washington, the second phase will expand this work into Oregon, Idaho, Montana and even British Columbia, Canada.
University spokesman David Leder told The College Fix the school hasn’t “been informed about any changes to the project’s funding” since Trump took office in January. Trump, a Republican, has signed executive orders declaring the federal government only recognizes two genders, and he has promised to withhold funding from states that allow transgender athletes on women’s sports teams.
This year, the TransRural Lives team plans to create research guides it claims will help contextualize the project related to “LGBTQ+ studies” to help schools interested in teaching the material.
The project’s leaders will also host a “Two-Spirit and Indigenous trans Elders storytelling event” on May 1, the organization’s website says.
One story promoted by TransRural tells about a male named Emily Sloan who started identifying as a woman at 62 “when she came across YouTube videos by trans women sharing their stories and something ‘exploded in [her] head.’”
Also highlighted is a 61-year-old male named Michele Pinkham who identifies as a two-spirit.
“It wasn’t until they moved to Vancouver after their sons became self-sufficient, that they learned what two-spirit is and a lightbulb clicked in their head – two-spirit summed up a part of their identity they spent a lifetime trying to define,” the website says.
M. Eliatamby-O’Brien, associate professor in the English Department at CWU, is leading the initiative. She also directs the school’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.
O’Brien’s research focuses on “the experiences of gender, sexual, and racially-minoritized forced migrants through engagement with digital life narratives, digital storytelling, and multimodal rhetorics,” the project says.
