7 Experts for Timely Analysis of Bills Targeting Transgender People

Director of Communications

This year, an increasing number of states across the country are considering bills that target transgender people - from restricting access to health care to participation in sports. For reporters covering these developments, the following university-based researchers are available to comment:

Northwestern University
Thomas J Billard

Outside of Northwestern University, Billard is the Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies—the leading academic organization dedicated to scholarship on the social, cultural, and political conditions of transgender life. Billard studies the important role media plays in the social and political equality of transgender people in the United States and globally.

Virginia Commonwealth University
Eli Coston Headshot

Coston's research examines how the intersections of race, class, and gender create differing experiences of marginalization and oppression for people who are LGBTQ. One focus of their work is on anti-LGBTQ hate violence—specifically, how structural visibility from LGBTQ public policy decisions impact rates of violence and how further marginalization due to race, class and gender create differing experiences for victimization.

University of South Florida-Main Campus
http://history.usf.edu/faculty/djohnson/

A nationally recognized authority on LGBT history, Johnson is the author of two award-winning books that chronicle the complex relationship between rise of the LGBT movement and recurring government-sponsored moral panics about it. His first book The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians, shows how the McCarthy era hysteria over national security affected more than suspected communists. His second book, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, shows how the U.S. Post Office waged an unsuccessful war against early LGBT publications. 

University of Washington

Marhoefer is a historian of trans people in early 20th century Germany as well as across the 20th century in the US, Germany and elsewhere. Their work on trans people and queer people has been internationally influential in debates about the Holocaust as well as in other respects.

Fordham University
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Murib's research focuses on the politics of race, sexuality, and gender. Murib's forthcoming book, Terms of Exclusion: Rightful Citizenship Claims and the Construction of LGBT Political Identity (Oxford University Press), examines how rights-based political strategies created opportunities for the recognition of white, gender-normative, monogamously partnered gay men and lesbians at the expense of other community members.

Michigan State University
Carla headshot

Pfeffer's research is at the intersection of critical inquiry into contemporary families, genders, health, sexualities, and bodies considered marginal, as well as social actors’ management of stigma and discrimination processes. Pfeffer is the author of Queering Families: The Postmodern Partnerships of Cisgender Women and Transgender Men and is currently working on an international study of transgender reproduction practices to better understand how trans and non-binary people form families, engage with healthcare professionals, and navigate social and structural norms and barriers while doing so.

St. Cloud State University

Querna's areas of expertise are gender socialization, identity development and health among queer/trans and gender-diverse adolescents and emerging adults, cis men’s violence perpetration, and individual and collective harm and healing.  Her current project explores the opportunities and challenges to using restorative approaches to respond to gender-based violence.