About

The Trans Freedom School (TFS) is a political education initiative that provides free teaching and organizing materials for students, educators, and communities hoping to learn more about trans life and activism. Created in response to growing attacks on race- and gender-based educational content, the TFS was created by and for trans communities and features timelines of trans history; interviews with experts in medicine, politics, art, and history; and resources for continuing discussion and education. Ultimately, the Trans Freedom School provides readers with resources for understanding the current moment and strategizing for the future.

This project is part of a three-year initiative called “Stem the Tide: Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism,” based at the University of California, Davis, and generously funded by the Mellon Foundation. The project and website both respond to a moment of intensifying repression. Each year, hundreds of anti-trans bills are introduced in state legislatures, and the federal government has increasingly strengthened these efforts by rolling back anti-discrimination protections, restricting access to health care, and targeting trans people in schools, sports, and public life. Bans on race-, gender-, and sexuality-based education are spreading across the country and beyond, and the few sources we have are rapidly disappearing. Taking inspiration from the 1960s Freedom Schools organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the TFS continues SNCC’s legacy by providing grassroots education as resistance. Just as SNCC’s Freedom Schools served as community-run spaces offering Black students the education systematically denied by state and federal governments, the TFS aims to foster community education spaces in the U.S. and beyond. 

The TFS strives to meet an urgent and growing need: free, open-access resources that place contemporary anti-trans politics in a longer history of authoritarian regimes, community resistance, and survival. The site’s timelines, video-based panel presentations, and short interview-based modules are designed for use by community organizations, classrooms, and other gathering spaces, and strives to meet educational needs anywhere formal trans studies courses remain out of reach.

The Trans Freedom School was created by Professors Ava L.J. Kim and Christoph Hanssmann. Together they lead the broader “Stem the Tide” project alongside graduate researchers Caitlin Graziani and Jake Knight. The site was designed and built with support from the Design Action Collective.