Purpose

Transgender Futures through Outreach, Resilience, and Meaning-Making (TRANSFORM) Lab

The TRANSFORM Lab at the University of Minnesota Duluth conducts community-engaged research with transgender and queer communities to imagine and build more livable futures. Our work explores health, sexuality, relationships, identity, and community wellbeing—not only by asking how transgender and queer people navigate systems that too often constrain their lives, but also how they create connection, pleasure, resilience, belonging, and Trans Joy.

We believe research can do more than document inequity. By centering transgender and queer voices, TRANSFORM produces scholarship that challenges harmful assumptions, strengthens communities, and informs clinical practice and policy. Across our projects, we are interested in both the conditions that shape people’s lives and the ways people resist, adapt, connect, and flourish within—and beyond—those conditions.

Come research with us! TRANSFORM welcomes undergraduate and graduate students who want to engage in meaningful research alongside transgender and queer communities. Students interested in health, sexuality, relationships, policy, community wellbeing, or LGBTQIA2S+ research more broadly are encouraged to get involved. No previous research experience is required—just curiosity, care, and a willingness to learn.

To learn more about joining the lab, contact Dr. Nomi Ostrander (she/they) at nomi@d.umn.edu.