CHAMPAIGN, Illinois (LifeSiteNews) — The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will host a “Big Ten Trans Research Symposium” in March, inviting pro-transgender paper proposals from highly recognized universities across the country.
The event, which reportedly seeks to fight “authoritarian efforts” to “eradicate trans life,” marks the continued departure of universities from the foundation of true education: taking objective truth seriously.
The goal of fighting alleged attempts to “eradicate” so-called “trans life” further undercuts authentic research into transgenderism, since it falsely assumes that attempts to change one’s sex are healthy and beneficial.
Scholars and students of all disciplines and affiliated with Big Ten institutions, which now include 18 universities scattered mostly across the Midwest and West, have been invited to submit proposals if their research “meaningfully engages trans studies.”
The symposium is part of a “three-year project funded by the Big Ten Academic Alliance to strengthen intellectual and pedagogical networks in trans studies across the Big Ten,” according to the paper submission form, indicating gender ideology is increasingly infecting institutes of higher education.
In fact, in 2024, the Big Ten Academic Alliance pledged $30,000 in grants to a proposal to “build transgender studies” across Big Ten campuses, according to the University of Illinois.
As the symposium submission form notes, such studies challenge the reality of biologically based “binary” gender.
“Trans studies today is a dynamic field, growing rapidly even as its interventions and practitioners are increasingly under threat. By centering trans frameworks and examining how the dominant frame of binary gender is inscribed in the practices of all academic fields, trans studies broadly transforms the stakes of knowledge production,” the symposium submission form says.
Gender ideology has been the focus of other recent college gatherings, such as a conference on “Gender and Sexual Minorities” hosted by Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and a “Pre and Early Modern Trans Studies Symposium” hosted by Boston University in March.
A review of over 60 studies shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, including psychological harm, especially when done with children who lack the mental and emotional maturity and life experience to comprehend the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
“A 2021 comprehensive data review of all 3,754 trans-identified adolescents in U.S. military families over 8.5 years showed that cross-sex hormone [use] leads to increased use of mental health services and psychiatric medications, and increased suicidal ideation/attempted suicide,” a McMaster University report found.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Scott” Newgent, a woman self-described as “a 48-year-old transgender man,” has described the harm of transgender interventions inflicted on her as follows:
“I have suffered tremendously, including seven surgeries, a pulmonary embolism, an induced stress heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, arm reconstructive surgery, lung, heart and bladder damage, insomnia, hallucinations, PTSD, $1 million in medical expenses, and loss of home, car, career and marriage. All this, and yet I cannot sue the surgeon responsible – in part because there is no structured, tested or widely accepted baseline for [so-called] transgender health care.”