Today is a day to celebrate trans* people around the globe for their contributions to society and for making the world a better and more interesting place. A huge shout out to Jazz Jennings for all of her accomplishments: A book! A reality TV show! And continued fundraising through the TransKids Purple Rainbow Foundation! Thank you, Jazz and Jazz’s family, for all that you do!

And, of course, many many thanks to our study participants who are pioneers in making the world a better place for their kids and for all trans* people and families! Also in celebration of TDOV, check out this fantastic post titled, “31 Trans* Women You Should Know (Besides Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox)”. We appreciated learning about all of the amazing contributions of these trans* women! To learn more about TDOV, go to: http://www.transstudent.org/tdov.

Kristina Olson, Ph.D., and her team at the University of Washington are doing critically important work through their study, “The TransYouth Project.” They will be following 73 pre-pubescent transgender children, ages 3 through 12 years old, all of whom have socially transitioned to living full-time as the gender “opposite” to the gender they were assigned at birth.

They discuss their findings so far in an Op-Ed in the L.A. Times. To sum up their findings, which were recently published in the journal Pediatrics, the children did not exhibit elevated levels of depression and only showed minimally-elevated levels of anxiety, which is to be expected, given the lack of widespread acceptance and support of trans* people in society. We look forward to seeing and learning more from the Dr. Olson and the TransYouth Project!

On March 7, 2016, Kate Kuvalanka, P.I. of the Trans*Kids Project, spoke at the University of Rhode Island to an audience of over 250 students, faculty, staff, and community members. During the event, which was titled “(Un)Doing Gender: Stories from the Trans*Kids Project,” Kate shared her insights from talking extensively with the parents and other primary caregivers in her study and shared with the audience members some of the things that the her participants want others to know about their families. A follow-up student news article about the event can be found here.