On Thursday, Nov. 6, Assistant Professor of History Jaden Janak and Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Lau Malaver hosted the event “Out To Lunch: Beyond Legislation — Building Trans Futures.” Hosted in collaboration with the Taylor Center and the Svoboda Center for Civic Engagement, the event was organized as an opportunity for students to come together in community and discuss transgender lives on and off campus, as well as enjoy a lunch catered by Tin Tea.
The event highlighted the life and activism of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who passed on Oct. 13, 2025. Miss Major, a Black transgender woman who participated in the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, was committed to fighting for the lives of transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals with a concentration on intersectionality.
In an interview with The Olaf Messenger, Janak spoke about the inspiration for this event and the need for these types of conversations on campus: “Dr. Malaver and I were chatting about how to bring conversations about the current sociopolitical environment [to campus] in a way that was disruptive to the kind of silences that we were experiencing as professors amongst one another, but also students coming to us privately saying, ‘We want more conversations. We are also scared of having those conversations.’”
Both professors wanted the conversation to be based around action. At the event, attendees created a Venn diagram of challenges that transgender people face on campus and in a larger global context, with a section in the middle focusing on building solutions. One suggestion was a clothing swap for gender-affirming care items. On this subject, Janak said, “I think we need to understand that we have the power to build things with what we actually have right now. We don’t actually need money to be able to conduct a clothing swap or to be able to have a closet for gently used gender-affirming care items.”
“One thing I hope can come out of this is that people talk and create something. I’m pro writing things because when you have something, whether it’s a word cloud or a mind map or another Venn diagram, ideas will flow, and then you start mind mapping actions. It needs to start somewhere,” Malaver said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger when discussing their hope for what attendees will take away from the event.
In conjunction with the event, the Trans Care Collective — a group of students currently in the process of becoming an officially recognized student organization — has formed to create a safe and welcoming community for transgender students on campus.
“My hope is that this is a beginning point, not an end point,” Janak said. “The amount of folks who showed up [to the event], over 40 people, that to me is a demonstration that more conversations, more community is needed here and that we have the tools to be able to do it. So I’m hopeful to see some real tangible steps come, especially from the Trans Care Collective and the work that students are doing.”
