The Transgender Educational Network: Theory in Action for Creativity, Liberation, Empowerment, and Service (TEN:TACLES) Initiative is an initiative of the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning Initiatives and is housed within the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, California.

The mission of the TEN:TACLES Initiative is to inject trans and nonbinary humanities scholarship into public discourse as a strategy for promulgating accurate narratives about trans and nonbinary lives at a time of increasingly consequential disinformation about these communities, and then putting those stories into action. 

It does so by building networks between and among scholars, activists, artists, audiences, and publics that will contribute directly to the realization of transformational social justice projects integrating the production of new knowledge into their plans and visions.

The TEN:TACLES Initiative is grounded in the awareness that transformative social justice for trans and nonbinary lives depends less on the generation of ever more empirical data to be used in rational debate about law and policy than it does on new stories, new story-telling practices, new audiences, new modes of expression and communication, and new social interventions that recast the contexts of our lives, and thereby create new conditions for living. “Story,” in this sense, must move beyond mere narration to enact novel forms of analysis and interpretation; it must move beyond textuality to encompass other time-based forms of expression in such practices as film and music and dance; it must move beyond traditional media to engage with emerging publics who interact by means of emerging platforms. Narrative and story in this expansive sense must become a patterning for collective social movements.

The TEN:TACLES Initiative pursues this vision of humanities-informed, narrative-based social transformation by supporting clusters of original activist-oriented interdisciplinary research and creative work on trans- and nonbinary-related topics. It sponsors working groups that focus on implementing concrete projects, and research clusters that explore broader areas of interest in a more preliminary fashion, which might develop into new working groups in subsequent funding cycles. It prioritizes work by clusters that might consist of scholars, creative practitioners, activists, professionals and members of stake-holder communities for a few months to a few years, who all share a common investment in and passion for a particular project or topic, as well as a common

willingness to imaginatively explore the dissemination of their work through unconventional in addition to well-established distribution channels. All projects must somehow engage with the work of trans and nonbinary scholars or scholarship, benefit trans and non-binary communities and causes, exemplify a exemplify a commitment to diversity, equity, & inclusion and intersectional values, and contribute to a social justice mission.