Grant propositions
The Bad Trans News economy
Written on 26 February 2026
Today the professor who introduced me to trans studies posted on Instagram that his birth certificate has been invalidated. Attached to the comment was a link to Erin Reed’s heavily shared article, “Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses”. Under this legislation, effective immediately, anyone who has previously undergone a gender marker change no longer holds a valid license, and could be fined or imprisoned for driving without one. This goes further than other similar bills nationwide, which have restricted and halted the process of future and ongoing marker changes, but have not asked for the surrender of existing documentation. Along with a “bathroom bounty” law allowing for trans people to be sued by individual civilians for entering a bathroom that does not align with their assigned sex at birth, this news has led Reed to update Kansas to a “Do Not Travel” status on her anti-trans national legal risk assessment map—the danger to trans people is immediate.
I see Reed’s article at work, from which I discreetly excuse myself to have a minor and self-contained panic attack. The irony is not lost on me as I duck into the women’s staff restroom. In moments like this it’s good to be a writer. You can always distract yourself with thematic coherence.
Reed calls this legislation “one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date”. This is very bad trans news. It’s also the clear escalation of a trend. Last year, while the United States federal government was in the process of seizing the passports of transgender applicants, and the UK was working to roll back the legal efficacy of Gender Recognition Certificates and legally define trans women out of existence, I was drafting my undergraduate senior thesis. In it, I wrote about these stories alongside some of the 2024 smear campaign ads against Kamala Harris1 as an example of the ways that language and documentation occupy a powerful position in the conservative imagination, arguing that
the transphobic argument which says that “sex is real”, immutable, biological, and solidified in the womb, harbors immense anxiety about the ability of mere “paperwork” to dictate reality. These arguments complain, indignantly, that bureaucratic lies are tantamount to brainwashing, that an amended passport makes it impossible for “us” to talk about what is obviously true. But in trying to express the absurdity of this woke mob gaslighting, by rallying for the necessary defense of these supposedly biological categories, they acknowledge their mutability, and the real power of naturalization (legitimation, transition).
This is a solidly academic reason to talk about the news. A close reading, even. But I also talked about these news stories for a simpler reason. I needed to prove that my field—trans studies—was worth talking about. Put uglier: I proposed that we should give a fuck about trans people.
Proving the relevance and horror of contemporary transphobia for essays like this is sort of an exhausting exercise, isn’t it? I’m tired of typing “transgender” into Google, not so much to find evidence, but to remind myself of whatever depressing news story is most recent. (Try it right now, I guarantee you’ll see what I mean.) I see similar paragraphs in a large proportion of the litcrit I read, a semi-obligatory gesture of rehashing this week’s worst human rights violations or whichever New York Times op-ed is at the forefront of increasingly mainstream transphobia (this week, it’s this one). There is obvious value to contextualizing a piece in contemporary discourse, and it might actually be impossible to write as a trans person in America without some influence from the material conditions of transphobia. But there is also something a little soul-sucking about acting out this practice in particular. Does my transfeminist reading of The Queen of the Damned really have an audience who needs to be reminded that there is a lot of bad trans news?
I’m a full-time artist, and I’m in the process of pursuing graduate school. This means that I spend a lot of time writing applications—for funding, for gigs, for articles, for residencies, for bartending jobs, for apartments where I don’t meet the income minimum, for a chance to be taken seriously. The charmingly-titled grant proposal is a particular industry, one which frustrates me and, also, runs my life for the foreseeable future. I am always proposing. I propose, for one, that the proposal and the proposition are near-synonyms separated by the imagined divide between society and commerce. A grant proposal, a business proposition; a marriage proposal, a sexual proposition. In both cases of the proposal, the financial element so deeply entrenched at the core of both the nonprofit sector and the marriage industry-institution is softened, gently obscured. We all know that marriage is a financial arrangement, a socially and legally privileged position of finance-sharing and combined legal personhood. We all know that writing a grant is asking for money. But it’s not always convenient or attractive to talk about it in those terms. We’re not asking our partner for a joint bank account, we’re asking for everlasting love. We’re not looking for capital that will keep our lights on, put a roof over our heads, and underpay our interns, we’re enabling and fostering crucial work, urgent work, work that is important now more than ever.
The joke goes that theatre artists like myself always claim our work is important now more than ever.2 This is a phrase we can probably retire, if for nothing else then for the sake of one less newsroom/director’s statement cliché. But to me it reflects not so much pure artistic narcissism as an economic reality of being a creative selling your work, especially a marginalized one. There isn’t time for work that is less than life-shatteringly important. Even self-consciously casual, silly, or self-indulgent pieces of art must paradoxically be justified with the claim that this casualness is itself critically necessary: we need to foster slowness, right now, and now more than ever. I have no reason to believe my work is the most important it has ever been; frankly, it feels like an insult to previous generations of trans scholars and artists to suggest such a thing. Trans work is not more important now than it was ten, twenty, a hundred years ago—not because I doubt myself, but because it has always been important to give a fuck about trans people. I make that proposal over and over.
The problem is of course that legislation of the type passed in Kansas really does make it feel like it is especially important to make trans work—or just to be trans, especially as someone in a much safer position to do so. It feels like a moral imperative to be trans loudly, and in our current economy, part of that is proposing. But there is something unsavory about the proposition that calls upon the suffering of my more marginalized, more endangered trans kin to ask for money. The grant proposition says that before we get to the business of talking about our art, we must recite a sufficiently recent, sufficiently heinous indignity, in order to prove that we are worth caring about.
Then again, not everyone follows trans studies professors on Instagram, or anti-trans legislation experts on Substack. Plenty of people in my life—most of them, probably—don’t know what happened in Kansas today, or at NYU last week. When it starts to feel like I am performing an endless repetition of trans suffering for consumption, I have to think there’s another option, something other than silence or exploitation. Surely education is not always the same as meaningless recitation. Maybe my (admittedly somewhat t4t) trans studies literary criticism doesn’t need to participate in this ritual anymore, but there are people who would be better off for knowing more about the state of trans rights in their country—and maybe some of them would give a fuck. I just don’t know how to talk about the bad trans news that makes me want to do trans work without implying that work is only viable so long as trans people are suffering. I don’t know what the other option is, but I know that the grant system isn’t an inevitable machine—it was designed, and it can be changed. Until we live in a world where survival does not require the constant proposing of my human rights, I have to trust my knowledge that trans work deserves to happen—not now more than ever, but now and ever.
I'm Reed Richardson, I'm a Brooklyn-based theatre artist and "independent scholar”, which is a fancy way of saying that I haven't given up writing about books even though no one is paying me for it. I like to write about experimental theatre, Shakespeare and early modern literature, early American history and literature, literary readings outside of traditional literary forms (archives, paratext, objects, ephemera, the news, social media comments), trans studies, queer studies, feminism, and theories of sex/kink/erotics. I also write prose, plays, and poetry. Find me on substack or at richardsonreed.com
Which are currently being rehearsed verbatim to target Kansas democrats.
20-something actors-directors are, by the way, not alone in this. Some recent examples of other things that matter now more than ever include the Olympics, childhood vaccines, Jesus Christ, PR for lawyers, and the muppets.