Eli Erlick is the director of Trans Student Educational Resources, a national youth-led organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans students, where her work emphasizes transgender youth activism, education, and media. Erlick co-founded the organization at the age of sixteen in 2011 while attending high school in rural Northern California. It has since grown to a national scale and has dozens of members, hosts the only countrywide fellowship program for transgender youth, and has resources in thousands of colleges and universities around the world. Erlick is currently a Ph.D. student in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she researches the political philosophy of the transgender movement. Her broader research focuses on contemporary transgender/queer studies, necropolitics, rural studies, self-determination, depathologization, suicide, youth politics, and neoliberalism. Her forthcoming publications include “Rethinking Non/Binary” (Letters for the Rest of Us, Columbia University Press) and “(Trans)forming Education: How Transgender Youth Are Leading the School Justice Movement” (Gender Diversity and LGBTQ Inclusion in Schools, Routledge). She is co-editing Suicidal Remains and Resistance, an anthology on critical interdisciplinary perspectives on suicide. She has authored several model policies regarding transgender students and has assisted in writing and enacting them at dozens of schools, colleges, and universities around the United States. She is a Westly Foundation, Peace First, and Red Bull Amaphiko fellow and has been recognized internationally by Glamour Magazine, NPR, and Teen Vogue alongside numerous other publications. Her work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times among dozens of additional outlets. You can learn more about Erlick at www.elierlick.com
Volume 39, Number 1, 2018