The future of our grant & mutual aid programs! Plus: Tuck & Jules G-P chat at NYU!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re hanging in there. This week’s newsletter is a little bit different than our usual format, because I’ve got something that I want to run by y’all, regarding the ~*~future~*~ of our various “redistributing money to trans people” programs. I’m gonna give you a long version and then a tl;dr, so feel free to skip down to the bold sentence if you don’t care enough to read 5 paragraphs (why would you???).

When we started our grant program in 2018, it consisted of three unpaid judges reading like 70 applications and handing out a few hundred dollars in bonus patreon money. I had a day job and good healthcare and was excited to allocate 20% of the patreon funds to people who needed it more.

When we started our mutual aid fund in April 2020, a pandemic had just hit and the world was (as always) scary and unstable and nobody knew how they were going to pay rent. I dropped all my other jobs for a month (or really, they dropped me, because, pandemic?) and wrangled donations and payments in a big google doc and did a lot of fighting with PayPal in both English and Spanish.

When it was time to do more rounds of grants or mutual aid, I polled folks on which program felt most important to continue moving forward. And people said… both! So we did both. Every six months. For years!

After seven rounds of grants and five rounds of mutual aid, both of these projects have become larger and most complicated, in both good and bad ways. I obviously cannot quit my jobs for a month every time we run a mutual aid drive. And in my rush to make sure we do a mutual aid project every six months, it ends up being a very chaotic, like, “ok we’re opening up this form for 2 hours on this random day and whoever sees it gets $100!” Which is fine but just seems… strange and lacking intention. We’re also getting hit by scammers in bigger and more coordinated ways every time we open up the application, which makes the entire process a lot more time-consuming (and frankly more energy-consuming).

Meanwhile, on the grant front, we’ve been receiving so many applications that the process now involves as many as 11 TPOC judges sorting through up to 500 applications to select 15+ winners. Most of those judges need to be paid for their time — that money, of course, comes out of the same patreon that’s paying for the bulk of the grant money… and that’s also paying for Ozzy and I to have, you know, jobs and apartments and ideally also healthcare.

What I’m trying to say! Is that running a full round of grants and a full mutual aid campaign every six months does not feel sustainable in multiple ways. What I would like to do is focus on grants in the fall (with a closing date of Halloween, as usual), and then focus on mutual aid in the spring, for Trans Day of Snack. Does this sound reasonable to you? I ask because y’all are LITERALLY paying for the grants, and I do not want you to feel like you were tricked into donating money that I said would go to grants, but that is now going into our general budget instead! Similarly, I know that SO many trans people rely on mutual aid, and it feels bad to cut it back even further, but I also know that systemic problems need systemic solutions and I am just a guy on a laptop.

Clearly I’m holding onto a lot of guilt about cutting back on the “giving money to people” part of Gender Reveal. It’s so SO important to me and it feels weird and antithetical to do less of it, but I also do not know how to keep doing this at this pace. So……. Lmk if you have any thoughts, I guess!!!

This picture of Ruby sitting proudly on a tall shelf is just a reward for making it this far into the newsletter.

Other updates: Podcast continues to podcast. Merch continues to merch. Actually, while we’re here, let’s talk about that: our merch program is also a form of “giving money to people” since we operate at a loss, and I’m always unclear on whether we should keep doing this. On the one hand, it feels fast fashion-y and time-consuming, and our margins keep getting smaller, so most of the money goes to the Teespring Corporation. But it’s also… very VERY fun to see y’all wearing the little designs!

So. Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? *circa-2012 YouTube voice* Let me know in the comments below! (I’m also interested in feedback on these programs generally, beyond just the scope and pacing.)

Photo: Another screenshot of a video of Jules and Tuck talking at the NYU Journalism Institute. 

On a completely different note! (Or, I guess, speaking of YouTube?) I had the honor and pleasure to be in conversation with Gender Reveal alumna Jules Gill-Peterson at a speaking event on Monday. We were invited to the ~NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute~ to discuss journalistic coverage of “the trans health crisis,” which as you can imagine, we both had a lot of thoughts about.

I did not realize until after the talk had concluded that this event was a) open to the public and b) recorded for future public viewing. So, although I did not realize that what I said would be leaving that specific room (whoops), I’m tentatively sharing the link here in case any of you would like to watch it. Jules and I are both wearing masks so it’s a little muffled, but I think we’re both still audible.

Shout out to the Gender Reveal listeners I met after the talk, by the way! It was an honor that y’all came out for this on such a grey and rainy Monday evening.

OK, that’s it for this week. Thanks for sticking through this long newsletter that was mostly about my feelings. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb.

Photo: Ruby, caught mid-yawn or mid-scream, perched in front of a painted portrait of her sticking out her tongue. 

A mood.

Xo,
Yr resident gender detective

PS: My reward for sending this out will be reading this week’s Defector GBBO challenge attempt, if you’d like to join me. I’m already stressed for them for next week…