Transgender activist, academic pioneer
shuster educates, empowers via scholarship, service, social justice
By:
Lois J. Gray | 2012.04.11 | 11:59 AM

stef shuster recalls the frustration experienced when filling out the Institutional Review Board (IRB) application to conduct graduate research.

“It was very formulaic, and so many of the questions were constructed in a binary way,” says the 29-year-old University of Iowa doctoral student in sociology who is conducting research on transgender communities and identities—and whose name is intentionally lowercase.

So when the form asked what percentage of the human subjects shuster interviewed were female or male, shuster was stumped.

“How do I fill that out when some of the people whom I interviewed identified as neither?” shuster says. “Life is full of nuance, ambiguity, and complexity.”