The Federal Government Is Spending $250K Documenting ‘Transrural Lives’ In Pacific Northwest

The federal government is spending a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars to celebrate “transrural” Americans — older people who live in rural areas and identify as transgender.

The National Endowment for the Humanities granted $247,000 for “The TransRural Lives Project,” a “digital storytelling project exploring and celebrating the lives of transgender older adults who live in or have strong ties to rural areas and small towns in the Pacific Northwest.” The program is run by professors from Central Washington University in conjunction with Helen House, an organization that operates out of a residential home and invites children as young as 13 to meetups.

“Helen House gives power to, and validates, SOGIE youth and young adults ages 13 to 24, fostering self-exploration, self-expression, and self-acceptance,” the organization’s website reads.

President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order intended to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the federal government and end any federal spending in support of the DEI agenda in academia and the private sector. A spokesman for Central Washington University told The Daily Wire that the federal funding for the “TransRural Lives Project” has not been affected, however.

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The three-year project, which won the federal contract at the tail end of the Biden administration, is helmed by M. Eliatamby-O’Brien, an Associate Professor in Central Washington University’s English Department who uses “they/them” pronouns. “Their research focuses on the experiences of gender, sexual, and racially-minoritized forced migrants through engagement with digital life narratives, digital storytelling, and multimodal rhetorics,” Brian’s biography reads.

The project has already collected the stories of multiple men who identify as women and live in the Pacific Northwest. “Veronica Steed is a 65-year-old white, crossdresser who came out around 2000,” one story reads, with another biography focusing on Elior, “an activist whose been feeling pretty burnt out for a few years now.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities did not respond to a request for comment. Central Washington University declined to comment.

This isn’t the first time the federal government has allocated taxpayer dollars to far-left, pro-transgender causes. The Department of Agriculture agreed to spend $50,000 of taxpayer money on an organization that works to “diversify the outdoors” by hosting LGBT-specific wilderness conservation trips for teenagers, The Daily Wire reported. And the Department of Health and Human Services approved a $700,000 grant to create “an inclusive teen pregnancy program for transgender boys.”

“Youth who are assigned female at birth … are at risk for negative sexual health outcomes yet are effectively excluded from sexual health programs because gender-diverse youth do not experience the cisgender, heteronormative teen sexual education messaging available to them as salient or applicable,” the award description reads.