Aqdas Aftab Wins the LGBT Equity Center's Graduate Student Involvement Award

Lavender Graduation recognizes an important milestone in the lives of our LGBTQ+ and Allied graduates.

English PhD candidate Aqdas Aftab won the LGBT Equity Center's Graduate Student Involvement Award. Aqdas is currently completing their dissertation titled "Trans Worlding Within: Decolonial Examinations of Trans of Color Interiority." To encourage more graduate students and faculty to engage with trans studies, they created the trans theory reading group at UMD. As a graduate assistant at the LGBT Equity Center, Aqdas has been particularly passionate about accountability and healing justice in higher education.

Outside of UMD, Aqdas is the co-creator of Transform Gender Collective, a transformative justice collective for transmasculine and masculine-of-center BIPOC to unlearn the white gender binary and build ethical masculinities together. They also facilitate "Intersections," a reading group (hosted by KhushDC) on caste abolition for queer and trans South Asians. Some of their creative and critical writing can be found in Bitch Media, Strange Horizons, The Rumpus, The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia, Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Speculative Transgender Fiction, TSQ*Now, andThe SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies. 

Aqdas will receive the award at the LGBT Equity Center's Lavender Graduation, recognizing an important milestone in the lives of our LGBTQ+ and Allied graduates. Lavender Graduation provides an opportunity for our community to honor those among us who have worked to make College Park a better place for LGBTQ+ people.