The University of Arizona will host a four-day international transgender conference in September focused on transgender issues related to academics and, as early as fall 2017, will offer a master’s-level program in transgender studies, reported Inside Higher Ed.

The public university began hiring faculty members to teach transgender studies in 2013 when it launched its Transgender Studies Initiative. Since then, the University of Arizona has hosted a peer-reviewed journal on interdisciplinary transgender studies, which was co-founded and now edited by Susan Stryker, director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the university.

The university hired three of four professors immediately. The two-year holdup on the fourth hire has been over racial diversity. “One reason why the search didn’t work the first year is that the three people who had been hired were all white, and we were really trying to prioritize hiring faculty of color,” Stryker said. “We did a couple of really targeted recruitments, but they both wound up getting really good job offers elsewhere.”

Transgender studies “examines sex and gender as they relate to cultural representations, political movements and lived experiences of gender nonconforming individuals,” said Inside Higher Ed. Stryker, who has been working on getting this program off the ground since the early ’90s, said what she’s done in bringing transgender studies to the University of Arizona is help people look at the subject differently. “However successful or unsuccessful the Arizona Transgender Studies Initiative turns out to be, what we’ve done has helped change the perception of transgender studies throughout the academy.”

Only an estimated 0.3 percent of the U.S. population experiences gender confusion to the point of identifying as transgender. However, the University of Arizona’s transgender studies program will be launched just as public concerns over the transgender bathroom debate hits an all-time high and some who identify as transgender have grabbed the media spotlight.

Eric Plemons, a medical anthropologist hired as one of the three professors in the program, designed a course that “explores how sex and gender have become objects of medical study.” He is also designing a course that will allow students to study surgical practices including sex reassignment surgery. The other two professors have discrete areas of expertise within the field of transgender studies. Plemons said the divergent specialties within the group are a strength. “There’s the medicine person, the aesthetics person and the religion person,” he said.