The first non-medical journal examining academic research into transgender issues is hoping to launch in April 2014, if it can secure funding.

Transgender Studies Quarterly pledges to ‘change the way the world thinks about transgender issues’.

The interdisciplinary journal, edited by University of Arizona professor Susan Stryker and City University of New York’s Paisley Currah, has already secured publishing with Duke University Press, a prestigious academic publishers.

But the editors are seeking to raise $20,000 (â‚¬15,500) via crowd-funding to subsidize printing before subscriptions will, they hope, cover the costs once the journal launches. The Kickstarter campaign has already raised over $15,000 (â‚¬11,600).

‘Transgender Studies has far-reaching implications across many academic disciplines, including not only gender and women’s studies, sexuality studies, and LGBT Studies, but also social sciences, health, art, cultural studies, and many other broadly defined fields,’ write Stryker and Currah on the campaign page.

‘The development of transgender studies also makes a politically significant intervention into the lives of trans community members with tremendous unmet needs, by changing what and how we know about transgender issues.’

Stryker and Currah said the idea for the project began in 2008 when they co-edited a trandsgender special edition of Women’s Studies Quarterly.

‘We received more than two hundred submissions for publication, yet we could only publish twelve of them,’ they said.

‘We knew then that it was time for transgender studies to have its own high-profile publications venue. Five years later, there is still no place to accommodate the kind of conversation we want to foster on transgender issues.’

Watch a video about the project here: