No Work About Us Without Us
Our Collective Essence
On the Creation of the Transgender Wisdom Wheel
Representing gender inclusivity, self-expression, balance, and connectedness, the classic transgender symbol was combined with the Ananse Ntontan, or the Ghanian Adinkra symbol for a spider's web. This hybrid symbol marks our working partnerships: the wisdom, creativity, and complexity inherent in our identities, and honoring the essence of our hybrid experience in our trans-national organizing work over years of collaboration.
The Transgender Wisdom Wheel was designed and published by j. nyla mcneill, dedicated to the colleagues within this collective.
Yante Turner
is a Black, openly Trans change-agent from the Northside of Milwaukee. He’s a former Community organizer and anti-violence advocate of Diverse & Resilient. He currently serves with GSAFE as the Director of Youth Engagement.
As a Transformative Justice practitioner, he remains a dedicated member of his community, working to abolish carceral systems for Black people, Trans folks, youth and their Kin. Yante has a background in uplifting and & support trans folks, youth based community and advocacy work. This dignity-based work led him to acquire skills like transformative justice facilitation and mutual aid. He hopes to continue to co-conspire in the dreaming of new worlds without white supremacy, poverty, transphobia and more. He’s certified in Youth Mental Health wellness coaching, community crisis response, and more.
Marquel Norton
is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the Department of Counseling Psychology at UW–Madison. They received a bachelor’s degree in clinical psychology and child development and a master's degree in School Psychology from Tufts University. Marquel was a formerly licensed school psychologist in Massachusetts, working in Boston Public Schools for four years. They are originally from Fort Worth, Texas.
Marquel considers themself an educator, advocate, and scholar who is deeply committed to developing critical community spaces for Black queer and trans individuals to commune, heal, and organize. In this, they hope to work across communal and professional spaces to develop community-based support programs for trans youth and their families and communities so that they can thrive in the educational and psychological domains of their lives. BTYR is a part of their current scholarship and larger research aims of looking at the interaction of emotional well-being, healing, activism, and critical consciousness in Black trans and queer youth organizing spaces.
j. nyla mcneill, DIY PhD
(they/them), known in their community as dr. ink, is a trans and nonbinary mixed Nigerian–Visayan–Hispanic American polymath—artist, scientist, musician, skater, and writer. They earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach, and began master’s-level research and skill training through an experimental interdisciplinary STEM program, Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity, which supported students in advancing directly toward PhD pathways through intensive extracurricular research.
As an artist first and foremost, they are vocationally an action-and-community-based researcher in the fields of liberation and transgender health psychology. They support community members through major life changes via a coaching practice, and have worked to catalyze societal transformation in Los Angeles County as a consultant.
They are a former two-term City of Long Beach Youth Council-member and Equity and Human Relations commissioner in the City of Long Beach, California. They closed their community-based DIY PhD process in 2024 with a postgraduate internship with the City of Long Beach, anchoring the launch of the now permanent Youth Power Participatory Budgeting system.