Over the weekend, Magic: The Gathering YouTuber Tolarian Community College raised over half a million dollars for Trans Lifeline, a peer-led crisis hotline for transgender people.
The channel’s namesake is a parody of “The Tolerian Acadamy”in Magic: The Gathering, a major university location within the game’s lore. It has become YouTube’s largest Magic channel, the 1st of its kind to reach the one million subscriber threshold.
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The channel’s creator, former English instructor Brian Lewis, has been using his platform as YouTube’s most prominent Magic channel to run annual fundraisers for Trans Lifeline since 2020. In an email sent to Them this week, Lewis states that the first fundraiser in 2020 ended with him raising over $121,000.
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After the fundraiser ended on Saturday, February 15th, Lewis posted to Bluesky that this year’s drive had raised over $564,000 for Trans Lifeline, making it his most successful one to date. He continues by expressing gratitude towards fellow Magic YouTuber Olivia Gobert-Hicks and thanking everyone else who contributed and donated.
We got there! Together, we raised over $564,000 for
@translifeline.bsky.social. 🏳️⚧️
Trans rights are human rights and all are deserving of equality and love.
To everyone who was a part of this, from myself,
@goberthicks.bsky.social, and all of us here at Tolarian Community College: THANK YOU. 💙💜🤍
The fundraiser featured a series of giveaways where for each increment of $4 donated to the campaign, donors would get a chance to partake in drawings for various Magic-related items. The prize pool ranged from cards to things such as art prints and accessories donated by other content creators within the Magic community on YouTube, including Josh Lee Kwai of The Command Zone, Lua Stardust, SaffronOlive, and so many more.
We love what Prof does every year for an incredible cause so Scrybabies is adding a box of Innistrad Remastered!
Just donate in multiples of $4.00 to
@translifeline.bsky.social until Feb 15 at 11am PST! Let’s support a great cause! 🩷🤍🩵
Gamegenic is proud and honored to support Tolarian Community College in raising money for the Trans Lifeline Fundraiser!🏳️⚧️
We will give away 7 prizes to 7 lucky donors!😮🥰
Support Trans Lifeline, follow the link, and donate to a great cause:
https://buff.ly/40SKR85
#gamegenic #tolarian
Lewis, of course, added his own items to the prize pool, giving away 10 boxes from past “Master” sets, which are among the game’s most expensive products.
This fundraiser also came at a very critical time of need for the Trans Lifeline. While its core crisis hotline remained in operation, the organization had to downsize and pause its Microgrant Program in late 2023 due to a lack of funds.
The Microgrants program will be used to help transgender people who are imprisoned, detained, in the immigration process, or who are trying to update their identity on documents with more accurate names and gender markers.
The organization has been a paradigm for helping transgender people, most notably by setting up a suicide hotline for transgender people as an alternative to the official, government-run suicide hotline, which has faced allegations of involving law enforcement when people call, according to the Trans Lifeline’s report on them.
Suicide is a serious issue within the transgender community, and though unbelievably deplorable, many transphobes use those statistics to promote their anti-trans hatred. This has often led to many transgender people feeling discouraged from seeking help with their battles with depression.
Though many people within the Magic community express vitriol against what they call the “woke-mind virus,” prominent members such as Lead designer Mark Rosewater have made their stance clear through their blog. More transgender and nonbinary are being added to Magic, such as the game’s first unquestionably trans character, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death
For prominent members in the Magic: The Gathering community to use their status to speak up on these issues and make this community more inviting is a strong example that there are good people in this world and inspires hope within a world that actively shuns those who are different.
Editor’s note: This article mentions suicide. If you need to talk to someone now, call the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860. It’s staffed by trans people, for trans people. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
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