Ziegler was born in Compton, California. Raised in a family of single black women, his mother struggled with mental illness and drug abuse. According to Ziegler's personal essay, his father was absent, and he lived with three alcoholic uncles who inflicted physical and emotional abuse on the women in his family.[6]
He was the first in his family to attend a post-secondary institution. He went on to pursue his master's degree at San Francisco State University and later his PhD at Northwestern University. When he began his doctoral program, he indicated he was female, but during this time, he slowly began his transition.[6] In his third year he began to identify as genderqueer and started taking hormones. In 2011 he began to defend his dissertation on queer, black, and Latino filmmakers. He was the first person to receive a PhD in African-American studies from Northwestern University.[7]
From 2003 to 2006, Ziegler maintained a black queer feminist blog, blac (k) ademic.[8] The blog is on the topic of gender and sexuality from a young black queer academic perspective.[9]
Ziegler's radical stance positioned the experiences of women of color as the locus of his feminist analysis.[10] Ziegler shut down the blog due to the many negative comments he was receiving.[10]blac (k) ademic went on to receive the award for Best Topical Blog in the first annual Black Weblog Awards in 2006. It relaunched in November 2012 and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award[11] and a Transguy Community Award.[12]
In 2013, Ziegler launched Trans*H4ck, an organizational hub intended for trans people to collaborate on technical projects. It first began as a two-day hackathon.[14]
Along with Tiffany Mikell, he also founded BSMdotCo, an educational technology startup company.[15] They both created Aerial Spaces, a video-based forum.
In 2017, Ziegler and Mikell co-founded Appolition.us to try to help incarcerated Black people return to their families by allowing users to round up purchases to the nearest dollar and donate the funds to funding bail costs. The app was supported through crowdfunding after a tweet from Ziegler in July 2017.[16]
^Moore, Lisa (September 15, 2007). "thank you". Does Your Mamma Know?. RedBone Press. Archived from the original on July 30, 2010. Retrieved September 11, 2010.