Brochure advertising the publication of the book The Woman in Battle by Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who claims to have masqueraded as a male Confederate soldier during the Civil War. Courtesy of the Digital Transgender Archive

The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), based at Northeastern University in Boston, has been bringing together transgender archival materials from institutions of higher education and grassroots collections to a central digital location since 2016. Seven years in, the DTA has collaborated with 76 organizations (with more likely to come on board) to build the archive with more than 10,600 items from around the world, focusing on materials originating prior to 2000.

At the 2008 TransSomatechnics conference at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, professor K.J. Rawson and scholar Nicholas Matte recognized a need for a centralized database of transgender archival materials. The DTA website notes, “Through a series of conversations, K.J. and Nick realized that their own challenges researching transgender history were representative of systematic challenges, which K.J. began to develop a plan to address with the DTA.”

“Transgender history is often hidden”—both intentionally and unintentionally—“within archival collections due to several major access barriers,” explained Rawson, now associate professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and director of DTA. He noted several systemic issues: “Few archives collect in this area; many archives are not aware of their trans-related holdings; archives employ their own idiosyncratic organizational systems, which are often difficult to navigate.” Rawson noted, “Many factors impact the discoverability of trans history, but often it’s a lack of awareness that materials have any relevance to trans history.”

In addition, noted Rawson, “Transgender materials are rarely described as such since the term transgender only came into widespread usage in the 1990s (and only then predominantly in the U.S. and Canada); and, of the trans-related materials that have been identified, only a small fraction have been digitized and made available.”

It would be eight years before the vision was realized. Rawson finished his dissertation, graduated in 2010, built relationships with future partners, and worked at University of Kentucky for two years before getting a tenure track position at College of the Holy Cross. “Once I had a tenure-track position and access to resources, I was able to begin developing this project in earnest,” he said, joining the faculty of Northeastern University in 2020.

The purpose of the archive is to “increase the accessibility of transgender history,” explained Rawson. “The DTA addresses these significant research barriers by providing an easy-to-use website that offers immediate access to thousands of digitized historical materials and extensive information on nondigitized archival holdings throughout the world.”

To ensure that commitment to accessibility, the archive is available at no charge to anyone with internet access. Researchers can search by geographical location, institution, and material type, including photographs, pamphlets, musical notation, and posters. They can explore such topics as drag, gender identity, transgender community, support groups, and more.

Five primary source sets cover topics from Protests and Political Activism to Trans People and the Prison-Industrial Complex to provide topic summaries, highlight particularly relevant items in the collection, suggest reading, and more. The archives’ newsletter collections “offer an incredibly rich introduction to community formation and activism throughout the second half of the 20th century,” said Rawson. Recent additions include collections focused on Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two notable trans activists and veterans of the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

The archive also provides a variety of resources for users, including a DTA Starter’s Guide to help researchers get started, as well as a guide specific to race and ethnicity research.

SIGNIFICANCE BEYOND RESEARCH

Scholars, activists, and others have used DTA materials to research books, educational projects, film, and more.

Joy Ellison, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island, used the archive’s resources for the chapter “When Were You Mine? Prince’s Legacy in the Context of Transgender History” in Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Billie-Gina Thomason cited several works for her PhD dissertation Not Every Man Was Male: Gender Passing in Nineteenth Century Britain at Liverpool John Moores University in 2020. Recently Dana T. Ahern, now postdoctoral teaching fellow in Queer/Trans Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, drew on memoirs and first-person accounts from the archive for his 2022 PhD dissertation Dangerous If Left Untreated: The Construction and Production of the Transgender Body at the University of California–Santa Cruz.

The archives’ importance extends far beyond research, however. DTA’s work of is particularly essential at a time when state legislatures are passing harmful transphobic legislation; libraries are facing challenges to books by, about, and for LGBTQIA+ people; and violence toward the trans community—and attempts to invalidate its members—continue to rise. “Perhaps most importantly,” said Rawson, “we regularly hear from transgender people who have found lifesaving support through learning about their community’s longstanding existence and resilience.”

DTA “provides an important historical enrichment for public discourse,” he added, “while also supporting transgender individuals and communities who continue to struggle for basic human rights, which is particularly pressing in our current political climate.”

INTENTIONAL PROCESSES

"Cross-Talk: The Transgender Community News & Information Monthly, No. 83 (September, 1996)." Periodical, 1996. Courtesy of the Digital Transgender Archive

Since the archive ingests material from a variety of institutions, Rawson and his team have learned to adapt to their needs. “Smaller and more grassroots archives often have us come to them to do on-site digitization, and then we typically host their materials,” he said, “whereas more institutional archives do all of their own digitization, processing, and hosting, and we just link out to them.”

DTA focuses on materials produced, or events that took place, before 2000. “We make some exceptions for continuing content, such as magazine runs that go past 2000, but we try to narrow our scope at least a bit,” said Rawson.

Since 2016, The archive emphasizes transparency so that “users can understand the decision-making behind the site and other projects can follow, adapt, or challenge our approach,” he added. Rawson and his team are also working to include more materials from underrepresented voices. “The collections in the DTA definitely overrepresent more privileged [parts] of trans communities,” he said. “Given the ways that access to power influences people’s ability (and desire) to document their lives, it’s fairly predictable that those with relative power, even within marginalized communities, have more documentations of their history. As a result, we have more materials about white people, about people who cross-dress periodically, about those who have more wealth, etc.”

They “cannot just follow the path of least resistance and only accept the donations that are readily offered, since this has resulted in collections that overrepresent the most privileged factions of trans histories,” he noted. “Instead, we have sought out grants and partnerships that will challenge this tendency and address the ongoing gaps and silences in archives.”

In 2022, the Council on Library & Information Resources provided DTA with a $334,000 grant to “digitize a wide range of materials documenting transgender, gender non-conforming (GNC), and gender-expansive Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC).” During the three-year grant period, the project will digitize over 20,000 archival materials and create a four-episode podcast, lesson plans, and more.