Set Your Wayback Machine

You might have seen articles about the Digital Transgender Archive, the Smithsonian has an interesting article on the archive.

This Transgender Archive’s Oldest Artifacts Tell a Story of Courage and Community

People whose gender identity does not conform to the one assigned to them at birth have long faced discrimination, harassment and assault. Though it remains unclear just how many people identify as transgender today, trans visibility in mass culture is higher than ever before. Now, a new digital archive is calling attention to the long history of transgender people—and its oldest artifacts highlight trans culture and remind people of just how long transgender people have been struggling for visibility and civil rights.

The article goes on to list a number of historic trans people.

Reed Erickson, 1931
This photograph is of Reed Erickson, a trans pioneer who helped educate the world about transgender people. Born Rita Erickson in 1917, Reed officially changed his name in 1963 and had gender confirmation surgery two years later.

A successful entrepreneur and wealthy businessman, Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF). His initiative funded innumerable research and education projects that taught the public about transgender people, sex reassignment and gender identity. At the time of this photograph, Reed was 14 years old and still lived as "Rita."

This is what some trans people are concerned about,

'Female Impersonators on Parade', 1960
This 1960 magazine is just one edition of Female Impersonators on Parade, a magazine highlighting drag queens and other gender nonconforming individuals. The pictures inside give a fascinating glimpse into the often-undocumented world of drag, along with commentary on how cross-dressers got used to women's clothing and accounts of the difficulties faced by men who dared to appear in public as women.

“The amateur female impersonator likes the gay social movements he finds in the company of others with the same likes and desires in experiencing the graceful life of a woman,” read one article. “The sympathetic understanding they derive in knowing that others are in the same plight as themselves often compels them to take the chance of being arrested by attending so-called ‘drag’ balls, where they can act and dance like women and discuss the latest feminine fashions of the day.”

Like drag balls, Female Impersonators on Parade itself wasn’t immune to prosecution and discrimination: In 1964, the magazine was investigated by a New York legislative committee studying “offensive and obscene material.”

Many trans people that this will give the wrong idea about transgender people. That the opposition will use the old magazines to claim that is about “sex” and not about identity.

This is my take on the archive that I wrote on a forum…
My two cents

As couple of years ago the big news was the photographs from Casa Susanna, do you remember the book about those photographs? Then there was the play “Casa Valentina” by Harvey Fierstein based on the photos.

I do a workshop on trans history and much of our history is lost, there are some good books out there about our history such as “Transgender History” by Susan Stryker but the ids today have no idea what it was like when many of us were growing up. When I begin my workshop I begin by telling the story about how the presentation came about.

I was attending a lecture at the True Colors conference here in Connecticut about LGBT history and in reality the talk was just about lesbians and gays, when I questioned her about it she said she couldn’t find anything about our history. And this was from a professor of “Queer History” at Brown University.

Later that year at the University of Hartford there was a lecture on LGBT in the Media by a Ph.D. candidate and once again it was just LG, when we questioned her afterward she said there wasn’t any shows about trans people. We then rattled off a list of television shows that had trans characters in them (I have since found her thesis online and she renamed it LG in the Media).

Then at Norwalk Pride in 2009 they had photographs of gays and lesbians that were in the Stonewall Uprising but not one trans person’s photo. When I found the director of the group I asked him where are the trans people from Stonewall, you can guess his answer… there weren’t any.

And then there was Congressman Barney Franks in 2007 when he pulled gender identity from ENDA he stated his reason for doing so was we had not put in our time lobbying for the bill, that we can’t just walk in the last minute and expect to be covered. He was totally ignorant of the decades of lobbying by the trans community.

So back to the Digital Transgender Archive, I think it is a mixed blessing. Will some people use it against us? Yes, they already have, read the comments.

But it will also be used for education and research and it will be a record of our history which we will lose as the generation from the 50s and 60s die. Stonewall will forever be know a “Gay” riot without our history. In my workshop when I mention that the police were arresting trans people at the Stonewall Uprising for not having three pieces of male clothing the kids couldn’t believe it.

The other day I was sitting around with a bunch of old lesbians (they are my age) who were in the trenches back in the 50s and 60s and they were complaining about the kids now a days having it so easy today and not knowing what it was like back then.

Hopefully, these archives will inform the generations to come what it was like to grow up with all the oppression that we all face.