Documenting Subjugated Knowledges: Two Trans Oral History Archives

Collecting, preserving, and sharing the histories of trans and non-binary people is necessary and vitally important work, particularly in our current and politically precarious historical moment. As we navigate the ongoing hostilities and challenges to so many historically marginalized individuals, we need to be able to look to and learn from those who came before us. Unfortunately, this is a task often made difficult. As explained on the Tretter Transgender Oral History site, "transgender voices and experiences are often missing in contemporary documentation and the historic record." As a trans-identified, transfeminist scholar, I am particularly attune to the lack of trans scholarship and representation in the academy, the erasure of trans histories, and the need and urgency to "move our history forward." At the 2016 Creating Change conference, scholar/activists Genny Beemyn, André Perez, Catherine Jacquet, and I organized a panel titled "Trans Legacies: The Importance of History for Contemporary Advocacy Work." We created this panel with the goal of discussing the "significant role history plays in contemporary activism [and to] highlight the importance of preserving the legacies of our communities … in ways that make them useful for making change for our communities" (Genny Beemyn, André Pérez, Catherine Jacquet, and Liam Lair, "Trans Legacies: The Importance of History for Contemporary Advocacy Work," in Creating Change Conference Book [Chicago: National LGBT Task Force, 2016]: 99). Both the Trans Oral History Project and the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, which I will discuss at length here, are living examples of how this work is being done by and for people in our community. Both of these remarkable collections are a testament to the labor, commitment, and resilience of trans and non-binary community members. These growing collections serve as a crucial intervention into documenting previously subjugated voices in the historical record.

Inspired by the ACT UP Oral History Project (http://www.actuporalhistory.org/), the Trans Oral History Project (TOHP) is a collective community archive that works, in the creators' words, "to document transgender resistance and resilience in New York City." Organized in collaboration with the New York Public Libraries, the collection explicitly centers the experiences of queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) and low-income transpeople in an effort to advocate for trans lives and trans liberation today. Its mission clearly reflects this commitment:

We work to confront the erasure of trans lives and to record diverse histories of gender as intersecting with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis. … [We seek] to build knowledge as a part of our anti-oppression work. We believe oral history is a powerful part of social justice work, and that building an alternative archive of transgender histories can transform our organizing for transgender liberation.

Currently, there are over 130 audio interviews with trans and non-binary individuals available on the site, representing many different and intersecting identities in terms of education, class, race, and ethnicity. At least one of the interviews is in Spanish. The first interviews were recorded in 2016. As a true community project, TOHP invites people (both trans and cis-identified) to talk with their trans and non-binary community members—to document their life experiences and their resistance and resilience in the face of oppression. The site provides an "Interview Handbook" explaining how to conduct oral histories for those who would like to contribute to the project (The New York Public Library, Oral History Handbook, accessed June 4, 2019, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/be0b9c_fa604a2db8cf40649be69caa949bc03e.pdf). In addition, the TOHP site offers a link for events in New York City and information about a "Queer Walking Tour" of New York led by Jay Toole—an activist and storyteller with over a decade of experience organizing around LGBTQ homelessness.

The interviews available on the TOHP...