Gender.Network

This archive is created in honor of the many activists, organizers, and artists who continue to lead the way forward, in memory of those who have left us, whose voices and images and energy live on in these materials, and as an altar to the many many lives that don’t appear here at all.

This is a scrapbook of our transcestors, our transparents and trans-grandparents, our siblings and niblings, people related to us by shared experiences and struggles rather than by blood. It traces what was important to us, what our lives were like. It maps how we have taken care of each other, organized ourselves as activists, created art and shaped culture. Above all it shows how we fought for our lives and liberation and the lives of those around us. But like any family, ours is filled with complex, multifaceted people, with stories and lives that are at times inspiring, joyful, triumphant, and at times tragic, traumatized, and frustrating.

These materials are being photographed and scanned at a variety of institutional and private archives across the US and Canada, and contributed by individual collectors. They exist because of the foresight (and hoarding habits) of queer figures and allies in the past, and because of decades of labor and care by generations of archivists and scholars. Despite this, these collections have many limits and flaws, sometimes full of more transphobic screeds, bigoted news exposés, and mafia-funded transploitation porn than they are of nuance or trans peoples’ self-determination.

So what I am searching for are trans voices talking back, weaving networks of care and organizing for solidarity. As a result, this archive is not primarily about the struggles or violence we have faced. It is a story of how we have resisted, overcome, and of all of the work we still must do.

A primary inspiration for this project is Toni Morrison’s The Black Book, a collection of documents related to Black history, including newspaper articles, slave narratives, Jim Crow-era laws, advertisements, patents by Black inventors, and photos of artworks created by enslaved people, published in 1974.

Morrison writes that she was inspired to create the Book because she feared that “the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really were.”

I feel similarly about the present moment, and that we have a lot to learn from the struggles and thriving of those who came before us. In order to write this hirstory I believe we first need to create a network here and now, to listen to and tell each other our stories, and rewrite some of these blunted, biased, oversimplified narratives we have been told. For example, trans of color, Two Spirit, trans masculine individuals, and trans communities of the geographic south and midwest are often written out of the story but they have been key to what security and hope we have achieved. I believe this is part of the collective work of mourning and healing we need to do to build new forms of solidarity.

I hope this project is an opportunity for us to work together on creating and (re)writing this hirstory from our perspectives. So often our hirstory has been used by others to prove a point or footnote a historical account, to underscore our victimization or perversion, or to lay claim to an ancient lineage of queerness. This hirstory is ours in that we are living it, and yet it is none of ours in its entirety. This "us" always contained a spectrum of identity, culture, experience, radicalization, oppression, trauma, and all degrees of privilege. But I also think it names something shared as we each hammer away at the edifices of gender, race, and labor that have tried to force all of us — trans and not — to conform and to submit to a system based on brutality and inhumanity.

Sky Syzygy