As federal agencies remove LGBTQ+ resources and political attacks on transgender people intensify, the archive’s work shows that trans history is not new, isolated or disposable.
When the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) launched in 2016, its mission was both simple and radical: make transgender history easier to find. According to Northeastern University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, the Digital Transgender Archive is now celebrating a decade of trans visibility, accessibility and storytelling.
The free online archive brings together more than 10,300 digitized historical documents from more than 80 archives around the world, according to a 2024 Northeastern University report. The archive includes newsletters, photographs, activist records, personal correspondence, clothing, ephemera, community publications and other materials documenting transgender lives across generations and borders.
Rather than requiring researchers, students or community members to know which university, grassroots archive or private collection might hold a particular item, the DTA connects materials from many locations through one searchable site.
Currently the website highlights collections related to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and the Bobby Smith Photograph Collection of LGBTQ+ community members and drag performers in Tampa. There is also a section on “Gender Euphoria,” a newsletter published by the Boulton and Park Society in San Antonio from 1987 to 1999.
In a 2017 interview with PBS’ “American Experience,” Digital Transgender Archive founder Dr. K.J. Rawson said the project grew out of the barriers he encountered while researching transgender history in graduate school.
“I found it shockingly difficult to find primary source materials,” Rawson told PBS. As he continued researching and speaking with other researchers and archivists, Rawson said he realized the problem was widespread.
Library Journal reported in 2023 that the archive was created in response to several systemic challenges, including the fact that few archives historically collected transgender materials, many archives were unaware of their own trans-related holdings and many older materials were not described using the word “transgender,” which only came into widespread use in the 1990s. That makes the archive more than a research tool. It is also a challenge to the idea that transgender people are new.
In the PBS interview, Rawson described a “kind of cultural amnesia” around transgender people, especially when public conversations treat trans life as though it has only recently appeared. The historical record tells a different story. The archive includes materials connected to people who lived outside gender norms long before “transgender” became a widely used term.
“Part of the purpose of the DTA is to make materials like that more accessible – both for people within trans communities and those outside of them,” Rawson told PBS. “We want to help educate and help elevate popular discourse around these issues. We also want to give people a sense of their history who might not otherwise have it.”
The DTA’s work is not only about collecting history, but protecting it and safeguarding records so that they are not scattered, mislabeled or hidden. It guides visitors not only to learn about transgender history, but to use it: to make connections across generations and borders, to understand the organizing that came before them and imagine what collective action can look like now.
That purpose is especially consequential as the Trump administration removes or alters federal resources acknowledging LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities. The DTA states that it prioritizes materials created by people documenting their own lives and communities, as well as underrepresented voices in trans histories.
Its collection documents people building relationships, sharing their own stories, creating art, organizing for survival and demanding a place in public life. It offers connection, and a reminder that trans people have always existed, have always found one another and will continue to do so.
For more details about the Digital Transgender Archive, visit their website at digitaltransgenderarchive.net.
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