All posts filed under: Trans History

Trans Oral History Post-Doc! (6 months)

January 26, 2019
by Elspeth Brown
Collaboratory News / Oral History / Trans History

Post-doctoral Fellowship in Trans Oral History The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (University of Toronto, ON), in collaboration with The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC) will award one six-month Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship is to be taken up, and concluded, between 1 June 2019 and 30 March 2020 (exact starting and ending dates to be negotiated within this time frame). The Fellow will be expected to coordinate and conduct oral histories […]

Remembering the Delisting Years, Twenty Years Later

October 5, 2018
by Elspeth Brown
Oral History / Trans History

Twenty years after the delisting of gender confirmation surgeries in Ontario, the recent return of the Conservatives to power forces us to remember the ten year struggle for relisting that resulted from this decision. On October 1st, 1998, the newly-installed Conservative provincial government removed coverage for gender confirmation surgeries under the Ontario health care plan (OHIP). The delisting of these procedures, formerly referred to as sex reassignment surgery (SRS), was part of a broader plan […]

Trans Oral Histories: the Transgender History Project of the Upper Midwest

December 30, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Archiving Oral History / Trans History

I realize that even though the website has a fantastic collection of websites concerning LGBTQ oral history, put together by Cait McKinney, I have not actually had the time to go through them all, and reflect on what they offer. I’m in the process of putting together a new course on Queer and Trans Oral History, and this seems like a perfect moment to explore some of these sites and reflect on some of their […]

Zine Digitization and Accessibility

July 18, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Digitization / Mirha-Soleil Ross Project / Public Humanities / Trans History

A potential benefit of digitizing zines is increasing their accessibility. While a physical copy of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ gendertrash from hell might be hard to come by for many people in 2017, putting a high quality scan of the zine online makes it accessible to anyone with an internet connection, right? Not really. Depending on the context, “access” can take on very different meanings. I think we should think critically about what it means to make […]

Affect in the Mirha-Soleil Ross Archive

May 30, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Activist Histories / Mirha-Soleil Ross Project / Trans History

Archival objects can be powerful and moving. When they are centred around LGBTQ people, they can bring hope and joy. Some objects found  in the Mirha-Soleil Ross fonds demonstrates this hopefulness to me. In her collection Mirha-Soleil Ross donated some pictures that were professionally taken of her and her partner at the time, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay. When Ms. Ross donated the photos to the CLGA, she attached a note requesting that we digitize them soon, showing […]

Reading gendertrash

May 11, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Mirha-Soleil Ross Project / Publishing / Trans History

I spent a lot of my first week at the CLGA looking through and digitizing materials related to Mirha-Soleil Ross’ and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay’s zine gendertrash from hell, published from 1993-1995. One of my favourite images I have come across was a drawing of four femme figures holding hands on a yellowing piece of paper. Below the figures, drawn in purple pen, text reads “TRANSSEXUAL SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL!!!” This image is published in black and […]