I had been on testosterone for one month when I did my first Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) interview. I remember Alisha Stranges, the co-oral historian, hitting record on the Zoom interview and thinking to myself,

“that’s it. This version of you, one that will eventually be unrecognizable to you, is going to be archived.”

At the beginning of every interview, I would think a different version of that thought; this went on for 3 months. The first four months on testosterone took me from anxiously awaiting physical changes to a noticeable voice drop and weirdly bloated-looking version of my old face. As our interview tracking list and interview library grew, so did my body hair. At times, it felt like the PPOHP and my physical transition were progressing in tandem.

In the early days, I was so nervous that the narrators wouldn’t see the “(they/them)” next to my name on Zoom, anticipating the pre-interview conversation where I was occasionally misgendered. Then I would zone out while Alisha answered questions about the PPOHP consent forms, and I would look at my little head, floating in the corner of the screen, wondering if I might notice any changes in my face if I watched some 2-week-old interview footage. It was wishful thinking. But eventually, enough time passed between the first interview and some of the later ones, and that thought became plausible.

I did my first solo interview in May 2021, which left me with the responsibility of uploading interview footage to the shared project folder. One of the video files started to play on my laptop. So, I watched a few minutes of the interview, taking it all in: me, as a solo interviewer, in the thick of my second puberty. I felt as though I had unlocked a new character in my own video game; like the version of an already existing character that has more armour or better powers. The May version of myself seemed more confident. I was familiar with the interview guide, secure in my understanding of the project and field of oral history… But more importantly, I had found new wells of confidence and comfort that I never imagined I would be able to tap into. I was chipper, cheeky, and flirtatious; only made possible by this sudden ability to recognize myself.

All at once, all the things I had read about were real to me. The time I had spent reading oral history theory and transition-related medical forums gave way to experiential learning. I was sharing authority with narrators while sharing voice updates with my family and friends. As fragments of the project came together, so did fragments of myself. Those fragments, marked by the instability of both oral history and transition, were challenging. There could never be enough interviews or strands of hair on my upper lip. I felt like I could never really know about some of the things I was curious about — the gaps in the interview data, the ways people perceived me in public. I wrestled with them, finding power in the incompleteness of oral history. Around that four-month mark, people were treating me like a boy instead of a woman. I had trans-ed age and gender, moving through the world as a 15-year-old boy. It wasn’t the most comfortable position to be in, living as an affectionate “buddy” to random cis men while getting confused looks when I was walking with my partner. After all, I looked a little too old to have a babysitter.

But the PPOHP remained, and became even more, a place where I was intelligible. Being in community, where people understood my life, gave me the opportunity to revel in my incompleteness. I could be proud of my awkward little mustache and small stature; I could be cheeky and sarcastic and flamboyant in that space. I didn’t have another place to focus on the excitement of being somewhere on the way to myself that wasn’t marred by the overwhelming incompleteness I still felt. From interview to interview, I moved further along, closer to myself. And those interviews capture much more of my process of becoming than any 5-second voice update clip in my personal video library. And so, maybe being archived isn’t so bad. I trusted my community to understand the incompleteness that I was wrestling with internally, and they gave me a space to celebrate my incompleteness. I hope that future researchers using the collection, myself included, can do the same thing.  

Elio Colavito is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. As a trans non-binary researcher, Elio’s passion lies in archiving and re-telling queer histories in Canada. Currently, Elio serves as the Co-Oral Historian for the Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project.