Co-creating a “usable past” for LGBTQ+ people in the present.

Word of Mouth: How the Trans+ Community Found Itself

Between September and December of 2021, Amelia Smith (MMSt), designed a digital exhibition drawn from 17 of the Collaboratory’s 21 Zoom-recorded oral histories with Trans Activist Elders and archival materials from the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archives.

While some of us are lucky enough to take the existence of today’s Trans+ communities for granted, this is a relatively recent experience. It was not so long ago that sharing any kind of Trans+ related information was difficult, dangerous, and almost universally illegal. Nevertheless, Trans+ people have always found ways to share information vital to their survival, using media ranging from hand-written letters to the World Wide Web.

Word of Mouth tells some of the story about how these communities and networks developed in North America in the latter half of the twentieth century.

A Message from the Designer

How do you find yourself? When the world is built in such a way that denies your existence, that says that it is not possible to be who you are, how do you find others? How do you discover that you are not alone? Where do you find your community? These questions are at the heart of the exhibition.  

The exhibition started with a series of oral histories with trans activists discussing their lives and their roles within transgender organizing. In these oral histories, one word stood out; information. The ways that information was spread. This became the foundation of the exhibition.  

With the big idea in place, it was time to find the objects that would populate the exhibition. Since the oral histories were being housed at the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, these objects would also come from the other collections kept there. An unfortunate aspect to the collections at the Transgender Archives, however, is the lack of representation. Much of the archival materials that make up the one and a half football fields of boxes in their collection come from predominantly white, middle-class, transfemme people who were able to live part time. This came to inform the majority of the exhibition’s content, for better and for worse. 

It was decided that the exhibition’s narrative would be presented thematically, rather than narratively. While there is a sense of time passing, it does not constrain itself to a strict, linear telling of history. The exhibition goes from the few to the many, singular individuals that were pillars of the community to decentralized means of communicating. And so, it starts with people such as Christine Jorgensen and Virginia Prince who were able to inform and connect many people at times when doing so was very dangerous.  

The exhibition then moves on to meeting locations, places where trans people were able to find each other and start to develop an in-person community. These could be places like gay bars where drag and butch gender expressions were more permitted, or they could be explicitly trans focused with events like Fantasia Fair. As the exhibition progresses, the connections grow larger, from local area to organizations that stretch across borders. As these organizations grew, they needed a way to communicate with their members. It was no longer a physical community but an imagined one, and as Benedict Anderson describes, imagined communities require the publications to maintain themselves. Television appearances follow as a way to reach beyond the community, providing a platform for trans people to advocate for themselves while also trying to inform people that might be in the closet that they are not alone. The exhibition then concludes with the introduction of the internet and how the new technology changed the landscape for trans people to communicate with each other.  

One of the earliest designed elements of the exhibition involved social media. In the oral histories, many of the interviewees were asked when they first discovered being trans was possible, when they first heard about it or met another trans person. This question moves away from the rote and traditional “when did you know” that trans people get asked all the time, to the more interesting “when did you find out you were not the only one”. Taking inspiration from Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum, it was decided that this question would be asked to the audience as well. It is hoped that the audience will then post their own “first contact” with the trans community on their social media. These would then be collected and placed in the exhibition alongside clips of the trans activists interviewed telling their stories.  

The exhibition will launch on the University of Victoria’s digital exhibitions site in the new year (2022). It is my hope that everyone will explore the content and that it will provoke visitors to think on their own connections both digitally and physically.