Our partners

Chair in Transgender Studies

The Chair in Transgender Studies at UVic is devoted to fostering and supporting research into a broad range of topics concerned with improving the lives and circumstances of trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people.

We exist because good research is the basis for solid reliable information about the real world.

We need research to drive social change. We need research as the basis for good policies and better laws to improve the well-being of trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people.

Queer As Funk Spring Fling

The Queer as Funk Spring Fling brings Victoria together in groovy funkdom like no other event in the city!

Featuring the explosive high-energy sounds of beloved Queer as Funk, with outstanding local musical talents, stand up comedy, a photo exhibit of Victoria’s diverse queer/trans history featuring materials from the Transgender Archives, and a Queer & Quirky History Pub Quiz!

The ONE Archives Foundation

The ONE Archives Foundation is the independent community partner of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries, the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world.

The ONE Archives Foundation is dedicated to promoting this important resource and making LGBTQ history available through diverse activities including educational initiatives, fundraising, and a range of public programs and events. 

The New Museum 

Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty

The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered in The New Museum's anthology, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty, delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps,” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms.  Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture. 

Abram J. Lewis, a contributor to the Trap Door anthology, used materials from The Transgender Archives. 

Gossett, R., Stanley, E.A., & Burton, J. (Eds). (2017). Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Art Gallery of Ontario

Outsiders: American Photography and Film

Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s celebrates the artists who changed the image of American life. 

The Casa Susanna and Transvestia materials, in part donated by The Transgender Archives, offer a compelling look at the lives of a group of cross-dressers at their weekend gathering place between the mid-1950s and early 1960s. The photographs have been widely hailed as a centrepiece of the exhibition. Exhibiton co-curator Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s Associate Curator, Photography, says: “They are an amazing record of trans community in the becoming,” she says. “They are typical snapshots on the one hand — there they are on the front porch, there they are at a picnic, or at the diving board. But then you kind of realize how exceptional they are as well, just for the subject matter alone.”

The exhibit showed at the Art Gallery of Ontario March 12 - May 29, 2016. 

Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College

Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics

Bring Your Own Body presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional and sexological to the personal and liminal.  After exhibiting in New York City and Chicago last year, the exhibit moves to Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery; a program of performance, film, and artists and scholars in conversation, spanning several Philadelphia area venues, will accompany and expand on the exhibition’s conceptual and political stakes.

Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by intersex pioneer Lynn Harris, Bring Your Own Body historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of historical collections, including the Kinsey Archives and the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria.

Bring Your Own Body opened at Cooper Union in New York City, then showed at Columbia College Chicago, and is now showing at Canton Fitzgerald Gallery.

Memorial University Libraries & University of New Brunswick

Bearing witness. TranStories: Selections from the Transgender Archives, will be on display at the Queen Elizabeth II Library from October to Novemeber 9th, 2016, and will then move to the University of New Brunswick (UNB). This exhibition, a partnership between the TGA, UNB, Memorial University Libraries and Memorial’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, is scheduled to coincide with the 2016 St. John’s Storytelling Festival, which promotes the art and tradition of storytelling in all its various forms.

LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is a collaboration among the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria; the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and the Lesbians Making History project; the Digital Transgender Archive; and the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony.

As the largest oral history project in North American LGBTQ history, the Collaboratory connects hundreds of life stories using new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice.

The Collaboratory is supported by a five-year research grant from the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Digital Transgender Archive

The Digital Transgender Archive provides a centralized hub for transgender-related historical materials, including born-digital materials, materials contributed by independent projects, and information on archival holdings throughout the U.S., Canada, and Germany. 

In order to improve access to transgender history, the DTA will virtually merge these disparate archival collections, digital materials, and independent projects through an expansive and highly adaptable search engine.

To Survive on this Shore

Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender-Variant Older Adults
www.tosurviveonthisshore.com
Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre

Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and within artistic realms, and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. To Survive on this Shore combines photographs of transgender and gender-variant people over the age of fifty with interviews about their life experiences in regards to gender, identity, age, and sexuality and provides a nuanced view into the complexities of aging as a transgender person.

This collaborative project intentionally includes subjects whose lived experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and geographic location. Every narrative includes both struggle and joy, often complementary aspects of the same experience.

This project is currently looking for particpants throughout the country!  If you are over the age of 50 and self-identify as transgender, transsexual, gender-variant or gender non-conforming, they'd love to hear from you!  

Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s-1980s

Harnessing the descriptive and expressive capacities of photography and film, the artists in this remarkable exhibition, Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s, all participated in changing the image of American life. They had no interest in what was stable, conventional or safe, and deployed their chosen media to reflect a broader, more complex and more diverse view of the world in which they had grown up. The exhibition Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s is part of the AGO Year of Photography.