the Transguyarchive

**CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ARCHIVE** An educational online and in-person archive about transmasculine history and culture. All are welcome, but be cool.

[transguyarchive]

Surprise! There's more to me than just my huge rack*

*of magazines, books, newsletters, etc.

Attack the Trans Guy Archive on ArtFight this year!

In between digitizing more items for the TGA I'll be participating in ArtFight this year! I have plenty of OCs for you to attack and, given my lax summer schedule, I pinky promise to revenge every attack I receive. (I will give preference to any OCs who are trans guys and/or are historical but no worries if you don't have any!)

Come attack me --> here. Please make me regret this decision lol.

[transguyarchive]

Excerpts from Mark Wilson's "Now That I'm a Male", from the March 1997 edition of the FTM newsletter, which you can read here.

[transguyarchive]

Satirical guide for cis allies from the March 1997 FTM newsletter, which you can read in full here.

[transguyarchive]

The former headquarters of FTM International magazine/newsletter, under Jamison Green. 1360 Mission Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94103.

FTM International isn't housed there anymore, but still a bit of surviving transmasculine history.

[transguyarchive]

Out of context screenshot from the FTM newsletter (autumn '96)

[phosphorusab]

Let’s all stop calling it ‘hyper invisibility of trans men’ or ‘trans men erasure’ and call it what it actually is - damnatio memoriae

It was a practice the Romans used to punish dead individuals and their contributions they made towards society by destroying anything they made, forbidding anyone to mourn them, completely erasing their memory and existences from public record and history. By erasing everything from public memory, there was no evidence the person ever truly existed

Sound familiar? Because trans men, especially those who are not white, able bodied, etc, endure this

[genderkoolaid]

Not transmasc invisibility, but erasure

the intricacies of transmasc invisibility, and fallacies of strictly gendered transphobia

Invisibility as a term for this dynamic is a fallacy in and of itself as what transmasculine people are suffering from is not invisibility, which suggests accident, but is instead deliberate erasure. Trans men, transmasculine people and transmasculinities have historically been intentionally erased (through not just expunging records but by creating new records entirely) explicitly so that violence against this marginalized group can continue to be ignored. This ignorance creates a dynamic where transmasculine people who actually do rise to any level of power are then made hypervisible (cough, buck angel, cough) and the general perception of a transmasculine person remains an image of a privileged, white, cis passing transsexual, who ‘acknowledges biological reality’, who has lived flawlessly as a man 6 months into t or instead an impressionable young (white) girl who has been infected by a social contagion. This cycle of highlighting only a few different stereotypes of trans man / transmasculine person further contributes to the erasure and harm done to trans men and transmasculine people who do not fit into those very niche groups that attain all the visibility and are said to represent the entire demographic. This deliberate erasure of the actual majority of trans men and transmasculine people exists primarily so that violence can continue to be enacted against them behind closed doors. It is so often not only transmasculine people themselves that are made invisible, but rather it is anti-transmasc violence, including militant state violence, interpersonal violence and a medical + psychiatric violence, which makes transmasculine people, through a process of essentialization, aggressors without aggression and victims without words. As you continue to read this interrogation of how the erasure of transmascs, trans men and other affected groups is performed, it should become more clear how this erasure does not function as a privilege or a shield from violence. If you have any desire for legitimate solidarity between marginalized demographics of people, I implore you to see how this function of erasure and invisibility is not the shield from violence it is so often represented as, but is instead a cloak that intentionally obscures piles of gender marginalized martyrs robbed of a full life. It is an intentional burial of history.

[transguyarchive]

Donations & Volunteering w/ the Trans Guy Archive!

Donations!

We've had a submission link lost in the text of "THE ARCHIVE" section for a while, but now there's a dedicated page if you would like to submit any books, zines, papers, essays, photos, etc, to the Trans Guy Archive! You can also submit items on behalf of somebody else. The two forms on the web page will allow you to submit digital items; for any physical donations, please contact us at the email on the web page!

The donations page can be accessed here! If you have any questions about what we will/will not accept, shoot us a DM :-)

Volunteering!

There's already been some interest from others, so now there's a web page available for anyone who would like to donate their time to helping the Trans Guy Archive research and catalog transmasculine history! You do not have to identify as transmasculine to volunteer, but you do have to be 18+.

More info about volunteering can be found here!

[transguyarchive]

this is what it feels like to have anxiety lol

[transguyarchive]

A quick list of FREE trans books

The queer liberation library (QLL) is a huge library of queer and trans books and audiobooks. The library covers queer/trans non-fiction histories, memoirs, YA, mature novels, etc. They're hosted on Libby and can be accessed for free via your browser with an email address. The account is free, no charge at all.

You can borrow books as you would with a regular library and return them when you're done. Unfortunately, some are rather popular.

Here are some books if you want to learn more about trans history and culture:

Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton (E-book, Audiobook ver. 1, Audiobook ver. 2)

Introduction to Transgender Studies by Ardel Haefele-Thomas and Thatcher Combs (E-book)

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozama (E-book)

Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology by Jack V. Parker (E-book)

Before Gender by Eli Erlick (E-book)

A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States by Carolyn Wolf-Gould and Dallas Denny (E-book)

So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro De Robertis (Audiobook)

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution by Susan Stryker (Audiobook)

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Dr. Kit Heyam (Audiobook)

Gentleman Jack: A biography of Anne Lister, Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist by Katy Derbyshire and Angela Steidele (E-book)

[transguyarchive]

EMBODIMENT (2022)

An experimental film, retracing the autoethnography of a transmasculine person from the Chinese diaspora.

Available to watch for free on the Trans Guy Archive.

[transguyarchive]

DES!RE is an experimental film exploring the desire for transmascs, trans men, butch, stud, 'Agressives', masculine of center (MOC) people assigned female at birth. Trans men, femme women and butch and MOC people speak about the complexity of their desire.

Watch the full video on the Trans Guy Archive!

DES!RE by Campbell X

Trans men, femme and butch women, and masc-of-center people speak about the complexity of their desire.

[transguyarchive]

Do Clothes Make the Man? FTM crossdressing in the 18th-19th c. Anglo-American world

Is gender something that is innate or put on? Are all men born with an inner manhood, or do men achieve satisfactory manhood through repeate

For those who have been following this account for a while, you've likely seen me mentioning the rather long thesis I was working on in grad school. Well, it's finally published and available for everyone to read on the Trans Guy Archive! I'm excited to know what you think! :-)

Blurb:

Is gender something that is innate or put on? Are all men born with an inner manhood (and vice versa), or do men achieve satisfactory manhood through repeated instances of complex social and cultural interactions? Furthermore, can the privilege of having gender be "revoked" once an individual has been confirmed to not fit into what society deems the "correct" version of Man? Using the United States and England during the 18/19th centuries as a backdrop, this thesis seeks to ponder these questions using chronologically topical examples of real people who were assigned-female-at-birth but were able to live successfully as men for extended periods of time.

[transguyarchive]

James "Jim" McHarris

A short biography of a blue collar Mississippi-based tough-talking lady-lover who was forcibly outed after a police stop.

Happy Juneteenth to everyone celebrating today across the United States! In honor of the holiday, we wanted to write about a Black American who has been popping up in our research recently. We intend to include more diverse perspectives on the archive as time goes on.

James "Jim" McHarris was born in 1924 and lived most of his life in Mississippi. Crossdressing as male from his teens onward, he was known as a tough-talking, hard-working lover of women. He was able to pass stealthily for over fifteen years until an otherwise routine police stop outed him and changed his story.

Read the full biography on the Trans Guy Archive by clicking the link above!

[transguyarchive]

This is in an article from TransAdvocate.com. You'd think, of all places, trans guys wouldn't suffer from erasure and invisibility, but no. McHarris lived as male for decades, in what world is the phrasing of this passage not insanely disrespectful?

Picture of McHarris for reference btw.

Another personal ick is the article's persistent use of calling a person's assigned-sex/gender-at-birth their "true gender". Come on now.

[zk-j]

“Where are the trans men in history?” See. When you're born a gender that was forcefully married off, who had to live most of their life indoors, when you had to raise children, and had a lobotomy if your family thought you were a tad too odd, it's kinda hard to come out as a trans man now ain't it.

[teefiesworld]

forever my lineage would use his wrong pronouns but not me

[transguyarchive]

Assistants and employees of the FTM newsletter (c. 1995), whom callers could phone in to for guidance and support regarding their transition. David (right) also did FTM's design and Jordy (middle) ran the newsletter's production.

See more FTM/transmasculine history on the Trans Guy Archive!

[transguyarchive]

One of the fun things about digitizing newsletters from the 1990s as someone born squarely in the Digital Age is you get an odd but giddy feeling about stuff like this. The Internet was so new back then! Not like it is today...