Trans writer, thinker, and director Susan Stryker briefly discusses how the invention of the Internet contributed to the formation of a federal transgender movement in the 1990s in her reserve Transgender History. In her writing, she claims that during the 1990s, transgender communities, businesses, and activist struggles grew in so many different contexts and locations that it is difficult to compile all of the changes into a single historical story. A large portion of this growth may be attributed to the Internet.
The Two Upheavals: A Story of the Transgender Internet, written by Avery Dame-Griff, focuses on this time in recent history. In her book, Dame-Griff makes two crucial and related points about how trans people have been using online platforms to create support networks since the 1980s:” The Internet was indisputably shaped by the presence of trans people, just as the current transgender movement do n’t exist in its present form without the Internet.”
He states in the book’s launch,” I’ve lived with computers my entire life.” Lady- Arthur, a professor in children’s, sex, and gender research at Gonzaga University, came of ageonline like some millennials. He remembers learning HTML, building fan pages, moderating message boards, and later joining a state-wide trans Yahoo group that quickly rose to prominence.
The Two Revolutions, which is roughly organized chronologically, examines how trans people have connected with one another socially and politically using specific networks and technologies, such as bulletin board systems ( BBS ), UseNet, AOL forums, home pages on the World Wide Web, and, most recently, social media. When safe space online was n’t given to them, these users created space for themselves through obfuscation and elision, manipulating existing infrastructure to meet their needs, using techniques they’d already perfected over a long history of silencing and oppression. He talks about how trans users navigated both the development of new computer technologies and the rapid commercialization of the Internet while creating digital community spaces.
To comprehend trans issues in the present, Dame-Griff believes it is essential to investigate how transgender people have abused these platforms. According to him,” the background of online trans life is one of sedimentation, with each successive change leaving behind its remnants to sit and finally consolidate into a mass of images, text, and memory upon which new communities are built.” The web is constantly presentist, Dame- Griff declared when we spoke in the middle of November. Usually violently presentist, it is. We miss the ways in which the past set us up right now if we do n’t care about it.
Dame- Fred claims that while in graduate school, he developed an interest in the development of trans community discourse electronically. He realized no one else was recording this story, and the story perhaps started earlier than he had thought, after reflecting on his own involvement in these virtual locations.
Dame-Griff explores how these programs helped facilitate discussions among trans users, leading to new understandings of trans area, language, politics, and personality, beginning with the development of BBSes in the 1980s. ” Creating community-specific nomenclature for gender nonconformity had long been a goal,” according to Dame-Griff.
The development of intra-community personality terminology is a recurring theme throughout the book’s pages. It ranges from expressions like the “gender community” in the early 1980s to the ascension of” transGender” as an umbrella term inthe 1990s and, eventually, the use of the term” cisgenender,” to discuss how online communities were essential for the development and popularization of these conditions. He discusses how modern social media platforms, which he refers to as” the datafication of speech,” commodify these terms by selling customer information to advertisers toward the book’s conclusion.
Archiving trans online group sources and gathering oral histories with the senior trans people who founded and moderated these spaces are both components of Dame-Griff’s research. ” I want people to realize that what you did online was n’t just a silly thing.” According to Dame-Griff, they are a part of background in the same way that if you send e-mails from the 1970s, it is past.
Princess- Griff is well aware that first trans Internet histories are dissipating. To combat its destruction, he started the Queer Digital History Project ( QDHP). Because modern archives during this time period are so fragile,” I felt an obligation to record this background.” I’ve been fortunate that most people have been willing to share [their things with me ] if archives exist, it’s often because one has saved them in a box in their basement. I’ll take it if no one else does.
An important difference in the applicable LGBTQ factual research is filled by the QDHP. Projects like the Internet Archive do n’t always have the cultural competence to handle sensitive LGBTQ materials, and queer and trans community archives frequently lack the resources or expertise to preserve digital material. The survival of this history responsibly is at the heart of Dame-Griff’s work, and he upholds privacy and anonymity whenever asked. ” The preserving depends on the morals.” For each program, there must be a cultural solution. And so, he continued,” I was giving each of these circumstances a lot of serious thought as I started the project of archiving.”
It’s a popular topic to discuss the departure of the LGBTQ Internet. Concerns about what happens when disadvantaged users depend on business media to help community connection have been rekindled by recent headlines regarding Tumblr’s potential shutdown. As sites like Tumblr and Twitter/X cancel or dark ban their articles, some LGBTQ users worry about what will happen to gay and transgender digital spaces.
It is possible for the community to possess its own little programs, according to Dame-Griff, who thinks we can look to the transgender Internet’s history for possible solutions. For decades, it did that. With smaller machines, it accomplished that. It did n’t bring in any real money, but that’s how it prospered. Additionally, this ought to be what we’re thinking about online in the future. Trans individuals are a concern for commercial websites, as we’ve seen in the modern era. They have always been and, to some extent, they always will be.
This is referred to as” the issue of the transgender user” by Lady- Arthur. He observes how commercial platforms have previously been conflicted about their transgender users, who are frequently a very energetic base but are difficult for sought-after advertisers to accommodate. In his next book, which goes into great detail about AOL, Dame-Griff discusses how trans users dealt with industry experts ‘ concerns that the LGBTQ content was not “family-friendly.” We can draw a clear connection between this record of online commercialization and the ways in which modern commercial social media platforms tokenize and then reject their LGBTQ users. This pattern, according to Dame-Griff,” speaks to one of the key challenges throughout the background of trans existence digitally: the need for safe spaces we own.”
The Two Upheavals is a social call for modern users to need more of our digital media platforms as well as an academic record of the transgender Internet. These jobs are expertly woven along by Dame-Griff. Reading the book occasionally made me feel like I was going back in time as a 30-something millennial who grew up in the 1990s. ( The book is worth reading just for the amazing Internet screenshots from the 1990s! ) My own memories of how I too explored my political and social identities online in the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s—debating abortion politics in AOL chat rooms, and asking “am I gay” —flooded back to me. puzzles on unstable sites and their ascent to social consciousness during the height of the female blogging craze. The modern feels fleeting, but it’s not, as Dame-Griff told me. It is archival. Before corporate media companies completely remove our LGBTQ online histories, his book serves as a reminder to protect and archive them.
