Transing the archive

For the Museum of Transology, transing the archive describes a way of collecting, documenting and sharing history that places trans, non-binary and intersex people in direct control of how our lives are recorded. It is both a practice and a principle: a way of working that reshapes the mechanics of the archive so that the people whose lives are being documented determine what is saved, how it is interpreted and how it will be used in the future.

The Museum of Transology began collecting in 2014 with a clear intention: to halt the erasure of trans lives from history by inviting trans, non-binary and intersex people in the UK to donate an object of personal significance. Each object enters the collection accompanied by a handwritten swing tag explaining its meaning to the donor’s experience of gender. The object and the testimony are archived together as two parts of a whole, ensuring that the experiences surrounding trans lives are recorded in our own words, in perpetuity.

What is Transology

This approach emerged from an awareness that archives are not neutral spaces. As Jacques Derrida observed, the archive is always a site where power is exercised. Historically, the records that survive about queer and trans lives have often been produced by institutions that exercised authority over those lives: the police, the medical profession, the law and the press. The result is an archive that frequently contains evidence of trans existence but frames that existence through narratives of pathology, criminality or spectacle.

Transing the Archive

Transing the archive responds to this history by redistributing curatorial authority. At the Museum of Transology, interpretation is written by donors themselves and by community archivists who catalogue the collection together. Hundreds of people have contributed to archiving the objects, measuring them, photographing them, describing them and writing the key words that allow them to be found. In doing so, the collection resists the cis-heteronormative language that has historically described trans lives from the outside.

What is Transology

Transing the archive also means bending the conventional rules of archival practice. Donors maintain autonomy over what they give and the conditions under which their objects can be used. In some cases, artefacts may continue to be used for the purpose they were originally made for rather than being permanently fixed as static display items. The archive therefore becomes a living system rather than a sealed storehouse of the past.

In this sense, the trans archive is not a mausoleum of memories. It is an active cultural practice that records the lives of trans people in the present while securing a record of those lives for the future. By contributing an object of sentimental value, donors ensure that their experiences are recorded within trans history and preserved as part of a collective memory.

Transing the archive is therefore about more than preservation. It is a way of writing trans lives back into history on our own terms, ensuring that the voices, objects and experiences of trans communities exist within the historical record and remain accessible to future genderations.