University of Pittsburgh Library System

Theorizing and Liberating Transgender Identities explores the magazines Transvestia and Trans/Transgender Tapestry held within the Archives and Special Collections. These publications were distributed mainly in America through the 1960’s to the 2000’s. Most of the audience of these magazines were mainly middle class or upper middle class. This project focuses on how the Transgender community (earlier referred to as the Gender community) used their platform to simultaneously try to understand their identity and organize to achieve political rights. One major theme this project explores is how the community explored terms to describe themselves and how the term transgender came out of these discussions. It aims to highlight the agency the community made for themselves in their own identity, as prior western attempts to study the community were done from outsiders. Another major theme is noting how the community organized themselves politically, going from effectively hiding to protest marches within five years. It shows the unification of a fractured groups of transgender people, and the very intentional entrance into feminist and LGBT organizations in the 1990’s.