AIR#09. Protecting the Privacy of Trans People in Archives

 On Monday, May, 5th, our colleagues of the SAA Privacy and Confidentiality Section (SAA-PCS) hosted a panel discussion titled Protecting the Privacy of Trans People in Archives. For an hour and a half, we enjoyed the explanations and insights of three archivists who are experts on this topic. While archivists have long followed ethical best practices for protecting individual privacy, the profession lacks specific guidelines that address the unique and complex privacy vulnerabilities of trans individuals. The panel discussion was focused on offering and sharing insights and practices to help address this situation.

The first one was Lara Wilson. She is Director of Special Collections and University Archivist at the University of Victoria (UVic), British Columbia. UVic has the world's first Chair in Transgender Studies, launched in 2016. 

Lara began by reading a letter of solidarity and collaboration from the President of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) regarding the recent attacks on the archival profession in the US. She then introduced the Transgender Archives at UVic's McPherson Library Special Collections. The archives include over 160 meters (530 linear feet) of documents and books in 15 languages from 23 countries. Lara spoke about the archive's two most recent projects: Digitizing Hidden Collections, and Trans[Formation]. Through these projects hundreds of at-risk, rarely seen audiovisual items will be digitized, preserved, described and made accessible to the public.

 

The UVic also collaborates with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), whose leader, KJ Rawson, was the second to speak in the panel. KJ is a renowned scholar and expert on Transgender Studies, a Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and Director of the Humanities Center. He is also the founder and curator of the DTA, and chair of the editorial board of the Homosaurus, the international LGBTQIA+ linked data vocabulary.

KJ discussed the DTA as a non-physical post-custodial archival project hosted by the Northeastern University. They began in January 2016 and currently they keep 13.202 surrogate digital documents available online dating from 1587 to 2025 (primarily between 1950 and 1990), collected from 84 contributors from all over the world, including UVic Transgender Archives.

He specifically mentioned the difference between archives about trans people and archives by trans people. He also talked about Ethical Trans Representation, as we can see at the attached image, and shared two really interesting resources: the DTA Harm Language Reduction Guide, and the Trans Metadata Collection's Best Practices Guide.

The third and final speaker is TJ Billard. TJ is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and, by courtesy, the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. They are the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago and Editor-in-Chief of the Center flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies (BATS). They spoke primarily on their experience creating and organizing the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) archive in Washington DC.

After the three presentations, SAA-PCS panel host, Leslie Schuyler, began the discussion by asking about the privacy and confidentiality issues that can arise when trying to protect the privacy of trans people at the archives. TJ commented that at NCTE most of the people reflected in the documents are trans activist who used to represent publicly the trans movement, but we must be careful to prevent these documents from being used against trans people by far-right activists or journalists. They also explained that the trans community has suffered more attacks in the three months of the second Trump administration than in four years of first. 

 

The three speakers agreed on celebrate the trans movement and lives through the archives but protecting trans people. Lara proposed that the best way to achieve this is to have the resources, time and space to talk to donors about how they want to be represented and accessible through their archives and documents, and to establish research agreements through dialogue with scholars and researchers. KJ and TJ warned about the current erasure of trans lives: archives are important for making trans stories visible, and silencing them to protect them is not a good response, even though trans stories can be weaponized against them, and we at the archives have to honor every personal decision.

Before the panel concluded, attendees were allowed to ask the speakers. Many of the questions were related to the correct use of trans people names when describing documents, the concerns of some organizations about the wave ofrepression that is draining resources and jeopardizing the activities dependent of Federal fundings, and the emergence of AI bots that identify metadata in trans archives.

The panel discussion was well-received, and most attendees were left wanting to learn more. Many thanks to the three speakers, to the main host, Leslie Schuyler, and to the SAA-PCS for their contribution to make visible trans people through the archival activism.