Since 2020, I’ve been teaching an undergrad class I call Trans Social Movements, which studies the past, present, and future of transgender organizing. I’m actually updating the syllabus now, including going over the readings to remember what worked, what didn’t, and what’s worth adding (in this case, Jules Gill-Peterson’s excellent A Short History of Trans Misogyny). By now, tho0ugh, I have a pretty good core of historical readings that cover major moments. Most of them do a great job getting across the historical context, but there’s one that I never know how a given class will react to when I screen it in-class: this 1987 episode of The Phil Donahue Show on crossdressing. Unlike documentaries like Queens at Heart (1967) or Behind Every Good Man (1967), something about this episode will baffle them. Usually one of the first conversations is about the specifics of the talk show format, from the role of the host to the panel framing to the semi-adversarial audience. Sometimes they question why you’d go on one of these shows at all, if people were just going to (in their view) talk down to you on television. Because unlike the documentaries, why we’re watching the guests have their lives questioned on national television by total strangers isn’t immediately clear.the purpose of watching this can be less clear. (Usually this provides an opportunity to remind them of what the pre-Internet media landscape looked like. If I had the time, we’d read a chapter from Joshua Gamson’s great Freaks Talk Back.)

But there’s one thing every class I’ve screened it in has struggled with, though we read extensively about them in prior weeks: being confronted with real heterosexual crossdressers. Even with all that context, they’ll still try and fit them into modern frameworks. “So, wait…they’re not trans women?” No, though some of their personal identities might have shifted later in life – we don’t know for some of them. “But they use female names and pronouns?” Yes, sometimes. “But not all the time?” Nope, usually just when en femme. “So wait, are they drag queens?” Also no! “So what are they then?” Heterosexual crossdressers! Even after the whole conversation, some students will still talk about them using contemporary frameworks and language. (This isn’t entirely their fault, though: The documentary Casa Susanna (2023), which they also watch and discuss, makes the same mistake. As with our Donahue screening, I have to talk through the differences in class.)

The persistence of this struggle, to me, signifies just how far the heterosexual crossdresser has receded from public and community view since the height of their power within the community during the 1980s. The 1980s are an interesting time in American transgender history. If the 1970s were a moment of visibility, the 1980s were notable for how invisible trans folks were in wider American public life. In part, this invisibility wasn’t accidental. The closure of the clinic system, anti-trans radical feminism, and the rise of the Moral Majority all contributed to a largely inhospitable public environment for gender nonconformity, and funding from organizations like Erickson Education Foundation had dried up. 

Given these challenges, organizing was increasingly focused on developing internal community networks. Small local groups as well as regional alliances like MAGGIE (the Mid-America (or Midwest Area) Gender Group Information Exchange), would blossom across the US, driven by an extensive print newsletter network. Though groups varied in who was allowed memberships, heterosexual crossdressers were the most visible and active members of these groups. How they approached crossdressing varied–to paraphrase what one of the Donahue guests says at one point, ask ten crossdressers how and why people crossdress and you’ll get ten different answers–but there were clearly demographic similarities and cultural norms. 

As a culture, heterosexual crossdressing prioritized white, middle class perspectives and desires. “Full” participation didn’t always come cheap, including membership fees, magazine subscriptions, acquiring a whole second wardrobe and associated items, and the funds and leisure time to attend weekend conferences and events. It also placed an overwhelming focus on privacy and discretion. Most authors went by first name only and made only vague references to other parts of their lives–references that other group members could decipher but would be lost on the unfamiliar reader. And authors exhorted readers to use a post office box, lest their neighbors find out about their “activities.” A 1990 issue of Femme Mirror, the magazine of major crossdressing organization Tri-Ess, includes the cautionary tale of a married Florida crossdresser, entitled “So You Think You Don’t Need a Post Office Box,” who forgot to update their mailing address with their local group when they sold their house. The new owner sent the group newsletter to the member’s new house in an envelope addressed to their wife, outing them. 

For even as they longed to be seen and build community with like-minded individuals, the focus on privacy remained paramount throughout the 1980s into the mid-1990s. As Jules Gill-Peterson notes of the Transvestia subscribers and Casa Susanna’s visitors thirty years earlier, this focus on maintaining privacy “ratifie[s] a bourgeois distinction between public and private.” In other words, participation in formal “community” was limited to those who could afford it, economically and socially. It would be these groups who developed and supported the organizational infrastructure from which the “transgender movement” could emerge beginning in the mid-1990s. They couldn’t have done it, however, if they hadn’t been able to hold onto their social and economic privilege as (to the wider world) middle-class men. And the “transgender” movement that would succeed these crossdressers would work to create a world that would render their cultural norms (or I would argue, their very mode of approaching gender nonconformity) obsolete.

All of this, I explain to students, is what made these talk show appearances so notable–members of the gender community had very few opportunities to reach a mass audience, so they took advantage of what they could get. Because even though they could hold huge personal risk, they also knew these appearances could be life-saving.

Because that’s the other thing: even as the language has changed, suicide has always been a specter hovering over trans life. There are multiple letters and columns to the Femme Mirror about the life-saving benefits of membership. Sometimes, it’s just the traces left behind, like this anonymous poem from Spring 1993, whose author committed suicide a week after writing it. Similar to Morgan M. Page, I don’t mention these cases to engage in shroud-waving, but I see “the absences of the disappeared” in these stories. Those who didn’t run across a group’s hotline number in the classifieds of their local alternative weekly paper on the two weeks the group could afford to run an ad or find the doctored entry in the library card catalog that directed information seekers to their local group before a librarian replaced it. Who were never able to find community. Even with all their racial and/or class privilege, it couldn’t give them the community needed. That they had to find in a world that didn’t want them to exist.

All of this secrecy and fear was, of course, massively alleviated by the Internet (there may be a whole book on that…). The Internet made it possible for trans youth to emerge as a recognizable demographic group. Yet there are forces that would like nothing more than to revert us to the 1980s, as seen in the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and platforms like Instagram’s anticipatory compliance. To a moment when one could only learn about transness through a secret P.O. Box or on a hotline. Like Page, I struggle with hope as a discipline. But I’m going to do my best to hold on to it, until bills like KOSA seem as foreign to my students as an old, scratchy digitized VHS taping of Donahue.

I’ll admit, I haven’t though much about Yahoo! Groups in the past ten years or so. Much like other early formats, they’d slipped into what I mentally lumped into the loose category of “legacy” products–still useful and usable, but technologies whose continued use owed more to their early popularity than any specific compelling affordances. But with Yahoo!’s October 16 announcement that Yahoo! Groups are being functionally wound down, with a full content purge on December 14, the historical impact of Groups comes even more to the forefront.

For many LGBTQ groups, particularly regional ones, who’d primarily relied on mailing lists or webrings (remember those inescapable banners filling the bottom of your Geocities or Angelfire homepage?) to coordinate, Yahoo! Clubs (rebranded Groups in 2001) offered the same communication with additional features, like file hosting, all in one place. Quite a few of them switched over to during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and have been using it ever since. My first contact with trans folks who lived in my state came via the now-defunct Alabama Gender Alliance, who communicated primarily via their Yahoo! Group. I now wonder how many other organizations and groups who’d previously resisted the urge now will be forced to move to Facebook—whose Groups offer many of the same functions in a far easier-to-monetize package.

That Facebook is the first, affordable alternative for many groups highlights a problem also made apparent by events like Tumblr’s sale to Verizon (and then re-sale to WordPress): on commercial platforms, user need will always be secondary to monetization, and companies will act accordingly. From Geocitites to Tumblr and now Yahoo Groups, LGBTQ users have found their existence rendered precarious due to monetary concerns: from the threat “erotic” content posted to Tumblr’s ad revenues and ap store status, to Yahoo Groups (presumed) unprofitability. As Oliver Haimson, Elias Capello, Zahari Richter and I argue in our (just published!) article on Tumblr as a trans technology, for a technology to be by and for trans people, it has to not only center user need but also adopt a framework that understands users not solely as users, but contributing members with clear feedback points.

In the meantime, however, preservation is the most immediate concern. Folks within fandom are already working on preserving content, and I’ve begun working with Kevin McCarthy, a producer at Inspired :a production of Interfaith Voices and director of the excellent documentary TransGeek (full disclosure: I consulted on the film) to begin the process of archiving group posts–right now we’re focusing on archiving transgendernews, which will be made available on the Queer Digital History Project. So while I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to save everything, please let us know either via Twitter or email to admin@queerdigital.com if there’s a group you think should be preserved. While there’s arguments to be made about maintenance and necessary loss in archiving, I’d like to help those communities who’d like to save their history, even if only for in-community consumption, but don’t have any members with the necessary technical skills (or the time to learn them, given the short notice) to have that option.

• Compuserve’s (aka CIS) GenderLine forum
• Prodigy (pre or post the closure of the “Frank Discussions” forum)
• GEnie (such as the GEnie Girls).

I’m hoping to learn more about the structure of these groups/spaces, their culture, and just how folks used them. If anyone is either interested in or might know someone who would be interested in participating in a short (one hour) interview, please let me know at avery.dame AT gmail.com.

I’m happy to announce the public launch of a site I’ve been working on the past few months: the Queer Digital History Project, which collects and catalogs the history of LGBTQ communities and discussion online roughly pre-2010, but especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Currently, it has a growing catalog of early LGBTQ communities online (Usenet newsgroups, BBSs, etc.), a small collection of primary documents from the 1990s, and an interactive map of TGNet, one of the first international transgender BBS networks. Eventually, I hope to integrate the Transgender Usenet Archive into it as well. For more information about the content, structure, etc, see the QDHP FAQ.

When you get a chance, go check it out!

I’m happy to announce that after almost a year of hard work, the Transgender Usenet Archive is now officially available for public use! You can search the archive for any single word or two word phrase, and searches can be filtered by newsgroup or post publication year. By default, all searches are case sensitive, but this setting can be changed under the “Case” header on the far right corner next to the “Search” button. Each search result under “click for texts” includes a link to a plain text file of that message, including date and message subject. Feel free to query the archive and see what you find!

This project has been an incredible learning experience for me, and I couldn’t have completed it without the generous support of the MITH staff, whose support, guidance, and expertise were invaluable throughout the process.

(Cross-posted from the MITH blog.)

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Most folks have no doubt encountered this adage, coined in a 1993 New Yorker cartoon, through one of the many, many cultural riffs and references, or maybe in a reproduction of the original cartoon. The idea, of course, represents public perceptions about anonymity, privacy, and the internet prevalent at the time of its publication: that one’s online and offline presences could be largely disconnected from each other.

When the cartoon was first published, the sentiment certainly seemed more likely to be true in theory (though not always in practice). Particularly throughout the 1990s into the mid-2000s, the internet was thought to be a safe space for engaging in a variety of identity play, and transgender individuals were uniquely poised to benefit. One’s offline identity was not always tightly bound to their online presence, certainly not closely as social network sites like Facebook might wish them to be—a change reflected in a 2015 follow-up cartoon of the dogs reminiscing about their prior anonymity. Online, trans individuals could take steps to disconnect their offline selves from their online identities, where they might adopt different names and gender identities that better reflected their own self-understanding. While I didn’t identify as transgender at the time, I nevertheless engaged in these practices myself as a teenager, often failing to ‘correct’ individuals who, presciently, assumed I was male.

However, my online life at the time was entirely pseudonymous, and I made sure to keep a certain distance between my offline and online selves. This has allowed me to keep my prior online activities (as well as my past opinions on the state of the World of Warcraft endgame) largely divorced from my current online presence. Other individuals, particularly early users whose online access came through an employer or university, may not have been able to maintain such a clean separation. Bits of one’s offline identity—elements of a legal name used for official company email address, differing names between those used in messages and those attached to email accounts, or an “official” email signature—remained connected to online activities, including posting to Usenet. For trans individuals, these traces can reveal distinctly gendered or pre-transition names, employment, or activities they might otherwise wish was not widely known.

As I get closer to a launch-ready version of the Transgender Usenet Archive, much of my attention has been focused on thinking through my ethical responsibility to these users. At the core of the project are two impulses. On one hand, I hope to increase the accessibility and reach of an important, if undiscussed, part of recent transgender history. As a consequence, however, I am giving these posts a new kind of visibility beyond the initial level of access (which, admittedly, you can already get through the Google Groups archive). Given this increased access, I am also deeply invested in conscientiously respecting not only posters’ agency as authors, but also their privacy as individuals, who may have treated their posts as ephemeral communications, not meant for academic analysis.

Because there’s not a lot of guidance for working with Usenet materials, I’ve looked to other instances where archivists faces similar concerns. Tara Robertson’s writing on the ethical implications of Reveal Digital’s scanning and posting of the On Our Backs backcatalogue (since taken down) speak compellingly to the importance of thinking carefully about consent, representation, and digital access. One difference between OOB and other digitized materials is Usenet’s status as the organizing umbrella under which a variety of public fora lived. Usenet newsgroups, and by extension users’ posts, were always ‘public’ in terms of accessibility. However, posts were not archived and made available on a mass scale until DejaNews started collecting them in 1995; the current Google archive, and thus the collections the archive is based on, are made up of what DejaNews collected, along with several other donated collections of pre-1995 material. Following DejaNews’s announcement, users concerned about privacy successfully advocated for DejaNews to adopt the the “X-No-Archive” header, which signaled a post shouldn’t be archived. However, DejaNews’s choice to respect users’ wishes to XNAY (for X-No-Archive: yes) their posts was voluntary—a policy Google (which acquired DejaNews in 2001) has continued to follow to this day.

Nevertheless, the fact users had the option to XNAY posts when they were first written doesn’t guarantee they would want their posts to be publicly available now. With contemporary indexing and archiving tools, what might have seemed “privately public” in 1997 now can be made, in incautious hands, all too public. With some fairly simple Python scripts, I’ve been able to collect, count, and index thousands of user names and emails, including building a whole network of users’ communication.

The Google Groups archive has functionally performed such indexing on a massive scale, making all of these posts (and their attached content, some of it clearly not intended for such a mass audience) available to anyone who wishes to access it. Individuals can request for archived posts be removed, but the process for doing so is opaque at best. As Andy Baio rightly notes, Google’s primary interest here is not in in acting as a good steward of the internet’s past but in maximizing profitability. In a internet landscape dominated by social network sites (including Google’s underwhelming entry into the field, Google+), personal data mining, and algorithmic filtering, Usenet is neither ripe for personal data mining nor very profitable. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: an unstructured, decentralized system now best known as a resource for illegal file sharing. Thus, there appears to be little financial incentive to investing energy into the archive.

In her discussion of the impact of Reveal’s choice to make OOB widely available, Robertson makes it a point to connect this act with the people it most directly impacts: those in the photographs. In reaching out to these individuals for their reactions, her opinion shifts as a result of her own community membership, as “‘the community’ wasn’t an abstract notion, it was the people who gave me those generous quotes. I could see their faces and empathize with their fears and feelings that institutions had screwed them over again.” These moments, Robertson suggests, require archivists, librarians, and others to act with an ethics of care, which Bethany Nowviskie argues focuses a researcher or practitioner on two key areas:

“The first is toward an appreciation of context, interdependence, and vulnerability—of fragile, little things and their interrelation. The second is an orientation not toward objective evaluation and judgment (as in the philosophical mainstream of ethics)—not, that is, toward criticism—but toward personal, worldly action and response.”

I, like Robertson, am both a professional (academic researcher, in this case) and a community member, and these roles shape my thinking. While I’m interested in making these discussions accessible, I also want to recognize and respect their contextual particularities and constraints. Robertson suggests the Zine Librarians’ Code of Ethics as source of guidance, and I’ve drawn on it in designing the Transgender Usenet Archive.

In design, I’ve chosen to take several different steps to preserve individual privacy and encourage good, respectful practice. The archive will be publicly available to anyone who wishes to use it, but accessing the archive will require users to informally agree that they are agreeing to use it for non-commercial personal, teaching, learning or research reasons only. All of the posts included in the archive have been selectively indexed and do not include headers which might contain identifiable information, such as emails and names. However, I have not altered posts’ content in any way, so any message sign-offs and email signatures that were already included in posts will appear in the archive as is.

I’ve also manually removed any 64-bit code for images (such as personal photographs, etc) that include any possibly identifying features (such as full body or face shots); these images have been marked with <IMAGE REDACTED FOR PRIVACY>. There’s a long history of repurposing and reposting trans women’s photos online without their consent, and I don’t want to contribute to it through the archive. Because I can’t determine the particular provenance of these photos (especially given that many were attached to mass-mailed spam), I’ve chosen to err on the side of caution and redact these images.

Lastly, I want to do my utmost to respect and support posters’ right to refusal. Unfortunately, the scale and amount of content in the archive makes attempting to contact individual posters unfeasible. As part of the archive site, I’ll will be offering a contact form for individuals whose would like to inquire about if their posts are included in the archive. However, this post is meant to offer individuals a chance to let me know if they’d like their posts not to be included. Please feel free to reach out to me via email (adame@umd.edu) if you think your posts might be in the archive and would like them removed, or if you have any other questions or concerns.

As you can guess from my last post, I’ve been relying heavily on the Python email and mailbox modules (which inherits many functions from email) to process and analyse the Usenet collections. Instead of having to manually sift through each message, the parser identifies key information, logs it in a dictionary, and can spit it back out when called. At a practical level, using this method has saved me a considerable amount of “processing time,” so to speak. Early on, however, I noticed multiple “Nones” appearing in my results, which indicated that an attempt to access the message headers had failed. I didn’t think much of it at the time, given the size of these collections. Just some static I could ignore in favor of the much more sizable noise. Then I started work on the cisgender network, and I discovered that static was actually noise as well. I just hadn’t been prepared to listen for it.

First, here’s what a raw Usenet post from the collection looks like (to maintain anonymity, I’ve removed to the name/email in the “From:” line):

From -8946248053963491671
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 10857f,b3db99cd0296b805
X-Google-Attributes: gid10857f,public
From: Email-Address (Name)
Subject: Re: New Member
Date: 1997/11/17
Message-ID: <3470d5d4.1323094@news.lineone.net>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 290289518
References: <01bcf387$c1ae6e60$0202010a@hp-customer> <64q94t$aj4@mtinsc03.worldnet.att.net>
Organization: British Telecom
Newsgroups: alt.support.crossdressing

Hello April———-enjoy the ride!!————-Joanne x

As you can see,  each post includes a header with a variety of associated metadata and then the text of the message itself. The collected Usenet postings, by and large, follow the conventions of email formatting at the time, with From, Subject, Date, and Message ID headers, along with a variety of Usenet specific or non-standard headers added by news clients or servers (designated by the “X-” prefix). Because these collections were scraped from the Google Groups format, every message header begins with “From” and the unique message ID assigned by Google, followed by a set of proprietary, non-standard headers.

As part of building my network, I collected the content of all messages indexed as part of the network in a .txt file. Some of these messages, however, began at seemingly random points in the body of a message, even though the original messages in the collection had all of the necessary information, including headers. Yet when I tried to find a cause, there were no immediately apparent similarities in the messages which came up, nor any less “visible” options like invisible characters.

As I found (with the excellent help of Ed Summers), these message were the empty “Nones.” As noted earlier, I’ve been relying on the pre-built Python parser to successfully identify the start of each message. The parser determines the start of a message using headers defined by RFC (Request for Comments) 2822, or searches for “a single envelope header, also known as the Unix-From header or the From_ header.” In the mailbox format, the envelope header functions as a separator to indicate the start of a new message. In practice, though, the parser flags all new lines that begin with “From ” as the start of a new message and searches for the defined headers. In most instances, however, developers follow the advice outlined in the documentation on the mbox format, RFC 4155: “Many implementations are also known to escape message body lines that begin with the character sequence of “From “, so as to prevent confusion with overly-liberal parsers that do not search for full separator lines.”

The Python parser, it turns out, is an overly liberal parser. Because it was matching any instance of newline + “From ”, it read all sentences beginning with “From ” as the start of a new message—which, of course, lacked any recognizable headers. When outputting the message content to my “collector” file, the “From” line was skipped and each message began on the next line down, resulting the apparent randomness of the message’s beginning.

Solving this problem, however, was somewhat more complex. I had two options: write a module that adapts the existing parser for my purposes or create a module that made a duplicate of the mailbox edited to prevent inappropriate flagging. Given my current schedule, I opted for the latter approach. However, for both there was a combination of factors made this task particularly thorny.

1. Because of overly-liberal parser design, the mailbox has (at least initially) to be read line by line.
2. I didn’t want a solution that unnecessarily “cleans” the data by removing the proprietary Google headers. Also, removing the headers a) doesn’t change core problem with the parser and b) necessitates the creation of a replacement envelope header.
3. The Google header being read as the envelope header doesn’t match the RFC standard for mailbox separator lines (IE: From foobar@gmaill.com Wed Jan 25 21:37:37 2017), so existing email-based solutions weren’t immediately helpful.
4. Lastly, whatever I wrote had to be able to differentiate between Google’s proprietary header, whose content was consistent in format (“From ”, sometimes a -, and a series of digits), and sentences beginning with “From ”, which were entirely inconsistent.

My current solution, while not technically elegant, uses this consistency to its advantage. Because the Google-specific message ID is always numerical, I know the seventh character (index location 6) will always be a number. In contrast, this combination occurs very rarely in the message text itself. Instead, all instances of “From ” that don’t have a digit at index 6 are changed to “xFrom ” in the new file. The module then does a pass of the new file, checking the end of “From ” lines for a digit. Any lines that don’t have a digit are printed in a separate log, so they can be manually checked and edited if necessary.

At a later point, I would like to sit down and write a Usenet-specific parser, adapted to account for this issue and Usenet-specific headers. After all, this process is by no means foolproof—as illustrated by the necessity of doing a manual check afterwards. Nevertheless, for me performing the manual check has served as a small, subtle reminder to “listen” to all of the information I received, not just that which seemed to sound “right.”

1. Some of these issues are, no doubt, why institutional archives like the Smithsonian use MBOX as a stepping-stone before converting the files to XML.

One of the biggest challenges of working with Usenet Archives is their sheer size. For my five newsgroup collections, the average message count is between roughly 50,000 to 100,000 per archive. (To place that in context to recent news stories, presidential candidate HIllary Clinton’s private email server held 62,320 total emails.) Though it’s not too sizable in storage terms (about 1 GB in total for all 5 collections), it’s definitely a lot of data for a close discourse analysis. Complicating the process further is that many of the messages held in these collections also aren’t relevant to my specific research questions. That’s also a lot of information to hold in a single location, particularly as an archive. Unlike the anonymous “generous donor” who initially collected all of the various newsgroup messages, I’ll be making deliberate, intentional choices regarding what to include, how to present the messages, and what information should be indexed. Given this, I’ve moved to using the term “collections” to describe the data as it is now.

I’ve also been slowing my pace a bit in order to think carefully about what the archive might look like. Recently, I’ve focused my energy on spending a lot of time with the data, in order to get a better sense of how it should be structured, the technical challenges I might face, and what ethical questions I should consider. Part of this process has been doing a lot of scraping, counting, and visualizing, in order to put my numbers in (some) perspective. Now, these aren’t perfect tools, but I have been able to identify the active posters, cross-posting habits, and a rough network of posts using “cisgender” and variants of the term.

I’ve put all of these visualizations up on my site, with some description about their significance and my collection methodology (with links to the modules on GitHub). From these exercises, I’ve learned that these newsgroups were similar to non-transgender newsgroups in poster activity, with a small handful of highly active posters who make up a sizable chunk of the messages archived. Users primarily posted to one or two newsgroups at a time, and there are some interesting differences in both what’s recorded in the archives and how users cross-posted. There’s not a lot of crossposting between the two newsgroups with “transgendered” in the name, alt.transgendered (AltT) and soc.support.transgendered (SST), but there is a lot of cross-posting between SST and alt.support.srs (SRS). In contrast, the two major crossdressing groups, alt.fashion.crossdressing (AFCD) and alt.support.crossdressing (ASCD) have almost equal patterns of single newsgroup posting and cross-posting between themselves. These differences raise interesting questions I hope to address in a close analysis using the archive, once it’s launched in the next few weeks.

However, I also wanted to spend a little more time talking about my initial network analysis, because I think it’s indicative of some of complexities of working with Usenet data. So, one of my key research questions is how Usenet facilitated the spread of the term cisgender. As far as I’ve found, the term or variants don’t appear in movement publications during the 1990s. However, it eventually became ubiquitous in transgender discourse. How could that be, if it wasn’t in active use in print publications? This takes me to the internet, the other major (recorded) hub of transgender discussion at the time.

The term’s origins are unclear, and its corresponding Wikipedia (the unofficial arbiter of its history) reflects this lack of clarity. The page did at one point cite two Usenet users, Carl Bujis posting in soc.support.transgendered in 1996 and Dana Leland Defosse, posting in alt.transgendered in 1994, as separately originating the term.1 However, the validity of these claims were challenged as not being from “reliable sources” and subsequently removed. Usenet connections are made elsewhere as well: In the official Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition, the earliest use example cited is from Usenet. For my research, I’m not particularly interested in finding a definitive origin point, but I am curious about what might have facilitated the sudden increase in use.

This leads me back to Usenet. As I noted in my post contextualizing Usenet, part of why spam was such an issue was how (relatively) easy it was to post and cross-post to multiple groups. This meant posts could spread widely and possibly be seen by a sizeable audience. Curious about how widespread the term was in the archive I collected information on all posts (identified by their unique Message ID) that used the term and its variants (cisgendered, cis-gender, cis-gendered, and cis), and the posts referenced in the “References” header (or previous posts in the conversation).2 The References header is by no means a perfect tool, though. According to the documentation, the References header in Usenet messages was supposed to “allow messages to be grouped into conversations by the user interface program.” However, programs were required to include only “a reasonable number of backwards references” if the list got too long. Thus, not all of a conversation was recorded in the header. Furthermore, some messages weren’t archived at the poster’s request, so their trace exists in a unique Message ID with no data.

Nevertheless, the network I built (visualized using the OpenOrd layout) gives you an idea of the amount, activity level, and connections between posts. Each node is a unique posting. Nodes are sized and colored according to their degree of connection to other nodes, and labeled according to whether they were “original” (so no replies) or responding to other posts. Posts with just a Message ID and no extra information (original/reply, year, etc.) were not held in any of the archives.

What does this show? Firstly, that the term appeared frequently on Usenet in several venues: ASCD and SST. I’ve specifically chosen appeared instead of “used” because Usenet posters often quoted each other using big chunks of one another’s text. So, a term could appear in many posts, but only in quotes and not by the individual poster. So the term gains visibility even if it isn’t adopted by others. Furthermore, big numbers don’t always equal long threads (as far as the archive shows). While several posts sparked a high level of conversation (large nodes), most were short threads or single responses. Lastly, activity is date-limited: The vast majority of post activity occurs between 1996-2006—right around when social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook really begin to take off. Most surprising to me, however, was the high incidence of posts in crossdressing groups. What little literature that exists on trans Usenet focuses on AltT and SST as the “big two” of Usenet, but AFCD and ASCD were active and influential in their own right. In ASCD in particular cisgender and variants appear the most, even though the group isn’t mentioned in the print archives as a major hub of discussion.

In multiple ways, then, making this network challenged either popular received knowledge about “cisgender” or my own assumptions about what trans Usenet looked like. The numbers can’t tell the whole story, though. Understanding how these posts connect to each other requires a close discourse analysis of individual posts and the connections I’ve visualized here. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of nodes on a graph: attractive to look at, but not meaningful in any particular way. Instead, this kind of project requires meeting big data with a fine-grained attention for detail that attempts to get at the content of discussions, in order to give those “big data” numbers meaning and context.

1. My data crawling actually raises questions about the received narrative for who “first” uses “cisgender.” In 1994, 5 months after Defosse posts, another user posts in the same newsgroup about “cis-gendered, narrow-minded people,” with no clarification as to what the term means.

2. Prior to collecting my data, I also checked each message’s content against an automatically generated list of possible common misspellings. However, this process produced no hits.

“The gender community is in the midst of two revolutions right now,” Stephanie Rose wrote in the inaugural 1991 issue of transgender journal Chrysalis Quarterly. The first revolution was in transgender politics, where individuals were increasingly adopting an umbrella identity, “transgender,” in order to reflect their growing sense of shared political consciousness. The second, while more “covert,” was no less important: “the computer revolution.” Trans users, according to Rose, “[stood] to gain more from [the computer revolution] than any other social groups out there,” as new communication platforms like bulletin board systems, or BBSes, allowed users to communicate securely and semi-anonymously with each other. Addresses for trans-specific BBSes begin appearing in trans magazine TS-TV (later Transgender) Tapestry as early as 1988, and their number increased over the next few years. However, coverage of online trans forums in trans media during this period framed communicating online as a “technical” endeavor for the “computer literate” who “[knew] the lingo,” or in one evocative turn of phrase, were “the ‘hackers’ in our community.”

By the mid-1990s, these attitudes shifted alongside a wider cultural movement to make the Internet accessible to a variety of individuals. In the same vein as niche-specific Internet explainer video Moms on the Net (1997), these were all-in-one internet introductions, going over getting access, describing necessary hardware like modems, explaining internet terminology and “netiquette,” and offering guidance on how to find and join trans-relevant groups. Transgender journal Cross-Talk in particular ran an 8-issue series from June 1994 to January 1995 entitled “The Information Highway and You” which provided not only information but some contextualization of “early” transgender presences on the Internet.

In a marked shift from the focus on tech-savvy “hackers” a few years earlier, authors now offered evidence of their own ignorance as proof anyone could use the internet. In a section of her article subheaded “Expertise,” one author told her readers (in all-caps for emphasis) “I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT COMPUTERS.” For a monthly fee, relay services like Cross Connection offered bundled access to a variety of services like e-mail, BBS and Usenet access, as well as archives of LGBT community publications, documents on trans issues, and GIFs. Though some users still connected to BBSes, they were increasingly interested in national “net groups” like Usenet. According to Cross Connection’s administrator, “users virtually abandoned the local [BBS] forums” when wider net access was introduced (Cross-Talk, Oct 1994, 38).

Usenet offered users the chance to make national and international connections, but Usenet newsgroups differed from BBSes in several important ways.¹ While trans BBSes often had a small set of dedicated, often trans-identified administrators who handled technical and social issues, Usenet represented a wider network whose administration was distributed across a variety of servers and their respective sysadmins. Because the network was decentralized, no one sysadmin could maintain total control over the network at large.

Social norms in trans newsgroups largely mirrored Usenet’s wider political culture at the time, which prized free speech as a core value. Any punitive action administrators took was focused on protecting the integrity of the network, targeting “only those actions that threaten the network’s ability to function as a forum for deliberative debate” (Pfaffenberger 2003, 21). As such, few newsgroups were actively moderated, with most being only occasionally retromoderated for spam or other abuse.² By and large, trans newsgroups reflected the larger network culture. Newsgroup charters or FAQs emphasized that while groups were unmoderated, posters were to abide by a set of designated prohibited behaviors which restricted these two core freedoms.

Unlike discussion sites we’re familiar with today, newsgroups did not have membership or signup requirements. Instead, one’s Usenet ‘identity’, so to speak, was tied to one’s email address—which could be anonymized or spoofed. Users also used distinct signatures to differentiate their posts or link to their social presence on other platforms. Cross-posting, or posting a message to a variety of possibly-unrelated newsgroups, was fairly common and allowed messages to appear simultaneously in a variety of different discussion “spaces.” While this function led some of the earliest notable online “spam,” it also meant users and threads would move across and between groups—which was key for propagating topics and ideas amongst the various transgender-related newsgroups. This movement could, at times, lead to moments of culture clash, since each newsgroup had its own distinct culture and norms, detailed in their charter or FAQ.

Beyond its political culture, one of Usenet’s most recognizable features was the prodigious amount of content users produced. In 1992 Purdue computer science professor and influential early Usenet sysadmin Gene Spafford described Usenet as being like “a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea—massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.” Yet the amount of users actually producing this content was fairly limited. The poster to reader ratio on newsgroups was often skewed, with an “invisible crowd” of readers for any given newsgroup vastly outnumbering the amount of active posters (Smith 1999). Transgender-specific Usenet groups followed this model, with a core set of highly active posters and an unknown network of readers. As one author said of trans newsgroups in 1995, “there is very little of help in them. Mainly they seem to be a couple of individuals scoring points off each other.”

Newsgroups’ popularity amongst trans users began to decline starting in the mid-2000s, as first other discussion platforms (message boards, journaling services like Livejournal) and then now-familiar social media platforms grew in prominence. The demographics for transgender users online were shifting as well, as the population got increasingly younger. For these users, Usenet was rarely part of their daily media diet, and they focused on building connections through platforms they already used. Now, Usenet functions largely as an archive of this particular moment in trans politics, offering a window into what the key issues of the day were.

1. Nancy Baym’s book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community offers one of the best in-depth investigations of an active newsgroup during this mid-1990s period.
2. Amongst LGBTQ-related groups, soc.support.youth.gay-lesbian-bi was one of the few newsgroups that did have active moderation.

“If only one life is saved by the creation of this group, wouldn’t it be worth it?  It’s only a communications medium, and people are needlessly losing their lives and wasting their potential in self-destructive, maladaptive, denial-bases coping strategies.  The loss to our society is great, and needless…If it gets us talking, it can’t be bad.” – Anonymous, SST — an early history (part 2) (soc.support.transgendered)

You wouldn’t have the transgender movement as it is today without the Internet. Widespread public internet access played a key role in the transgender movement’s growing visibility at the national level during the 1990s. Access to the Internet mitigated many issues that had limited other organizing efforts, like geographic limitations and the sometimes-lengthy publication arc of print media. From the earliest days of Fidonet, trans individuals have made spaces for discussion and resource-sharing online. Some of these spaces were hosted on Usenet, a decentralized, worldwide discussion system founded in 1980 and organized around topic-specific newsgroups. Usenet, as a communications network, is an influential predecessor to modern social media platforms and the origin point for now-common bits of contemporary Internet vocabulary like “spam.”

Amongst its many newsgroups was a small collection of important transgender-related forums, the five most active being alt.transgendered, soc.support.transgendered, alt.support.srs, alt.support.crossdressing, and alt.fashion.crossdressing. As the anonymous poster in the opening quote notes, these spaces offered folks the opportunity to communicate and find support, without falling into “maladaptive” coping strategies. Discussions were active and sometimes highly contentious, as posters—some of them major figures in transgender political activism at the time—discussed and debated key issues of the day in transgender politics.

These newsgroups are at the center of my project as a Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow for this year. As a Fellow, I’ll be building a public archive of posts from these five groups using the Bookworm API and data from the Internet Archive’s Usenet Historical Collection. This archive will form a key part of my work, a case study focused on how posters use the term “cisgender” in their discussions. These groups are one of the few archival locations where participants regularly used the term, and several origin narratives point to different newsgroups as being the where it was first used. For my project, however, I’m not interested in origins so much as the specific contexts it was used in and how posters connected this use to their broader understandings of “transgender community.” This follows the focus of my larger dissertation, which explores the affective and structural meanings assigned to “community” in English-language transgender discourse online.

Beyond my own project, though, I’ll also be thinking and writing about the mechanics of Usenet-related research in general. Archival Usenet research can face significant barriers and raises important ethical questions about the afterlife of data. Over the coming year, I’ll be writing and posting about my process at the MITH blog, here on my own blog, and (occasionally) on Twitter. Some of these posts will be about the technical and ethical challenges of the project, offering a window into I’m thinking through them. I’ll also be sharing some of my early findings and other interesting things I encounter in the archive during my research.