The Trans Equality Archive

 

The purpose of NCTE’s Trans Equality Archive is to make the records of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund (NCTEAF) accessible to historians, social scientists, and other researchers, as well as to the wider transgender community. The Archive’s mission in this endeavor is to facilitate greater societal understanding of the fight for transgender equality and to document the challenges to transgender equality that have been faced over the decades, lest knowledge of the work of the transgender rights movement be lost to time. In particular, the Archive strives to document the history of policy work by NCTE and, to a lesser extent, its coalition partners and predecessors that have secured the movement’s most momentous political victories and have shaped the national political culture surrounding transgender rights.

In addition to the records of NCTE and NCTEAF, the Archive collects records generated from the organization’s research, communications, and programming; the personal and professional papers of its officers, staff, consultants, interns, volunteers, benefactors, and associates; the papers of other individuals and organizations when particularly relevant to the documentation of NCTE’s history; and oral histories from actors involved in the establishment and development of the policy wing of the transgender rights movement, including those involved in the origins and early operations of NCTE.

Records collection is complete for the present and we are in the process of arranging for a permanent institutional home for the Archive.

To learn more about the development of the Trans Equality Archive, read my article “Preserving Transgender History in its Own Right: A Case Study of the Trans Equality Archive” in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies (2023). To learn about some of the history that has been illuminated by the records collected in the Archive, read my article “The Origins and Development of the National Transgender Rights Movement in the United States of America” in the Journal of Social History (forthcoming).