06:30, 27 May 2024
Words by Abi Scaife, Staff Writer, London
Knowledge is power - it frees us, strengthens us, and gives us the tools we need to support and stand up for our fellow humans. Enter, Trans+ History Week.
The beloved brainchild of Marty Davies (she/they), Trans+ History Week is a way to educate people of any gender about the history of trans+ lives around the world, and combat lies that are endangering trans+ people today.
Marty launched Trans+ History Week with the help of independent queer publisher QueerAF, who made it one of their launchpad projects. This year, they celebrated the first-ever Trans+ History Week, and Smiley News caught up with them to hear more about this incredible project.
My name is Marty Davies (she/they). I call myself a proud attention-seeker.
I’m an award-winning creative strategist, campaigner, writer, creative industries thought-leader and changemaker.
Everything I do sits at the intersection between LGBTQIA+ culture, history, rights and the creative industries and attention economy.
I’m the first trans columnist for Campaign Magazine and I currently serve as the Co-CEO of the LGBTQIA+ advocacy group for the advertising industry, Outvertising. And I recently founded Trans+ History Week which is a new not-for-profit community interest company. We celebrated our first Trans+ History Week this year, May 06 - 12.
I wrote an article for the independent queer publisher QueerAF’s queer gaze writer scheme.
I had just learned that the world’s first trans+ clinic was raided by Nazis back in 1933, with over 20,000 books and precious books being burned - so I wrote about it. The story quickly became a tool used by others to shut down the ‘transgender trend’ lie online. The idea that we are somehow a new phenomenon.
We were denied this history lesson in school. I wanted to change that. Trans+ History Week is for the history lesson we never had.
This one article led to the idea that we needed more stories surfacing our gender-diverse history, told by trans+ creatives. But that wasn’t enough, we needed the space for audiences to immerse in them too. After consultation with the community, QueerAF CIC helped me to launch Trans+ History Week by having us be one of their launchpad projects. We launched with support from 20 LGBTQIA+ sector orgs.
It’s pretty cool that just getting geeky about history can be such a powerful tool in our fight for liberation.
The motivation behind the project was the desire to shut down a lie. Our identities are dismissed as a “modern fashion” and a “trend” and in even worse terms we're framed as a “contested belief” an “ideology” or “social contagion.”
Simply sharing and celebrating our stories tells the world we’ve always been here. Simply sharing that Trans+ people have history causes people to question the lies they may have heard about us in our media and politics.
But what I quickly realised was that the primary power of Trans+ History Week was actually the potential to instil a great sense of wellbeing among the Trans+ community itself. To know we’ve always been here tells us we belong here right where we stand in 2024, and to know that there have been efforts throughout time to deny us and erase us and yet still we persist. That’s powerful and empowering.
We are living through a moral panic about Trans+ people in the UK and US and a mental health crisis within our community. If the message of “you belong” reaches the eyes and ears of Trans+ youth I hope it can give them strength to hold on and help them to show themselves some self love for who they are.
Our history should be something that we learn from. By spending time with our history we can observe parallels with our present but it also helps us to imagine possibilities beyond our present.
We can also feel our place in our history and our power to have agency in creating our own. I like how Marsha P. Johnson said this “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.”
In creating Trans+ History Week I've held this close. Building it has been a series of impulsive decisions.
One of those was that we decided against having an annual theme for Trans+ History Week. Instead we created a workbook with four stories that told four lessons. These four lessons we found repeated themselves again and again in our history stories. Each help to remind us that we belong and give us strength to build our future, together.
Lesson 1: We’ve always been here
Lesson 2: We can’t be erased
Lesson 3: We’re stronger together
Lesson 4: We’re more than Trans+
Quite incredible and overwhelming.
I woke up on the Monday of the week to a social feed flooded with content from all over the world. Histories I hadn’t known of. That was an emotional moment.
In London, we held a large community event and a smaller poetry event. Being immersed in the joyous queer energy at both was really special.
Some stand out moments for me were seeing our national billboard campaign appear across the UK in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and London. We had the Trevor Project in the US spontaneously recognise our week, the UK Parliament recognised us with an early day motion led by Kate Osborne MP. And seeing all of the Trans+ creatives, we commissioned and paid to create art and write stories, receive so much love for what they’d made, that was really so special to witness.
Finding images of Marsha P. Johnson that are rights-free and easy for a grassroots not-for-profit organisation to use is incredibly difficult.
There are lots of iconic shots of this incredible hero - but very few are OK to use without paying large licence fees. We don’t think money should not be a barrier to celebrating our history and remembering our Trans+ trailblazers.
So with QueerAF we set out to fix that. We wanted to gift a piece of art to the community. So we commissioned artist Sunday Avanti to create a portrait of Marsha P Johnson. We’ve made it available under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) for any not-for-profit organisation to use for free.
It’s one way we hope to pay back the community for enthusiastically supporting our week.
We’ve worked closely with the queer independent publisher, QueerAF, to produce so many history stories for you to enjoy. We have articles, art, a podcast series of mini documentaries releasing weekly into Pride Month and poetry performances we’ll also be releasing during Pride too.
You can support Trans+ History Week by following us and QueerAF on Instagram and immersing yourself in trans+ history stories.
Reading all of the stories on QueerAF’s platform and by signing up to receive their weekly newsletter to support queer talent all year round! https://www.wearequeeraf.com/transhistoryweek/
We’ve always been here. And it’s time to tell our stories.
At Smiley Movement, we like to elevate the work of charities across the world. Here are three charities whose causes align with the themes in this article.
MindOut. An award winning LGBTQ community mental health service based in Brighton; run by LGBTQ people, for LGBTQ people. Learn more here.
Switchboard. They provide an information, support and referral service for lesbians, gay men and bisexual and trans people – and anyone considering issues around their sexuality and/or gender identity. Support them here.
LGBT Hero. LGBT HERO is the national health and wellbeing charity for LGBTQ+ people supporting over 100,000 people a month. Find out more here.
This article aligns with the UN SDG Quality Education, Gender Equality, Reduced Inequalities
