For the Record

What’s the future of the public archive of Trans lives and stories as erasure and authoritarianism takes hold?

Bright white light, darkness, a flash of hot pink and back to dark again. In the dark, crowded theatre of the Tranzac Club, a couple hundred people are bathed in light from the film projected onto a pull-down screen. When the scenes cut we wait in the dark for a moment before the light comes back again. Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa Mackay come to us from the 1990s in their short film, Gender Troublemakers. They take turns on either side of the camera talking about living as Trans women in Toronto and Montreal. Ross smiles, speaks in her ever-classy Québécois accent. 

The crowd is watching in reverent silence. Earlier, Trish Salah was the first to take the podium onstage, bringing us a message from Ross. She asked us to take 30 seconds of silence for Xanthra Phillippa Mackay, who passed away in 2014. But now, on the screen, Phillippa Mackay is laughing, sure of everything she’s saying. From the projector’s light, she’s with us. We’re here commemorating the first printed collection of her and Ross’ brainchild, the zine Gendertrash From Hell. 

First printed in 1993, Gendertrash was a groundbreaking Trans zine. Over the span of four editions, it made space for Trans artists to express themselves through essays, poems, and investigative pieces that explored many aspects of Trans life, particularly through the lens of sex workers and working Trans people. The zine differed from other major periodicals of its time that covered gay and lesbian stories. This includes the Toronto-based Body Politic, which steered away from Trans people and sex workers thinking it would make them appear more respectable to a wider audience. Gendertrash was revolutionary for its time, but all night we hear how prescient and necessary it is for today. 

Once again, bright light illuminates faces, then the screen
cuts to dark. A pink card with black text pops up, reading:

 “we have the right 

to be proud

of our backgrounds 

to be proud

of our heritages

without having them 

continuously slammed

in our faces 

by gender bigots”

On this rainy, cold night in mid-November 2025, in this dark theatre that’s brimming with people, everyone knows there is something wrong. 

***

In the first year of the current Trump administration, Trans rights have been intensely targeted, in both legislation and day-to-day, social existence. From ID bans and hostile bathroom legislation to bills limiting access to healthcare, Trans people have become a constant talking point for the administration. With such an all-sides attack from the administration, Trans people exist as a vulnerable group. 

Around 2.8 million people over the age of 13 identify as Trans in the U.S., according to research from UCLA’s Williams Institute. 3.3 percent of that two million are Trans youth aged 13–17. This is about 724,000 people. Out of the overall American population, Trans people account for around one percent. Yet, during Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, his team spent around $95 million on advertising, 41 percent of which  contained anti-Trans messaging. 

“All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.
A lot of folks, they don’t want to get in trouble. They want to keep their head down.”

In January, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention released a statement saying Trans people in the U.S. are facing the early stages of genocide:  

“I think what they’re doing here is they’re trying to destroy a gender group…and so I do think it’s genocidal. I think that the objective here is literally, physically to destroy this group,”  Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, president of Genocide Watch told the Lemkin Institute in their release. “In fact, we are seeing Trans identities being chipped away from public record. ” 

The webpage for New York’s Stonewall Memorial, an official government website, for example, now refers to the protests that occurred there as advancing the “LGB civil rights movement.” Any reference to the Trans men and women have been erased. 

“Silence = Death” was a powerful cry of protest that emerged during the AIDS crisis. If you’ve ever been in Toronto and walked past the Church Street Murals project at Church and Wellesley Streets in the Village, you’ve probably seen it: a bright pink triangle hovering over the two words. Or maybe you’ve seen it in Keith Haring’s work, with three yellow figures posing: one seeing, one hearing, one speaking no evil. There is an understanding in the community that there are consequences to not speaking out.

When there are such concerted efforts to remove evidence of 2SLGBTQIA+ existence, from calendar dates, and sports, and bathrooms, and girl scout groups, and government websites, and public record and public life for what is about one percent of the overall population; a good question to start with is, why? 

As efforts toward social erasure of Trans people ramp up across the United States, Trans folks in North America know that media organizations, many of them owned by corporate entities, will not be there to report their stories fairly or accurately. So, as they’ve always done, they’re taking it on themselves — through documentation, archiving and speaking out. They’re making space for themselves, to keep their stories and their communities alive. 

***

The archive acts as a historian for our world of stories, preserving them for posterity in the event of erasure in periods of potential loss, such as federal cuts to public broadcasters. In July, a bill passed congress that cut $9 billion (U.S.) of funding to public services in two sections: public media and foreign aid. Of this amount, $1.1 billion was cut from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funnels into National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS. This was an existential threat for PBS as 15 percent of its funding was through CPB, and in the months following cuts, smaller stations have been hit the hardest. 

According to Politico, around 45 percent of stations given funding through the CPB were in rural areas. From those stations, almost half of them relied on the CPB grants for 25 percent or more of their funding. In August, PBS slashed its entire budget by 21 percent and in September, the organization announced a job cut of 15 percent.

Even while American public media faced a threat from the government for alleged left-wing bias, PBS already had a history of not standing by the Queer work it published. In 2021, Lil Miss Hot Mess was featured in a drag queen story hour episode of the children’s show Let’s Learn on WNET, a PBS affiliate station in New York.  She read from her book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, in which kids can sing along to the tune of “Wheels on the Bus” that, “hips go swish, hair goes up, shoulders go shimmy, fingers go snap, cheeks go blush.”

At a congressional hearing in March 2025, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former representative from Georgia, sat at the elevated desk in Congress after calling leaders from PBS and NPR to testify, accusing them of wasting federal resources.

“PBS News is not just left leaning. But it actively uses tax-payer funds to push some of the most radical-left positions like featuring a drag queen on the show Let’s Learn,”
said Greene. 

As she speaks, two aides turn a comically large white poster board around behind her to reveal a photo of the drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess. In the overblown portrait, she’s in a Chappell Roan-esque red curly wig and silver sequin bodysuit covered in red, white and blue stars. The image stands smiling over Greene as she accuses her of being a “child predator,” and “monster.” 

In response to months of attacks on public media, PBS doubled down on diversity promises. In an industry conversation at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Erika Dilday, executive producer of POV, PBS’s longest-running documentary series, said, “I’m ready to paint my face, tie a band around my head, and crawl through the mud to try to save our ability to show independent content on public media,” according to a recap of the convention from the International Documentary Association.

But when conservative outlash broke out over the episode of Let’s Learn, PBS denied that they had produced it, saying it was made and distributed solely by WNET. Then, PBS and WNET both backed down, and removed the Lil Miss Hot Mess episode altogether. In May 2025, the site LGBTQ Nation reported that PBS had scrubbed their archives and released a letter saying they’d taken the episode offline.

In an op-ed for Huffpost, Lil Miss Hot Mess wrote, “it’s funny that Greene and other MAGA Republicans have yet to learn that it’s a bad idea to pick a fight with a drag queen.” On Instagram, she posted saying “the unfortunate irony of Greene’s political bullying is that while she claims to promote liberty, in reality, she just wants to tell us all what to think and do. That’s not freedom, that’s ­fascism.”

In November, after the Gendertrash reading, I met up with Aino Pihlak, one of the speakers from that night. Pihlak is a social historian and PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on 20th-century Trans feminine porn, periodicals, and subcultures.

Sitting across from me in a coffee shop, Pihlak turns her phone to me and asks if I’ve ever seen this picture. In it, two young men stand over a pile of loose pamphlets, strewn about books and a broken shelf. Their shoes are shiny and their skin is white. The man on the right has a book opened in his hands, and his left arm is turned to the camera, where a swastika patch sits just above his elbow. 

I recognize the photo. It’s from the 1933 book burning and looting of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in Berlin, where young Nazis broke in, tore through the institute’s library and burned books, documents, and ­records, in Bebelplatz Square.

Hirschfeld was a gay Jewish man — a leader in early Trans studies, advocating for equality for homosexuals, Trans people and women. According to the German History in Documents and Images collection, his library held records and materials on sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, marital problems, abortion, and ­homosexuality. 

Across Germany, 20,000 books were burned that night. Homosexuals and Trans people were among the first groups the Nazi regime targeted. The extensive violence came early in the Third Reich regime. They’d only been in power for three months when Hirschfeld’s institute was ransacked. 

Looking at the looting and book burning of the Institute of Sexology, the images are not exclusive to that point in history. Along with book bans sweeping certain red states, in 2024, a Republican running for Missouri secretary of state took a blowtorch to two banned Queer-inclusive books. 

“All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. A lot of folks, they don’t want to get in trouble. They want to keep their head down,” Pihlak says. 

“That sort of attitude of like, ‘well, I don’t want to get in trouble. I want to protect me.’ That is how genocides happen. That’s how roundups happen,” she says. “So that’s another real fear I have as well, not of the really big hardened Nazis but the folks who were sort of just following orders and just sort of going on because they don’t want the trouble.”

As corporate media participates in social erasure, Trans journalists are organizing to tell Trans stories with accuracy and care. Founded in 2020, the Trans Journalists Association (TJA) in the U.S. conducts research on reporting on Trans communities and creates resources for best practices in coverage. In October, the TJA released a study analyzing media coverage of Trump’s executive orders from his first 100 days in office. The study pulls data from 60 articles which were randomly selected from a pool of 295 that reported on Trump’s first
140 orders.

“At least one in 10 [orders] sought to change regulations around gender — from a wholesale ban on the federal government acknowledging ‘gender’ as a concept to more targeted attempts to remove Transgender people’s access to identity documents, education, health care, and other basic necessities,” the report explains.

The TJA report found that out of their selection, 70 percent of stories did not quote a single Trans person. Their study found “journalists frequently quoted government officials without adding perspective from the people directly affected by the policy decisions (or representatives of their communities).” Trans youth under 20 were quoted even less, making it into just six percent of articles, “despite being one of the groups frequently talked about” in those articles.

Pihlak told me it’s even harder to find archival materials on Trans people than it is for gay or lesbian folks. “There’s very few because it was under such intense — I know it’s hard to believe — but even more so intense social prescription. That is to say nothing of illegality,” she says. Pihlak shared that while Trans periodicals were scarce, they usually existed as a form of advocacy.

“There’s not really a tonne of these [Trans] archival traces of like, ‘oh, this is like the Body Politic from the 1870s.’ It just doesn’t exist,” says Pihlak. “You get a little reference to things, of folks, [who were] what we might think of as Trans fems and Trans mascs. References to these very tiny little broadsheets they would pass around together.” 

I ask Pihlak what I asked every archivist I interviewed for this piece: What does “archive” mean to you? She questions me back, asks what I mean by that. I say something about collections.

Pihlak looks me dead in the eye and says, “We’re both archives.” 

***

As that congressional hearing where Greene griped about Lil Miss Hot Mess was happening, a documentary featuring a Trans protagonist was set to air on PBS’ POV. Break the Game follows Narcissa Wright, a Trans woman who aims to set a new speedrunning record for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Jane M. Wagner, the director and producer of the film, spent over six years documenting Wright’s experience of losing her online fanbase after coming out as a Trans woman, and her subsequent journey navigating life as a visible Trans person.

Wagner was adamant Wright’s story be told with respect to her Trans identity, centring her humanity. Wagner also consulted GLAAD to make sure they were portraying the community with care. “As a documentary filmmaker, we witness, we hold truth to power. We fight for marginalized communities. We care about the truth,” Wagner says. 

Break the Game played at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023 before being acquired by PBS to air on the 37th season of POV.  But Wagner’s years of hard work and passion into the film would be met with what she calls censorship, as PBS conformed to authoritarian demands from the current Trump administration. 

The documentary’s initial release was scheduled for February 2025, prior to the federal funding cut. But that same month, the administration issued an executive order to terminate “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” This order extended to services that use federal grants, which PBS fell under. And with that, the broadcaster closed their Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) office. The documentary’s release was also cancelled that month.

PBS’s public editor, Ricardo Sandoval-Palos, justified the closure in a February release, labelling DEI “a quick social remedy.” In the statement, Sandoval-Palos wrote that closing the DEI unit “was a necessary step to comply with an arguably legitimate presidential order.” Sandoval-Palos assured readers that while “DEI executives often lacked corporate authority to effect real change…at PBS, the DEI work was real.”

Yet publicly, PBS’s archives of several years’ worth of DEI reports are inaccessible, with the website leading to an error message reading “page not found” and a consolatory picture of a swimming turtle, or leopard cub. Efforts to remove or make archival documents inaccessible from even the past five years creates a silence and unclarity around what was actually policy before complying with Trump’s decree to scrap it. 

***

When Wagner’s documentary was picked up by PBS, she was excited to be working with a broadcaster she thought was aligned with the film. 

“It felt like a really great home. And being on public television, it would be really accessible,” she says. Wagner was thrilled, until she received word in February that PBS was halting all promotional content for Break the Game. 

“It felt very much like we were in a situation that fell off the playbook where, you know, first they come for trans people, in authoritarian regimes,” Wagner says. “I felt more of an existential anxiety about what was happening on a larger scale beyond my film.”

When promotion for Break the Game halted, Wagner was told PBS did it to avoid the film being weaponized as political fodder. By March, Wagner noticed the film had been deleted from the PBS website. 

It wasn’t until Daniel Engber from The Atlantic reached out to PBS looking into the cuts that they reached out to Wagner. It was only then that PBS offered another air date for Break the Game. The documentary premiered on POV on June 30, 2025. PBS claimed the release push was for scheduling reasons, but Wagner believes PBS cancelled it to appease the Trump administration, fearful of losing funding. 

“We’ve found time and time again in the Trump administration that conceding doesn’t even accomplish anything,” Wagner tells me. “I thought the way to go is to defend these stories and stand by the films that you program, and not to retreat and pull them. Not only is it wrong, but it’s not effective.” 

In the end, it made no difference to the Trump administration that PBS tried to censor Break the Game or Let’s Learn. The $9 billion cut was made regardless.

The issue isn’t just that Trans stories are disappearing off the shelf entirely — it’s that meaningful stories featuring Trans people are being used as political capital, as with Break the Game. With Let’s Learn and POV seeing releases wiped from the archives, or censored before they even come out, there’s the question of how media gets preserved when corporate interests find it more convenient to erase them and participate in the silencing.

***

The University of Victoria (UVic) in British Columbia is home to the world’s largest Trans archives. Michael Radmacher first started volunteering with the archives in 2014. He’s worked with the chair in Transgender Studies at UVic for the past 10 years. Since 2025, he’s been the archives’ metadata librarian. He says he’ll occasionally hear anti-Trans commentary at tabling events for the archives, with people questioning the validity of Trans identity.

But archival material can be such a great way to respond to statements like these. He’s seen people leave the table with changed minds after engaging with historical records of Trans existence. 

“One of the best ways to kind of break through to those people is through archival material,” says Radmacher. “It’s proof, like right in front of you, you can touch it. You think this is trendy? Actually, it goes back a long time. It’s actually been around forever. And having those archival materials is a great way to cut through a lot of the noise.” 

UVic’s Transgender Archives is a path to connecting with people, he says. Radmacher says the archives have allowed him to build relationships with people, both recorded in collections and those who visit. “For me, an archive means community.”

Many of the archive’s collections are available online, but most are stored in person in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. Radmacher told me that of all the library collections at UVic, the Transgender Archives is one of the most visited. The archive contains anything ranging from self-published works to newsletters like Lou Sullivan’s FTM for Trans masculine people. Keep looking through the archives and you’ll find everything from the Transgender Scrapbooks, to the collection of Transvestia, a magazine for cross-dressers that ran from 1960–1986. Resources are meant to help people with personal, academic, and, in cases like this, reporting research. 

There has been much to grieve since cuts to archives during this Trump administration. In February 2025, Trump fired the first female head of the National Archives. The archives were key to Trump’s 2022 indictment, alerting the Justice Department he’d potentially kept classified documents. The archives are being attacked to feed into the administration’s storytelling, which skews the past by making it harder to access organized information.  

All night at the Tranzac Club, speakers talk of Trans struggle and resistance, looking back at pieces from Gendertrash like Phillippa Mackay’s “Don’t call me mister ‘cause I’m a TS Butch.” We hear how even now Trans people will not be erased, will not disappear. When host Kai Cheng Thom returned to the stage with the keen sensitivity of a great poet, she said she was recognizing grief in the room. Before introducing the next speaker, she put aside her notes and asked if we’d all let out a collective sigh. The room breathed in together. And then, we exhaled, each person deflating a bit as we all tried to get closer to a kind of relief you can get while you know the threat will still be there when you go to inhale again. 

Readings from the zine felt like pulling findings from the archives, with each speaker sharing something special they’d found in it. Gendertrash was special because it was more than just reporting, it was a community outlet for capturing Trans life through art. 

Pihlak spoke with me about questioning the validity of institutional archives as opposed to smaller community based ones. She says people donating to bigger archives might do so for their institutional staying power, but “if they’re going to be destroying and storming community Trans archives and they’re going to go after institutional archives as well…I don’t think they’re really gonna have to try very hard.” 

“Just look at the amounts of archives that have related to them that are institutions, or rather, university institutions that have capitulated to the Trump era,”
she says. 

***

News librarians and archivists of a publication’s records are a dying breed, Astrid Lange, library and research specialist at The Toronto Star, tells me. Lange began as a summer student in 1999. In her 26 years as a Star librarian, Lange has seen the role shift with the times; Lange said she’s seen her team shrink down from 12 when she first began. Most of her work in the archives is ensuring the digitized systems are working properly. As one of two librarians, Lange pulls data and research material for reporters, from legal records and dates, to past issues of the paper. She says there’s a small remaining population of news librarians across Canada as things have transitioned into the digital realm. 

“It’s preserving our history too, right? This is accessible resources for people down the road,” Lange says. “There is this thing about newspapers, like kind of being the paper of record, we want to ensure that what the Star has covered reflects society now. And it’s preserved for future generations.” 

While important, archiving is not a one-stop shop solution to guarding against social erasure. Archiving is a practice directly tied to institutions, and operates within those institutional frameworks.  This means institutional shortcomings translate into how archives can be accessed, are run, and curated. As of 2021, there were 51,102  archivists working across Canada. Only 20 of them were Black, according to that year’s census. 

Distrust from communities harmed and skeptical of institutions, like Indigenous communities across so-called “Canada” may be less willing to share their personal records with larger institutions, Radmacher says. Then, you have more gaps.

Kae Petrin is one of the founders and board president of the TJA. They’re a data reporter, and work with the association to train newsrooms on best practices in reporting on Trans people. 

Misinformation is one of the TJA’s main focuses. Government narratives around Trans people regurgitated in reporting have real world effects. Once misinformation is out, it’s hard to take back, Petrin says. Corrections can be issued, but for those who don’t see or care, the damage is already done. 

Petrin says journalists need to be more critical of information coming from people in positions of power. They say taking time to fact-check, and question the administration’s information can help prevent potentially publishing false and harmful claims. When there aren’t people in the room who are familiar with Trans communities and are informed enough to spot misinformation on them, Petrin says this can echo through news ecosystems. 

“We just have to get the industry to be familiar enough with Trans communities to be able to spot when an official source…has just spouted a bunch of stuff that, frankly, just simply isn’t true,” they say.  

“I think we are still in some cases, at that point in the journalistic education process,” Petrin says. 

***

On October 15, 1982, journalist Lester Kinsolving asked the first public question about AIDS at a White House press briefing. The press secretary laughed. As heard in archival footage from 1982, the room is filled with the childish snickers from White House correspondents. 

“Does the President have any reaction to the announcement by the Center for Disease Control in ­Atlanta that A-I-D-S is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?” Kinsolving asked. “Over a third of them have died. It’s known as ‘gay plague.’” Kinsolving continued, serious. 

More laughter burst out in the background. 

“I don’t have it…do you?” Deputy Press Secretary ­Larry Speaks threw back. More laughs.

“Does the president…in other words, the White House look on this as a great joke?” Kinsolving asked. 

At the time of that press conference, 853 people had died in the U.S. of illness related to HIV/AIDS. In the next five years, 147,667 would die in the U.S. as the crisis reached its peak, according to the New York City AIDS Memorial. 

Since 1988, December 1 has been observed as World AIDS Day. Created by the World Health Organization (WHO), the day is meant to honour those lost to complications from HIV/AIDS and raise funds and awareness for ongoing efforts to eradicate the virus globally. UNAIDS has said sharp, fast losses of funding in 2025 are leading to dire consequences already. December 1, 2025 marked the first year since its inception that the U.S. did not recognize World AIDS Day. The State Department released a statement a week prior, writing, “an awareness day is not a strategy.”

But it is unclear what the administration’s actual strategy is. On his first day in office, Trump announced that the U.S., the WHO’s biggest donor, would be pulling out of the organization. And in July 2025, the same bill that cut $1.1 billion from the CPB also cut $7 billion to foreign aid, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and USAID relief. 

This cultural attitude toward AIDS can be directly linked to media portrayals of it. In Susan Sontag’s 1989 book, AIDS and Its Metaphors, she dissects the language and manufactured mythology surrounding those with HIV/AIDS. She writes that in the media and society, those with AIDS were turned into a “community of pariahs.” 

In 2025, we’re seeing a continuation of historical unfounded social outrages over Queer identity in the modern moral panic over Trans people. Like energy, moral panic movements don’t seem to die out, they take different forms over time.

***

In a brick house on the North end of Church and Wellesley Streets sits the ArQuives, self-titled as Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. On a visit, I sat with banker’s boxes and a hearty stack of aged yellow envelopes in front of me. I’d pulled photos and files of the staff of the Body Politic, one of Canada’s first Queer magazines that ran from 1971–1987.

Looking at those photos, I felt a similar feeling to when I stood in the Tranzac theatre, as people weaved their way around the room running into and embracing each other. I thought, maybe selfishly, that the people in the photos were familiar. 

Leaving the ArQuives, I wrote down for the first time what I’ve begun writing every time I feel things are too dire, or helpless. I want us all to make it. 

I feel it when I see Queer people moving in spaces joyfully despite all knowing what’s happening, what might be to come, and what already is. 

I am concerned with our survival, that we make it out alive. 

I want us all to make it. I want us all to live. Maybe that’s something for the record.