For many transgender people, April 1995 might not sound like an important date, but it deserves to be remembered as one. By the end of that month, the U.S. government stopped funding the National Science Foundation Network, which had restricted most internet use to government agencies and universities. Suddenly, tech-minded laypeople around the world were able to access a powerful communication network, and almost immediately, trans people began flocking together online through websites like Transgender Forum.
Launched beginning in February 1995 by Cindy Martin, JoAnn Roberts, and Jamie Faye Fenton, TGForum.com rapidly became one of the early trans internet’s largest social hubs. After the end of the NSFN, the burgeoning internet was effectively privatized, allowing commercial businesses to set up shop online. This change enabled TGForum to grow from a plain-text newsletter into a website that would change the course of trans history.
The site is still running today under the guidance of managing editor Angela Gardner, though it’s received quite a few upgrades from its original incarnation, which Fenton “built from scratch,” as Gardner put it in a 2014 interview. Beginning as a bare-bones repository of information, TGForum grew over a matter of months into one of the first ever trans-focused digital publications and meeting grounds, becoming a subscription-based haven where isolated trans people could make friends, post pictures, write articles, and gossip.
This past October, Cara Esten Hurtle, a volunteer archivist for the GLBT Historical Society, posted an incredible find that another archivist had brought through the door: the first four years of TGForum’s history, from April 1995 to December 1998, on one officially-produced CD-ROM still in its original shrink wrap. Hurtle quickly uploaded the disc’s entire contents to the Internet Archive, where it is now immortalized for anyone wishing to wander through its repository. Almost lost to time, this disc is now a remnant of early-internet trans culture suspended in amber, like a rare insect in a museum.
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The TGForum archival disc is a fascinating glimpse at how trans people made the switch from print and mail correspondence to online organizing, but it’s much more than just another historical document; it’s also a collection of philosophy, political debate, and community building from a group of people discovering they are so much less alone than they ever imagined.
Also, the memes are spicy as hell.
By the 1960s and ’70s, trans folks were already laying the foundations of modern U.S. trans culture. Communication between trans people on their own terms, without interference or filtration from medical institutions, was finally possible; Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to help other trans people of color find stable shelter; the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march took place in 1970, eventually leading to the modern concept of a “Pride parade.”
Concurrently, a few well-heeled trans women and drag queens began the first American trans periodicals, establishing new platforms of community news, art, and inevitably, gossip. Pharmacologist Virginia Prince started widely distributing her underground journal Transvestia in 1960 (under her own publishing banner “Chevalier Productions,” named for the famous French spy Chevalier d’Éon), and in 1963, Siobhan Fredericks began Turnabout: A Journal of Transvestism. Prominent drag queen Lee Brewster, the owner of “Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique” in Greenwich Village and sometime STAR collaborator, followed suit in 1971 with the debut of Drag magazine. In 1978, publisher Merissa Sherrill Lynn introduced TV/TS Tapestry, which was eventually renamed Transgender Tapestry and managed to last until 2006.
But although these print magazines — along with some scattered, clandestine mailing lists — were major steps forward in connecting trans people in a larger community, they also carried major limitations inherent to their medium. For one thing, it was still legally risky to publish any material about “crossdressing” and “transvestism,” which were still regarded as a form of sexual deviancy that posed a danger to public morals. In 1961, only a year after the first issue of Transvestia landed in subscribers’ hands, Prince was charged with felony distribution of obscene material through the mail. Officially, U.S. Postal Service inspectors brought the charges over Prince’s private erotic correspondence, but told Prince they would drop it altogether if she agreed to stop publishing Transvestia, as Pomona magazine reported. Prince refused, and received five years probation and a court-mandated prohibition on crossdressing (for which she later obtained a medical pardon).
Even if they weren’t getting their founders arrested, print publications for the “gender community” faced a major Catch-22 in achieving sustainability. Mainstream newspapers and magazines could be publicly sold on newsstands, and subscriptions could be advertised in other media. But as the creators of trans periodicals keenly understood, nobody in their target audience would be caught dead buying a magazine for crossdressing enthusiasts at the same place they picked up their morning paper. Without a presence in brick-and mortar stores or any ability to advertise publicly, the only way for a trans person to find out about Drag or Tapestry was through their local community. That meant many isolated trans people from older generations may have missed out on these publications altogether.
New print periodicals by and for trans people persisted into the ’80s and ’90s, including periodicals for trans men and radical zines that embraced the countercultural spirit of a rising generation. But as the information age reared its digital head, plugged-in trans people began turning to the internet as a new way to communicate. Connecting online allowed for more safety, privacy, and spontaneity than our community had ever enjoyed before, exponentially widening the range of possibilities.
It’s become something of a media cliché to point out that the internet fundamentally changed human relationships in less than half a century. But few populations illustrate the internet’s profound effects better than transgender people, whose ability to build wide-ranging networks exploded after the internet became publicly available. Suddenly, after decades of insular community groups and disparate activist campaigns, anyone who believed they were the only trans person on earth could privately hop online, search for keywords they could never speak aloud, and find dozens — no, hundreds, no, thousands — of others from all over the world looking for information, support, and understanding about exactly the same topics. Many began forming online communities on newsgroups and bulletin boards.
For new users, the thrill of stumbling on one of these groups was incomparable. As one new member of the Brazilian Crossdresser Club, a virtual community founded in 1997, wrote in a now-archived post, “You know, there was a time in which I felt I was sick, but then I found the BCC and realized there were a lot of people like me. it was a relief!!! If society were not so prejudicious, I would live as a woman all the time.”
The early figures in TGForum’s history came from print media themselves. Roberts published two magazines, Ladylike and International TransScript, and several books through her company Creative Design Services (CDS), and prominent TGForum columnist Dallas Denny had printed Roberts’ “Bill of Gender Rights” — a document calling for the rights to choose and freely express any gender identity — in a 1991 issue of the journal Chrysalis. But the internet promised something much greater than any one periodical could offer.
Creating even a simple website was no small feat in the early days of the World Wide Web: Roberts provided the business framework through CDS, Fenton hand-coded a skeleton for the newsletter and soon-to-be social network, and Martin ran the show as TGForum’s official publisher and editor, according to Gardner, who joined the company in 1996. Without the luxuries of modern blogging platforms, posts on TGForum needed to be coded individually as well: authors would write HTML into their articles, Gardner later explained, and “[Martin] would get everyone’s HTML file by email and put the new content together for publication every Monday.” The process sounds exhausting now, but in some ways wasn’t that different from laying out a print newspaper. Regardless, considering the slower pace of print publications, the concept of a trans news and culture source updated every week was clearly worth the trouble.
Through the magic of CD-ROMs and the modern internet, we can return to this liminal stage in the trans world and experience a snapshot of what this sea change in queer community-building looked and felt like firsthand, through the essays, personal ads, photos, and nationwide resources shared by the site’s founders and users. Although a great deal has changed since the mid-to-late ’90s with regards to how trans people relate to one another online, there are plenty of things that still feel very much the same, for better and for worse.
Thanks to Hurtle’s archival discovery, anyone curious can experience the TGForum archives in one of several ways. For the efficiency-minded, an ISO file — a direct digital copy of the disc — is available through the Internet Archive, which can be virtually mounted and run on any computer. You can also extract the files and simply browse manually, viewing all the various photos and HTML files on their own in isolation. But arguably the best and most satisfying approach is load it through InfiniteMac, where Hurtle uploaded the CD to be emulated as it would have appeared on a 1998 Macintosh running the long-defunct browser NetScape.
Obviously, but no less tragically, there’s no way to access what was once shared through the TGForum live chat room, which is prominently featured on the CD as a one-click way to connect with other trans people right now! (The archive disc advertises “specially designed ‘MEOW’ chat rooms,” because our community has apparently always had a catgirl problem.) Almost everything else is quite intact, however, and experiencing it is equal parts heartwarming, surreal, and laugh-out-loud funny.
Part of that humor, it has to be acknowledged, comes from the experience of living in the 2020s while revisiting something that is so relentlessly ’90s. There are plenty of ways to turn this into a game of Bingo: mark your boards if something is “kewl,” or whenever you see someone whose bangs are sprayed three or more inches above their scalp. For those who grew up anywhere in the confines of that decade, some if it may even resurrect residual cringe, to which I say: Let anyone who did not post blurry scans of Polaroid thirst traps during this era throw the first stone.
But don’t let yourself get bogged down in emotionally-removed gawking. The pure retroness of it all is what makes this archive such a fascinating and unique artifact. It demonstrates while individual signifiers may change, the larger social trends that create them stay intact. Today, memes about which inanimate objects “make you trans” abound, and “trans culture” iconography includes the Ikea BLÅHAJ shark toy and, for some reason, frogs. Judging from some of the hundreds of user-submitted photos found across the archive, one major equivalent for trans women on the TGForum was the character Death from writer Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic series, who pops up regularly in scanned images, on T-shirts, and quotes from the comics. (In fairness, Death and The Sandman are still claimed as trans culture, especially with Indya Moore joining the cast in the Netflix adaptation’s second season.) Trans people have staked out bits of territory in mass culture in similar ways for decades, much as gay men found avatars in Judy Garland and Madonna; ours just tend toward abstraction, and seemingly always have.
Most of these pictures can be found on the CD’s “Photo Ops,” “Personals,” and “Pictorials” sections, in which the site’s users proudly show off their best looks alongside contemporary community leaders and activists, like Transexual Menace co-founder Riki Wilchins. At the time, the free web hosting service Geocities was dominant, which helps provide another portal into the lives of users outside of the forum. While the CD’s hyperlinks may not work, many of the pages in question were incidentally archived in The Geocities Gallery, meaning you can find random trans peoples’ unpublished horror novels, boudoir photos, fansites, and generally eye-searing attempts at web design with pinpoint accuracy. (My personal stand-out favorite is Revana’s Transgender Dominion; note the prominently-featured Sandman panel and stunning array of font choices.)
Then there were the memes. TGForum prided itself on hosting its members’ music and art, and published original work by several cartoonists who drew gag comedy about being trans, some of which still holds up today. It also hosted material by Leigh de Santa Fe, who may have originated what we would later recognize as a “trans meme.” Leigh’s work reads like a spiritual predecessor to GayVapeShark: digital manipulations of vintage stock photography and comic books that rib her own community, like a mock magazine cover for Modern Transvestite and a satirical Superman-inspired strip “Perry White’s Mid-Life Crisis.”
“You were right, Clark, that red Kryptonite did the trick,” Superman’s editor-in-chief declares in the comic. ”36D cup at last count. Thanks again!”
Unfortunately, while all these photos and images are freely available through this CD, they would have been inaccessible at the time to anyone who wasn’t subscribed to TGForum for $25 per year — roughly $50 today, adjusted for inflation. Non-subscribers were mainly limited to the text portions of the site. Still, the information there was no less valuable: fresh news items, opinion and advice columns, tips on fashion and “passing,” and links to various resources from clothing stores to doctors and therapists. Again, the utility of this information being widely available outside of whisper networks was completely unprecedented. Readers could email “Dear Rachael” for advice, with columns sometimes fielding questions from confused spouses and family members; peruse a sprawling library of “how-to” guides on shopping for clothes; and read a revolving door of opinion columns by various authors including Roberts, Martin, and Denny.
It’s those opinion columns that hold some of the archive’s most fascinating historical value, situating TGForum users’ major concerns (finding companionship and cute fashion) against the queer political upheaval of the 1990s. Chief among those was Roberts’ own monthly column, “Chatusbo,” named for a notable bar in William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. A self-identified crossdresser, “CyberQueen,” and founding member of several trans advocacy groups including the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, Roberts used her pulpit to dish on makeup trends and lambast major LGBTQ+ organizations in the same breath. That included the Human Rights Campaign, with Roberts chronicling one of the famous LGBTQ+ advocacy group’s most infamous missteps in real time.
In February 1997, as Roberts wrote in her column, HRC lobbyists working to expand gay rights with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) accompanied Wilchins and other trans activists to Washington, D.C., where they were told by several members of Congress that trans-inclusive language in ENDA would torpedo the bill. But just two months later, Roberts sent out a furious update. “Now, it looks like Wilchins and Priesing may have been suckered by HRC and taken only to certain offices where the message would be delivered the way HRC wanted,” Roberts wrote. She had reportedly heard from another activist group that visited Congress separately that many supporters of the bill were in fact open to the idea of including trans people.
“We need to trust our instincts and not be so gullible,” Roberts fumed. “HRC is no friend to the transgender community as they have demonstrated time and again.” ENDA would eventually pass the House ten years later, with no protections for trans people, but never cleared a Senate vote. Today, some of its legacy is contained in the trans-inclusive Equality Act, which cleared the House in 2021 but died in a Senate committee.
Martin held court in her own monthly column, “One to One,” with a similar breadth of coverage, including a scorching-hot take on how Bill Clinton and trans women both have poor impulse control and regular updates on any TV show that mentioned trans people, good or bad. Martin was also among the vanguard of those objecting to comedian Norm MacDonald’s notorious trans jokes during his time on Saturday Night Live, jokes which Martin called “hateful” and MacDonald “a cheap shot artist who seems to enjoy going after the weak and powerless.”
It’s impossible to summarize all the print content on the TGForum archival disc, especially as every reader will latch onto a different piece as their “best part of the whole thing.” For me, that spot is occupied by Gardner’s undated interview — either from 1998 or 1999 — with Jordana “1.8.7” LeSesne, the Black trans woman who played a major role in popularizing drum ‘n’ bass music in the U.S. Writing my own profile of LeSesne several years ago changed how I look at music history, and reading Gardner’s changed how I look at my profile in turn. It’s surreal to read LeSesne’s reflections on the minute details of her transition — including how it almost kept her out of the music industry altogether — only a year or two after announcing herself to the world. Most heartbreaking is LeSesne’s excitement just after releasing her second album Quality Rolls, not knowing the tragedy that was about to upend her entire life while touring in 2000 — a brutal attack that ended the tour and prompted her to flee the country.
Unfortunately, Gardner’s LeSesne interview also lampshades a major diversity problem that bubbled below TGForum’s surface. Despite its zeal for broad community building, the site was near-universally populated by white, middle-class, Boomer trans women (a trend which was reflected in many of its humor articles and cartoons). Though a few non-white trans women like writer Karina Isato featured in some columns and pictorials, the overwhelming majority, including the site’s founders, were white. Likewise, outside of a few incredible pictures of Frances “the Night Man” Vavra in a tux and a “FTM Resources” section labeled simply “scarce but growing,” transmasculine people are almost nowhere to be found.
As galactic a step forward as TGForum was for the time, it still centered a few similar, relatively privileged perspectives over the incredible diversity of the larger trans population. But while that’s a solid axis on which to critique the site’s legacy, it’s also a way of measuring what (if any) progress we’ve made as a community. More diverse voices in LGBTQ+ spaces today are still frequently crowded out by white people, reminding us that any fight for queer liberation must also reckon with implicit bias and white supremacy. Our community is not unique in wrestling with this, but it’s also a problem that has existed in intra-community trans media since the early internet and before. The only way for us to truly address the issue is to learn from our history — which is why archives like the TGForum disc, messy as they can be, are so vital for the future health and growth of the trans movement.
If you boot up this archive, it’s almost inevitable that one way or another, you will find something that grabs you by the heart. Perhaps it will be a political essay about an event you weren’t alive to see; an open letter that proves trans folks have always been rather prickly about being mocked on television; a meme that reminds you of something your Discord friend sent you last week. Maybe it’s just a picture of two trans people in love. Then again, what you feel most strongly might instead be the absence of something, a hole felt too keenly still.
Whatever you find there, it will be part of the history of transness, a timeline that is still misunderstood even by those to whom it matters most. Trans communities have undergone so many dramatic changes since 1995, yet some things remain keenly relatable: how we seek belonging and fulfillment within an often-hostile culture, the ways we squabble and bicker in search of new roads forward, and even the mistakes our own activist institutions commit in looking for those paths.
Life in 2023 is so far removed from anything the founders of TGForum could have expected, but without the rails it laid in those early years, today’s LGBTQ+ media landscape would look a lot duller. Maybe that’s our own bias talking, though; after all, without TGForum, Them co-founder Meredith Talusan might never have transitioned herself, and the site you’re reading right now may never have existed.
“I didn't personally know any trans women before TGForum,” Talusan wrote in a 2017 essay. “It was because of these women online and the road they paved that I was able to get out of a cage I didn’t even know I inhabited, and yet I’ve never met any of them in person.”
So if you want the inside scoop on trans history and culture as the world merged onto the information superhighway — warts and all — set aside some time and take a look back into the TGForum archives. Find someone’s Geocities page that you might have become pen pals with, scroll through the hundreds of photos that all attest, “We were here,” and understand on the deepest possible level: the more things change, the more they stay the same, even for a community as fluid as transgender people.
You’ll have a good time, we promise. After all, TGForum was, if nothing else, totally kewl.
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