Table of Contents
Trans Erasure: Serving Our Children
Trans Erasure
Recording transgender people’s contributions to their own history is essential because it protects the integrity of the historical record and affirms trans people as agents—not footnotes—in the social, medical, legal, cultural, and community changes that have shaped modern life.
When trans contributions are erased, the everyday work of building mutual aid networks, founding organizations, mentoring youth, creating art, advancing research, and changing policy is flattened or lost.
Trans erasure isn’t only the absence of names; it’s the active misattribution of ideas, the stripping of context, the disappearance of community infrastructure, and the rewriting of events so that trans people appear late, marginal, or dependent on “allies” for legitimacy.
Preserving first-person accounts, oral histories, program materials, meeting minutes, zines, recordings, and digital traces creates accountability, counters disinformation, and gives future generations a usable lineage—evidence that trans people have always been here, have always contributed, and have always helped shape the world they inherited.
Coming Out of The Shadows
At the start of the 21st century, trans children were, essentially, an invisible population.
Advocacy specific to the inclusion, affirmation, and medical treatment of transgender, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, and otherwise gender diverse children and adolescents was nonexistent outside of the Netherlands, where the use of GnRH analogs (“puberty blockers“) was pioneered in the late 1980s.
While attempts were made to add services and support for trans+ teens and young adults to already existing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender adult support systems, there wasn’t much that wandered from maintaining a focus on sexual orientation, rather than gender identity and expression. Even organizations that provided support for family of LGBT adults (PFLAG) had little expertise or resources to offer parents of transgender children and adolescents.
That changed in 2006 when Jenn Burleton, a transgender woman with painful memories of her own isolated transgender childhood decided to do something.
