The Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project 

A Partnership between the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, the William Way LGBT Center, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, Penn's Department of Sociology, the Research Data & Digital Scholarship team, and the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

 Thank you to the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE), the History Department, and Urban Studies for their support of this project. 

The Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project (PTOHP) preserves and makes publicly available the stories of trans and gender-nonconforming people connected to Philadelphia. We have an intersectional and abolitionist perspective that centers trans community and stories in the face of racial capitalism and cissexism.

PTOHP places an emphasis on stories that are circulated in community, but not in the dominant narrative and especially welcomes the contributions of trans elders. By bringing trans folks into conversation, we hope to counter forms of alienation and isolation, and aim to make trans history more accessible through our archive and community events.

Historicizing Trans Philadelphia: Through our partnership with the William Way John J. Wilcox Archives and the Kislak Library, we ensure the historical preservation of not only PTOHP interviews but also, trans archives and historical artifacts from Philadelphia.

Training: All interviewers participate in training to navigate intimate and also potentially traumatic stories shared in interviews. Interviews can be vulnerable, both for narrators and interviewers, and training provides a methodology to deal with frictions and tensions that inevitably arise.

Interview Release: The narrator’s consent and autonomy are centered in all aspects of the project. Narrators may request to have their content removed from our website at any time. Once published online interviews are freely available for community collaboration through the Creative Commons license for free and open use.

How to Get Involved:

• Sign Up to be a Narrator or to Volunteer with Us!
• Fill out our interest form to be a narrator and/or volunteer by clicking this link here.
• Attend Our Community Events!
• Join our listserv to stay up to date by emailing us at Phillytransoralhistory@gmail.com. Anyone who signs up for interviewing or volunteering will be added to the listserv.
• Donate Items to the Wilcox Archive!

If you have items related to Philadelphia trans history that you would like to donate contact Nat DiFrank, our project manager, at Difrank@sas.upenn.edu.