The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet by Avery Dame-Griff

Avery Dame-Griff’s monograph The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet demonstrates the interweaving of two parallel threads: the rise of the internet and the emergence of “transgender” as a term to define a shared community identity. The result is a social history of trans activism and an internet history that centers the transgender community as users. Dame-Griff guides the reader through the inner workings of the transgender community’s use of communication technology. These workings include linguistic and etymological discussions of a collective community’s term of identification, as well as debates on who is considered a legitimate member of the community. Full of anecdotes, documents from the Digital Transgender Archive and the Queer Digital History Project, and firsthand accounts from Dame-Griff himself, this work reflects the trajectory, successes, and struggles of the transgender community with care, respect, and dedication.

Methodologically, Dame-Griff conducted significant media archaeology and archival research from the 1980s to the present day; many of the documents shared in this work have been selected and preserved by the author himself as part of the Queer Digital History Project. These resources are complemented by Dame-Griff’s use of the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of content produced on the World Wide Web. Dame-Griff used these archival sources, which include newsletters, advertisements, clip art, comics, screenshots, blog posts, and forum discussions, to create a narrative of trans digital connection and community building. In this respect, The Two Revolutions is an excellent accompaniment to Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, as both pieces document how communication and media technologies can be leveraged to support the labor and connections necessary in fostering social movements and underrepresented communities.¹

In this book, readers can expect a synthesis of the parallel growth of the internet and the transgender community. Dame-Griff details how the transgender community came to define itself. As the collection of transsexuals, heterosexual cross-dressers, transgenderists, and androgynes began to evolve and develop deeper connections, calls for a unifying term to define the community grew more numerous, ultimately settling on “the transgender community” (9–12). As the community began to unite, define, and legitimize itself, the needs for connective shared spaces grew. Local meetups existed, but they were relatively sparse geographically, and attendance rates were stable but low. The growth of communication technologies and the internet was therefore especially beneficial and transformative for the transgender community.

Dame-Griff guides us through how multiple communication technologies were leveraged by the transgender community at different stages and how each of these technologies in turn influenced the community. Chapter 1 describes GenderNet, the first bulletin board system (BBS) created in 1984 for the transgender community. It later grew to facilitate over three thousand calls a month by 1985. It was worth noting that BBSs tended to be used among the more technically literate, that is, white-collar knowledge workers who had access to computers and hackers who skewed white, older, and middle class. Not until the growth of the internet, AOL, and the family computer do we begin to see more widespread adoption and connection.

Chapter 2 shows that the effect of this growth was mixed: these technologies enabled broader access to communication technologies within the transgender community while also enabling out-group access to the community and their content. The transgender community’s content was thrown into the public eye, prompting discussions on what was considered unsuitable for children. As a result, transgender topics were unfairly associated with pornographic and adult themes, leaving trans individuals vulnerable to censorship, policing, and condemnation. While some platforms such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and GEnie offered more lax content moderation, AOL adopted a stringent policy that associated transness with perversity and effectively banned all discussion of trans-related topics. Platform policies stigmatized trans content and restricted their ability to participate in discussions related to their identities, and the community was increasingly pushed into the margins. Due to this exodus, the Transgender Community Forum (TCF) was born in 1995.

Around this point, we also see an emergence of trans youth, detailed in chapter 5. Most trans youth got online through their universities, and according to Dame-Griff, a high percentage of those reaching out to online gender communities were computer science majors. Technically savvy, trans youth tinkered around with different technologies, with IRC, AIM, and message boards emerging as dominant youth communication formats from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Yet these formats were transitory, and messages would eventually disappear; instead, the homepage became the preferred format for trans youth craving a more permanent place to express and tailor their gender identity presentation.

The final chapter of the book is aptly titled “Owning Our History”; in it, Dame-Griff highlights the contrast between independent online communities (for example, trans newsletters and BBSs) and corporate-owned platforms (for example, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr). Dame-Griff suggests that the community should instead be moving toward models where they may exert autonomy and ownership over their communications and data. He argues that independent communities have a greater potential for respecting, preserving, and storing marginalized communities’ content and history, as is the case in McKinney’s Information Activism. Future “trans technologies” should be designed by and for trans people outside of capitalist frameworks. Platforms must prioritize user needs, community involvement, and inclusivity and must have cooperative governance structures to ensure ongoing empowerment, equitable collaboration, and preservation of marginalized voices.

A unique piece in both topic and methodology, Dame-Griff’s The Two Histories is a masterful work in conducting a history of communication technologies through the lens of an independent group, that is, the transgender community. Throughout the book, the author highlights inequities and diversity issues within the community (for example, few trans men were present in the early stages of the community, and the transgender community was predominantly white and more affluent) and takes care to include evidence from and center more diverse perspectives. Dame-Griff deftly walks us through the transgender community’s access and usage as new technologies came and went while highlighting the impact these technologies had on community organization. This work is a significant contribution to archival studies and media studies for its methods and to information studies, science and technology studies, and queer and gender studies for the people Dame-Griff centers.