#trans archives

martin has trouble with health insurance at some point and has to go off t for a while, so his period comes back and he is Suffering. he asks if anyone has any painkillers (specifically vague) and tim’s like “yeah bro i gotchu” and hands him a midol. and martin just looks at him in panic like …does he know?? and tim is just like 😬 don’t mind me i’m just a normal cis guy with normal cis guy painkillers and neither of them ever mentions it again

tim wears a binder underneath his usual buttoned shirts, and likes to keep the top couple buttons undone. people just tend to assume it’s a tanktop, but sasha knows. she’s traded clothes with him a dozen times already

sasha gets bottom surgery and while she’s in recovery tim brings her food every day, and sits with her and tells her what she missed at work. he makes up funny stories that get more and more ridiculous until she’s finally like “okay tim i KNOW you’re lying this time” and he shrugs and replies “all trans men know is make friend laugh, eat doughnut, and lie”

jon gets top surgery but doesn’t tell any of his coworkers what procedure he’s having done, just that he’s having surgery. he’s out of work for weeks, and when he comes back martin notices that he’s no longer wearing what he’d assumed was an undershirt. martin doesn’t think anything of it. tim, however, notices that jon is veeeeery cautious about lifting his arms over his head and is just like ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) i see u, boss (and goes out of his way to retrieve everything that’s on high shelves for jon, who continues to act like nothing is up)

How would you describe being a trans citizen of Argentina now?

Depends on your age. The statistics say the average transsexual person in Argentina lives anywhere from thirty-five to forty-one years. Young people can continue in school and work while transitioning. But there are people totally out of sight of the system. They don’t have a job; they’re not qualified because they never had the opportunity to go to school. Because of the new law, younger people’s lives are better. The problem at this moment is the older person. Many of those who are now over forty-five have silicone liquid floating around inside their bodies or untreated diseases because we don’t have a good health-care system in Argentina. We need new laws for all the girls who are over forty-five, who don’t have housing, health insurance, work, an education.

- Jon is non-binary, but none of the other archive staff know for a while because Jon sees it as a personal matter and it is unprofessional to talk about personal matters at work

- Martin transitioned after he moved out because his mom was transphobic and he has a small trans flag on his desk

- Sasha is stealth because she knows that acedemia is hard enough for women let alone trans women

- Tim isn’t trans but he doesn’t really doesn’t care about gender

- Both Jon and Sasha are relieved to see Martin’s trans flag because it’s nice to not be working in an all cis environment, but neither of them say anything, Jon because it would be unprofessional and Sasha because she sees how Jon treats Martin and assumes it’s because he’s transphobic

- The fist day of pride month during her first year in the archives Sasha decides that she doesn’t care if here boss might be transphobic so she years a trans pride tshirt to work

- Jon just looks at her when she gets there and tells her that she can’t wear tshirts to work

- Jon is wearing a non-binary pin during this interaction

- Sasha almost laughs because she had expected a worse reaction

- Tim’s drags them all to a pride parade, Jon tries to complain about professionalism but none of them are letting him get out of having some fun

sasha gives martin pointers on how to shave and trim his facial hair, and in return he walks her through the best ways to paint your fingernails without making a huge mess

tim and jon met (pre-archives) before either of them had started to transition, so they've been kind of unofficial transition buddies since then, and celebrate milestones with each other

tim and sasha take martin out for dinner when he starts t, and they surprise him with a cake that says "IT'S A BOY!" (martin cries)

jon gathers a bunch of transfem resources from georgie once he learns that sasha is trans, and gives them to her in the form of a thick-as-hell binder with a little trans flag sticker on the front (he's highlighted important bits in pink and blue)

tim takes a fun little trip to hr (and elias's office) after cursing someone out for misgendering/deadnaming martin

jon silently hands out personalized pride/pronoun pins on the first day of pride month (he asked georgie to make them, as he does not have a pin press and that is not the kind of craft he knows anything about)

martin implies to jon at some point that he's used to people not seeing him as a man and the next day there's a new nameplate on martin's desk that reads "MR. BLACKWOOD" (nobody ever comes down there so there's nobody except the other archival assistants to see it, but martin still loves it)

the archival assistants have trans movie nights, where they pick movies and then (drunkenly) decide which characters have the most tgirl/tboy swag (this has led to shouting matches when tim wants to claim a character for team tboy and sasha wants to claim that same character for team tgirl)

tim gets sloshed and cries because he can't find his dick. sasha (equally sloshed) offers to give him hers. martin (a little less sloshed) has to hide all the scissors before the other two do something incredibly stupid

after he gets top surgery, the archival assistants give jon a shirt that says "I GOT MY TITS CHOPPED OFF AT CLAIRE'S"

Tattooed this heartthrob for Caitlin

Inspired by the ID card portrait of Toni/Kathe T, one of the first to receive a “transvestite passport” in 1928 in Weimar Republic (before the rise of the nazi party)

These passports were issued by early sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to those who we might consider trans or gnc today, to keep them safe from police due to being discriminated against by public indecency laws of the time

Weimar Republic itself had some huge advances in the understanding of sexuality and gender identity, and even had the first trans magazine published, however in the early 1930s most of these ID certificates along with gay, lesbian and trans literature and photographs were burned by nazi soldiers and lost, however Toni’s certificate survived and here is our rendition