About Dialogues

Welcome to our first Dialogue. This new series invites authors to return to work they have published in the journal and talk more expansively and in depth about the ideas, questions, experiences, and processes that shaped it. These conversations offer space to trace the genealogies of thought behind a piece, clarify or complicate its arguments, and explore questions that may remain open beyond publication.

We see Dialogues as a complement to the articles themselves: a way of making inquiry and thought visible as something that is necessarily ongoing, relational, iterative, and unfinished. Rather than treating publication as an endpoint, the series creates space for authors and editors to think together about where an article came from and where its ideas might lead next.

Enjoy our conversation with Travis L. Wagner, below.

Original Article

“What is Trans Information Work in Trying Times?” by Travis L. Wagner

Dialogue

nicholae cline, Editor

So you have the honor of multiple Murmurations firsts; first published article, first to be subjected to our experimental review process, first to be part of this conversation for our Dialogues section. And we’re grateful to you for trusting us with your work and ideas! It might be helpful to just say, for you and for future readers of this dialogue, that we’re really thinking of these as informal ways for contributors to talk about their process, the ideas they’re exploring, and the genealogies of thought and thinking that they’re drawing on for the piece they’ve published in our journal. So it’s a kind of complement to your article, and hopefully this conversation will give you an opportunity to clarify, illuminate, or expand on any of the ideas you were working through on the topic of trans information work.

So to start somewhat at the beginning, I’m curious what first led you to thinking about the idea of trans information work; what made it feel necessary to name, for you? Obviously, you have this anecdote at the beginning of the piece, but I imagine that’s not the first time you started thinking about or formulating this larger concept. How have you traced and explored this in your work up to this point and how did what you wrote for this piece emerge from that, if it did?

Travis L. Wagner, Author

Yeah, absolutely. And I hope you can see this in the article, that a lot of my background both as a scholar and the work I’ve done in information spaces is in response to the idea that there isn’t this fine binary between what is an institutionally verified authority and the sort of everyday circulation of information that we trust and value. Of course, that is simple and easy to reconcile with how we think of things that have different stakes, such as popular culture or just, you know, what makes for a good recipe. But when it comes to one’s embodied lived experience, we take a different approach to that or at least we imagine that institutions are allowed to ascribe onto people valuable or representative information. And for trans folks or for any historically marginalized people, that disadvantages the group because it says that a person who may or may not have that experience is the one who can describe that. So, the way that I think about that and why it is important is that we’re seeing both a continued rise in the visibility of trans and non-binary identities, but at the same time, the question of the legitimacy of those identities is at stake.

So institutions play a critical role in making that visible but also can’t be the only positions of knowledge for that because it’s done historic harm. So what my work has done is tried to understand why it’s always important that this information work comes from trans people. 

But as the anecdote at the start of the article states, the people who want to see that work aren’t always from the community, right? And don’t always actually want to hear that information. So, we get in these cycles of who gets to be an expert for information while also not necessarily trusting or seeking out institutions to do that work. And I’m sure there’ll be other questions that nuance that a bit, but it was coming from that sort of constant cycle of who gets to do this work and why we even need to have it outside of or from a position of an identity in the first place.

nc

That’s so helpful, and I think it helps to bring forth another part of the question, which is how have you been thinking about and developing these ideas in your other work as well? How have you named this before, in this or other forms, and in what ways have you sketched this out previously, because you have multiple ways of framing it and bringing it forward in this piece, as if there were a number of pieces and threads you were weaving together. And I’m curious about the development of these threads across time.

TW

Yeah, it was perhaps an organizing of the work and naming it as a practice that we do in information work. Secondarily, it might be important that I’m coming more broadly from a queer experience rather than forefronting that it’s from the trans experience first in this particular piece. So, some of my other work, in grad school, that I alluded to was research around health information practices for LGBTQ+ people, broadly, that also focused on trans identities, health information that was trans-related, and then also work I’ve done within the archival description and information organization space. But again what I would say is important is considering how we are thinking about what it means to encounter these identities in such spaces and also how transness fits within information access and description. So I think what has happened here is, if we start with trans identity as the point, how does that filter out questions of what the information work looks like, and then I think it becomes a question of the value of circulation or representation first and then how we reconciles that with these systems in which we do this work. So it was a flipping of what became the first point of concern for this work. So yes, but not in an exact or linear order of operations.

nc

I wonder, too, if for you there are any differences or commonalities in the “information work” of/for other marginalized groups? For example, are there structural differences or similarities between “trans information work” and something like “queer information work,” or even some form of “Indigenous information work,” for example, or a brown or of color information work?

TW

Yes, I think of course. They are all nuanced by one’s intersectional lived experience, but I also think the larger question that this is prodding at, and that I think I’ve tried to allude to in the piece but also in other work I’ve done, is whether and how we can understand that we have to reframe this work from being an institution doing things onto people to what these people do in response to and outside of (or even inside of) institutions. And that requires us to understand that they are representative of a finite group of people. 

So part of this push towards trans information work is an attempt to understand that the previous work or what is seen as normative work in spaces might be understood as cisnormative, and I know many of the folks working on Murmurations have written about this as well. But what I want to extend here then is about how we can understand that dichotomy to be true and we can also understand, then, that institutions are settler colonialist work. So then Indigenous information work might reframe that or look differently given the representation of normative ideas of whiteness. So an “of color” information work would be an important vantage point as well.  So I’m hoping that this work offers a way for people to have perhaps another way of drawing those connections, so that all this intersectional work, down the road, helps us think about them as interconnected; and particularly, these identities become salient depending on where the institution is or what other identities a person is bringing in to a space as well. I’m hoping this can be a “yes and” type of framework that people can take and use.

nc

So getting a little deeper into the piece, it opens with this anecdote that is, I think for many of us, familiar, but it is also very layered. What made that scene, the social media exchange and your experience with it, feel like the right place to start? Obviously there’s the labor you’re offering to this person, and it’s clear you want readers to notice that, but as an anchor to the piece what felt most compelling about it to you as an opening?

TW

I really appreciate that question because what I think came out and what I really enjoyed about the review process here was how much of the back-and-forth was, what do you want us to know about this, and I think what I wanted to illuminate through that anecdote was that I was being asked to do something but the person wouldn’t explicitly say why they thought I was the best person to answer that. And I could take the one reality, which was that I have published and circulated this information. So in a best faith effort, I can say “oh, you’ve read my work and you think that I can answer this better than some of your friends might be able to, or other people that you’re arguing with on the internet.” But there was this implicit understanding that, as a person who would identify as trans non-binary, I was also being asked to do that and this person wouldn’t say that. 

Now, I know in the spaces of trans information work, particularly work being done by folks in library and information space that are bounded by the traditions of archives, library work, museums, and so on, this is sometimes explicitly said: “oh, you are trans and therefore you have to tell me the right answer to this.” And I would venture a guess that, if it were almost any other request, this person would just have trusted their interpretation or would not have felt so inclined to avoid asking about why I had that identity and therefore should speak to it. So what I was trying to pull out is this demand of one’s identity to explain this information while simultaneously finding that a limitation as well. I’m not sure if I’m translating this idea very well, but it would be akin to saying, “oh, well you are a trained historian and I trust you there because that is a domain expertise that doesn’t have a tied lived experience to it right.” I can imagine that someone might treat an expert in Indigenous histories or Indigenous knowledges similarly, saying “I need you to explain why you know this from a lived experience rather than just showing expertise through credentials.” 

nc

I think the opening anecdote also showcases the silences and assumptions within a question—not only within that particular question, but really within any question we’re asked. Those silences come to the fore here, though, and maybe have a particular force or impact because the question is asking about things that are intimate: about your life, about your identity. In a way that perhaps not everyone who might have been asked this question would experience, you’re almost forced to ask: Why are they asking me? What are they seeing in me? What do they know about me? Why are they coming to me with this question? There’s something about the fact that the question has been directed toward you specifically that itself becomes part of what you have to interpret.

And then there’s also the question of why they’re asking it at all. You know the literal question they’re asking, or the sequence of questions as the interaction progresses, but you don’t necessarily know what they’re trying to get at. Are they trying to affirm a believe or opinion they already hold? Are they trying to refute an argument they’ve been hearing? What is their relationship to trans people in sports, or to whatever broader discourse the question is emerging from? There are all these gaps in the query that you’re inevitably filling in to some degree. And that, to me, is part of what makes the anecdote so evocative, in addition to the way it opens onto these larger questions: it shows what we do with the silences or gaps in a query, and how much interpretive work can happen before we ever begin answering the question itself.

TW

On that particular point for a second, I think something I would have perhaps gotten into in a different or sort of extended version of this article, now that we’re having this conversation, is the sort of work that I have to do to evaluate this individual and their stances about me or folks like me, right? Because if I really prodded, I might have found out that this person was perhaps the one who was being transphobic, right? And then I have to reconcile that discovery about a person. And that’s, of course, a constant sort of way in which we evaluate others around us.

But to have to do that under the larger question of helping somebody figure out a question they might have already had an embodied answer to is, I think, a sort of secondary layer of the surface of what I’m thinking through.

nc

Yeah absolutely. And the ways in which we, as queer and trans people—and, of course, as people of color and people who are otherwise subject to different kinds of vulnerability in public space, which is part of my experience as well—have to think about our safety, right? We have to be, to some degree, vigilant about our social interactions out in the world, about our own comfort and safety, about what another person might think of us or how they might respond to us. And it adds this whole other layer to our work when we have to do that kind of assessment within an interaction where we are also being asked to provide something to someone else.

I mean, obviously, as far as I understand it, this particular interaction wasn’t part of your job—you weren’t at a reference desk; this was a social media interaction. But in professional spaces, and also simply as information professionals moving through the world, we’re still having to navigate our own safety vis-à-vis the people we’re interacting with. There can be this simultaneous process of trying to understand what someone is asking, trying to help them, and also trying to determine: Who is this person in relation to me? Is this interaction safe? What am I exposing myself to by continuing it? And that, to me, is another really fascinating aspect of the interaction you describe in the piece, because that labor is happening alongside the information work even if it isn’t necessarily visible as part of it.

So, moving a little further into the piece, one of its key contributions, I think, is that it gives language to this idea of trans information work. And I’m imagining here that we’re on a podcast and you have to give somebody the relatively concise version: how would you define that concept? Obviously, readers will be able to really dig into it in the piece, but what is trans information work, in your terms? And what did you want that term to be able to hold or name that perhaps other concepts don’t quite capture—or that the broader idea of information work itself doesn’t quite capture?

TW

So, this will be the most academic I get in my response, because I feel obligated to be a bit citational here, and you can sort of follow this along in the piece. But I’m trying to bridge two frameworks that have been really helpful to me in the research and work that I do.

The first one is through that lens of information practices holistically: the idea of how we create, share, seek, and use information. So, that traditionally came from paradigms of, like, “I need to do research, so I need to go to the library and do research.” And that was quite quickly complicated by scholars who were like, “Yeah, but that’s not the only time you do information work”—or, they called it information practices and behavior. You do that in your everyday life; you do that when you’re trying to go to the grocery store and evaluate what you want to eat for dinner.

But, of course, that then got pointed out as, like, “Yeah, well, if you do that type of work, you also do it from these lived experiences.” So, this came through the lens of embodied information practices. Particularly, I’m thinking about the scholarship and work—some of which I’ve participated in as a collaborator—of what it means to be queer and to do information creation and sharing, right? From studying that, we learned that that comes from communal, word-of-mouth sharing of information, evaluating information outside of some of the institutions we said earlier might not have a queer or trans person’s interests at heart.

But that’s not to say that this is inherently a deficit operation, right? What queer and trans folks are doing isn’t lesser or different than institutions. It’s necessarily structured through and outside of those. So, this piece is trying to do the work of saying: well, what does that look like particularly from the orientation of trans identities, and what does it mean to value and center that?

So, that is the framework I borrow, particularly from the work of, again, one of my advisers and collaborators, Vanessa Kitzie, but also Megan Threats, who I mention in the piece as well. There’s this idea that this information work can be promotive and can be imaginative and creative within community. So that’s the one side of things. And the other side of it is that, if we think of Oliver Haimson’s recent work on trans technologies, he gives us this really wonderful way of saying that trans technologies can be those technologies, yes, of course, that impact the day-to-day lives of trans people, but also the work of trans folks to create technologies that center and value their lived experience.

So, I wanted to connect both of those together and say that we can think of the creation, sharing, and circulation of trans information as a way of understanding work that is informational in nature but makes visible and values trans experiences.

And I’m sure we’re going to get to this. I have an anecdote at the end that I think gives voice to this. But I think it can be some of these contentious but known practices that help insist on trans visibility, right? I’m just thinking of pronouns in signatures. I know that’s a contested practice, but it is a way in which you insist on this discussion coming to the forefront, right? And that is also facilitated by the technologies themselves: this idea of doing something to give space to and value transness in an ecosystem that, as I alluded to earlier, isn’t particularly keen on doing that right now.

nc

And I mean, I feel like one thing the piece does so well is show that trans information work is not simply about sharing facts, right? It’s not just about the unidirectional flow of information about trans people, trans identities, or trans experience from one person to another. There’s something much more relational happening. As part of it, you’re thinking about antagonism and exclusion, but also about the affective life of information—what information does in an encounter, how it moves between people, what kinds of relations it can reinforce or interrupt—as well as the communal and creative capacities of information and information work.

And I think that comes through especially in the way you differentiate among these different forms of trans information work. Just to name a few, you talk about defensive, protective, and promotive forms of trans information work. I’m curious about how those distinctions emerged for you. What were you seeing, either in the examples you were working with or in the larger body of research you were drawing from, that made those distinctions feel necessary? And what do those categories help you clarify about the different dimensions of trans information work—about the different things that information can be doing, or that people can be trying to accomplish through information work?

TW

Yeah, yeah, that’s such a great question. I think it’s easy for me to sort of always find defensive and almost paranoid information work as the easiest to identify, because, again, it is oftentimes the most temporally necessary. We are in front of something that needs to be corrected and fixed. But there are times when it doesn’t have to be that way, and it can be more creative and imaginative, or it can use a moment of defensive reaction to do something really cool.

I didn’t talk about it in this particular piece, but I’ve written about it elsewhere. I find, when I’m helping prepare future trans and queer librarians, queer information folks, folks coming from diverse experiences, that they will have to reconcile with the failures of an institution—sometimes because of the people working inside of it, but also because of the almost eons of structure that have made it very difficult to exist in those spaces.

So sometimes I encourage people to use that confrontation with the institution’s failures to then do something different. Again, I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I use this anecdote where I was working with a trans student who was really eager to build a database of what trans fiction and nonfiction was in an academic library. And, of course, that required him to come to the library and see how poorly all of that was represented, right? And we had a conversation. I was like, “You could do the work of fixing all of these subject headings, but maybe you don’t want to do that. Maybe you don’t want to learn about the difficulties of that sort of structural change. So why don’t you use yourself and your community to maybe build an alternative database that’s easier for you all to circulate and interact with?”

And that was a really good example for me of seeing a defensive moment and wanting to antagonize it, which is valuable and important, and eventually it did get corrected. But more immediately, it was easier to promote these materials through an alternative spreadsheet that you and your friends made, that you could share and use to circulate these things. And I think I’m seeing that as a common theme: the scale of expectations, right? What you can do between yourself and your community versus what you can take on with an institution.

And, just to be transparent here, I’m not pretending like this is a new thing that I’ve come up with. Obviously, folks like Emily Drabinski have named this explicitly as a way of understanding interactions between, particularly, reference librarians and their institutions and the folks that they’re serving. But I’m trying to think of this as a site of interaction that can be outside of those often very limiting institutional gates, and be more open and more everyday and almost amateur, in a good way, in nature.

nc

That’s really helpful. And I was very struck, in the article itself, by the way you name this promotive and speculative side of the argument—the idea that trans information work can be world-building, that it can be imaginative and creative, that it can produce possibilities rather than only respond to or defend against existing conditions.

I hadn’t really thought of this as a question until you were talking just now, but are there other ideas you have about that speculative dimension that you didn’t get to explore in the piece? I’m thinking about what trans information work can make possible: what kinds of relations, practices, infrastructures, or ways of being it might help bring into view or help create, rather than only what it can correct, resist, or protect against.

TW

I have a couple of things that I’m sort of working on—not to pre-hype them—but I’m particularly interested in when this information is relational to other things and becomes a way to do that. I get into this a bit when I’m talking about the Cross Talk newsletters, where you’ll get this very static discussion of the way in which trans identity is evolving, but then you’ll get these discussions of cultural moments that might seem disparate but are part of the same advancing and insisting on trans visibility.

So I have been really looking at places where, say, a community gets together to create a resource that promotes trans health, right? Whether that be, “Here, we have listed the names of affirming doctors. We went and evaluated these doctors. Here, this is a resource.” What else happens in those information spaces that is also a sort of promotion, right? What types of books are you sharing with one another, and how is that implicitly a sort of information work that is valuable? But also, how are you describing some of your interactions with folks to one another and using that space to do emotional and affective care with one another?

So I have some anecdotal evidence that this is happening in those spaces, right? They’ll describe to me interactions that are similar to the one that starts the story. So if they are trying to figure this out, if I’m trying to figure this out through this piece and inviting other people to have this conversation with me, I’m also aware that this is happening as this information is being quite literally codified by the community.

There are also these other conversations that are not codified but are doing that sort of world-building of, like, “Yeah, I’m not the only one getting weird Facebook messages from a friend I haven’t heard from in a decade about this thing,” right?

So, to answer your question more concretely, I think the speculation part is that there are affirmative world-building practices happening around how to handle all of this that we just won’t see written down, because that’s, I guess, a difficult thing.

nc

That part. And I think, going back to what you were saying just a second ago, the article really does move across a lot of different scales in productive ways. It begins with something very interpersonal—here is an interaction I’m having with someone on the internet—and then moves outward into thinking about infrastructures and platforms and, of course, library systems through which information professionals do information work, including trans information work.

And I think one thing I’m curious about is how you understand the relationship between those everyday encounters, like the one that opens the piece, and these larger information systems—not only libraries and other information institutions, but the broader infrastructures, platforms, classifications, discourses, and technologies that shape trans life. How do you think about the ways those larger systems condition what becomes possible in an interpersonal encounter: what kinds of questions people ask, what assumptions they bring with them, what kinds of information seem available or authoritative?

And then, in the other direction, I’m also wondering about how those everyday encounters relate back to the larger production of knowledge about transness. Because these systems don’t only shape what trans people encounter in their own lives; they also participate in producing and circulating broader conceptions and narratives of transness for people well beyond trans communities. So how are you thinking about that relationship between the very intimate, everyday scale of information work and these much larger systems through which transness becomes legible, narrated, categorized, and understood?

TW

Yeah, that’s a good question. I guess I have to respond with a degree of cautious optimism, because if I reflect on just the past decade—and I’m going all the way back to the anecdote at the beginning of the piece—there was a reality, like, a decade ago where it would have been difficult for this person to actually go to a database and seek out articles that would have given them a trans-affirming narrative, right?

I’m not under the illusion that they couldn’t also have gone to these databases and gotten a negative experience, but it would have been difficult to even utilize the language you would need to find resources in the first place, right? And within the past decade, we’ve seen profound advances in the tools we use to describe those. The Homosaurus, the Trans Metadata Collective, have made massive strides in making that available.

I talk to emergent professionals about that, where I’m like, “Listen, when I was a grad student, that was just a thing that people talked about maybe implementing in the future. Nobody knew what was going to happen with that.” And now it’s pretty common for me to talk to librarians and archivists who are not only implementing it, but working directly with the Homosaurus to evaluate its implementation.

So, on a very tangible level, you can find that stuff because we now have an ethics for how we describe that through the lens of the community. So I want to put that there. It also opens it up, of course, to the interaction of unwanted actors, and that doesn’t solve the larger question of what it means to be a trans information worker in this historical moment, where I am trying to still be quite optimistic, but it’s again very difficult to do because I have seen the tangible impact on folks who have receded from visibility, either because their state has told them that they have to or they just perceive that that is a best practice for them. And I’m not going to argue with that, because I think that is the right interpretation.

But in the same vein—and perhaps this will segue into what I talk about in the back half of the article—I think the tools that I described earlier have also given us the ability to see the longer tail of this work, and that it is a cycle of communal and self-advocacy in the realization that the institutions that are purporting to be inclusive just are not always invested in that work, right?

So it is the continual ebb and flow against institutional support that I think this article is trying to get at. If you don’t find embrace or legitimacy in whatever framework an institution is saying is valuable right now, here are some alternatives that will still give you value as a trans person doing this information work. And here’s how you might understand that as separate from what you have to do in your day-to-day life as a professional, and here’s how you might do professional work under the guise of whatever is acceptable, right?

Some of that is, like, how you rethink the collection development you do in a moment where it might be difficult to just explicitly say, “I’m buying this book because it’s about trans people,” right? How do you still do that without naming it?

So I tried to get to that. But again, I think it’s about understanding cycles of progression and advancement, taking the value you can from those without understanding that work as ever finite, right? It is iterative and continues, but you can borrow from what folks before you did. Hopefully that kind of answered that question.

nc

Yeah, it does. And I think it makes me want to ask about what, to me, is one of the most moving parts of the piece: your archival encounter with the Cross Talk materials. I thought those sections were so compelling to include, and I’m wondering whether they shaped your sense of the cyclicality you were just describing—or, maybe more importantly, your sense of possibility.

Because I think there’s an optimism in the piece that really suffuses it, and I think it maybe even caught some of our reviewers off guard a little bit. And I’m curious about where that optimism sits in relation to those archival encounters. Not necessarily whether it came from them, exactly, but whether encountering that history affirmed something for you: a sense that trans people have been doing this work for a long time, that communities have continually found ways to make and circulate knowledge, to care for one another, to create possibilities even within hostile or limiting conditions.

And then, of course, there’s the other side of that, which is the cyclicality you’re describing—the recognition that these struggles recur, that institutional support advances and recedes, that some of the same needs and pressures return in different forms. So I’m curious about how that archival encounter shaped or refracted your own feelings while you were writing the piece. Did it change the way you understood the present moment, or the kind of optimism and possibility you wanted the piece itself to hold?

TW

Transparently speaking, I cannot emphasize this enough: that discovery happened while I was figuring out how to write this piece. So it truly was serendipitous, as much as it seems like, “Oh, I’ve had this idea from beginning to end.”

But what it made me do, rather than sort of say, “Oh, well, here’s just a single proof that’s going to change things,” is it really made me zoom out and think again about, like, well, one, if you do this work with an anticipated end goal, you will be disappointed, right? Because you will find out at the end that more work needs to be done, or the work could be challenged in some sort of way. So that helped me remember that I am part of a process, or advocating for a process, that is, again, always ongoing.

But when I say it made me zoom out, I mean that then I was looking around me, like, “Well, who else is just doing things that are trans information work that is being embraced?” And it made me realize, for example, here at Illinois, that one of our MSLIS students was helping with the updating of trans-affirming practices at the university. Nobody asked them—like, that wasn’t a thing that they had to do—but they felt that it was important and necessary, right? Understanding that that work could be updated and should be updated. Of course, we are in a position here to be able to do that. That is a benefit of the state we’re living in, but that could have easily happened outside of it. So seeing that even a space where everything’s going all right could require some updating and correction, and being able to do that, is really important here.

But also, the optimism here—and I tried to allude to that even when I was like, “I don’t know where this Facebook message is going to go in the future,” right?—is, like, who knows who might need to see this in the future? Because I saw this Cross Talk message that somebody stuck in the back of their copy, probably for themselves at the end of the day, end up meeting somebody who needed to see it in the future. And I just have to believe, even in the very precarious nature of social media archiving, that maybe downstream somewhere that will show up.

And certainly I ought to think about how to make that available. Perhaps just entering the story into Murmurations was enough. I don’t know. We’ll see in the future if that helps.

But also, to go a bit more meta with your question, it reminds me of just the continued amount of work that has to be done to build the archive of trans identity and trans information, right? It’s one thing for us to have named, recognizable places to go for this history, but it’s another thing for us to continue to open up where we find and discover that history. And I think this is also an invitation to expand that work as well.

nc

Yeah, I feel like it comes through very clearly to me that the article is deeply concerned with, and committed to, trans continuity across time, right? And I think it works so effectively in the way it thinks about how trans people in the present encounter traces from the past—what they find there, what they recognize, what they make meaning from—and then, in turn, what from our own present might remain for others in the future. For trans people, certainly, but also for anyone who may come into contact with these histories and these traces later on.

I found that to be one of the most compelling parts of the piece, because it feels like it is thinking with the present toward the future while also refusing to treat the present as somehow disconnected from what came before. There is this sense that trans life and trans information work are always happening within a longer continuity of people leaving things behind for one another, sometimes intentionally and sometimes almost accidentally, and then other people encountering those traces and making something from them.

And I think that brings me back to the speculative aspect of the piece too: what can the work we do in the present make possible for the future? What might we leave behind that becomes useful, sustaining, legible, or meaningful to someone we cannot anticipate? That’s not really a question, exactly, but I’m curious if you have anything else you want to say about that idea of continuity across time and what present-day information work might offer to people in the future.

TW

Something I grapple with a lot in my work, and I’d venture all the editors do as well, is: how do I possibly reconcile what all of this is going to mean to somebody in the future, right? And, sort of giving a peek behind the curtain of this process, in the editing of this I had pulled a particular example from Cross Talk where I was like, “I think this is a really cool example,” and some of the editors were like, “It might read as a bit problematic in this historical moment.” And I was like, “That’s sort of fair.”

So, thinking about some of perhaps the inelegant nature of trans information work, too, you’re creating it in a historical moment where it’s trying to do what makes the most sense for that moment. And, you know, folks reading this will be able to see both of those correspondences in their entirety. It uses language that was of the time, and it is using arguments for trans identity that we might see as a bit outdated, but they articulated legitimacy in that moment. I think that’s important.

So, as you’re figuring out how to center transness in the now, there’s a trap you can fall into where it’s like, “Well, I have to make sure I get this exactly right for somebody 20 or 30 years in the future,” and you can’t possibly know what that’s going to look like.

So my hope—and I appreciate you saying there’s a sort of continuity to it; I tried, and I’m glad it’s translating there—is that that continuity is sort of inviting somebody in the future, if you’re really doing this with the hope of its value, to add on, correct, or build from it in the future, rather than rely on its sort of certitude in that historical moment.

nc

I think the sense of responsibility, or commitment, or just one’s own place within a larger historical arc is very clear in the piece. And one of the things that I think we drew out a little more through the review process was the question of labor.

And so a thread that became more explicit, I think, was this unequal labor that can be expected of trans people in the context of trans information work, but also of other marginalized people in relation to other kinds of information work. There’s this tension between having particular knowledge or experience that equips someone to do certain kinds of work, and then having that very knowledge or experience become the reason they are expected to take that work on (or to take on particular forms of that work, along with the concomitant affective labor and energy that requires of us).

So I’m curious about how you were thinking about that burden or responsibility as you were writing. What did you want to say about the difference between being equipped to do the work and being unfairly tasked with doing it? And how did your thinking about that distinction develop through the writing, review, and revision process?

TW

It’s actually one of the most joyous processes of this: being challenged about how I talk about transness in a way that I’m not used to. And by that I mean, usually when I publish this type of work, somebody’s like, “Can you please explain to me what each letter in LGBTQIA+ means? I don’t know how to use Google,” like that type of thing. Whereas this is much more about what it means to embody that position and sort of define this transition from, like, “What is the agreed-upon American Psychological Association definition of this?” to, “What does it mean to say that this identity exists and to insist on its acknowledgement by everyone else around you?” Right?

And I think I’m still, candidly speaking, grappling with that, because it is a historical moment where people, again, agree that these identities exist and should be defended, but don’t necessarily see themselves as responsible for doing that work. I think there’s still a moment where it’s like, “Well, you, trans person, advocate for yourself, and I will just thumbs-up whatever you do in support.”

And, again, perhaps this is to bring it back to the beginning of this piece. Perhaps that is what the person who messaged me is trying to do: “I’m trying to help in a situation, but I don’t know how to figure out how to do that for myself.” I want to help people to be able to do that. I am in a privileged position to be able to do that at a more intellectual level than perhaps a lot of practitioners are.

What I don’t know how to reconcile with is when that work becomes part of one’s job, but not part of one’s defined and, you know, paid job, right? So, if I’m thinking of practitioners working at a reference desk, their job is to engage in X amount of reference interviews per day, to do this. What is not defined in that is: what is the qualitative difference between particular tasks that are being asked of a person because of their perceived identity, and what might it mean to value, say, having to share one’s lived experience as part of that work? And, again, I think the piece tried to get toward, like, here is a way to operationalize that in the confines of: here are tasks you do in information work; here are tasks you, as an information professional, can say that you’re doing. And that might translate to what an institution needs to hear.

What I also could not pull apart as much as I would have liked to is how you interact with your peers who are asking you to do this work that they are capable of doing. And I’ll just candidly speak: I would want to leave that to particular practitioners who are grappling with that story to tell. I can only infer from what I’ve been told by other folks. But it’s all right to say that, you know, we are both librarians working in this space. We have access to the same resources. I’m not going to write your Trans 101 guide that you’re capable of writing.

I’m a little less certain on how to tell a practitioner how to be like, “Well, you, fellow reference librarian, have a history of being transphobic or exclusionary to students. So do I have to do that sort of defensive information work, to volunteer to do that work with students?” The question of safety maybe transcends whose labor should be counted.

And that is perhaps where I’m a little less optimistic in this historical moment, because it’s very difficult to get people who are antagonistic out of spaces quickly, right? So that labor might have to be, at the very least, unpaid or lower-paid, but perhaps valued at least at a horizontal and communal level, maybe not on a vertical and administrative level.

So, you can sort of tell in my answer here that I don’t have a good answer to that question. 

nc

That’s still very helpful and clarifying. But I also want to see if this question helps us get at it from another angle, or if it just leads us down the same path. But I’m thinking beyond the more obvious kinds of topics or inquiries—beyond Trans 101 materials, or creating a trans book list, or doing trans readers’ advisory, or something like that.

For readers who are working in libraries and archives, is there something in particular that you hope they take away from the piece? Is there something you would hope they understand differently after spending time with it—not just about trans people or trans information needs, but about their own work, their institutions, or the kinds of responsibilities they have within those spaces?

I know that’s somewhat similar to what we’ve already been talking about, but I wonder if framing it in terms of what you hope changes for a reader—what they might notice, understand, or approach differently after reading the piece—opens up another path into the question.

TW

I mean, this is going to seem like an almost silly and simplistic answer, but you need not always seek your value in doing trans information work from an institutional vantage point. There are other places and other spaces that see and value your work.

I know many a trans information professional, and they do this work, and they will tell you that that is where they actually seek the value: taking it outside of that space and sharing it. Because you do still have a set of skills that you are trained in, or in the process of getting trained in, that make you exceptional. So, in some ways, you have two sets of skills that a lot of people don’t have. Go to the space that’s going to value both of those skills together.

But the other takeaway here is, again, something we were talking about earlier: what you’re creating, sharing, and doing might not get used or valued in the exact moment that you make it. It’s so critical to understand that that value won’t be quantified in the sort of way that we think about metrics in this historical moment in libraries, right? It’s not going to have a citation count or a metric count that is traceable.

But if that’s what you want to make, then you can, and there are people doing that. You would just want to be reflective about whether that’s your end goal here, right? So, yeah, I would say: evaluate differently, and look outward when it’s emotionally necessary for its value.

nc

And I think, on that point, and just thinking about the ending of the piece and some of the questions it raises around care, labor, and what we owe to others, I see so much possibility and optimism in where you end up.

But I also wonder whether there’s a tension within trans information work itself. On the one hand, there’s this desire to leave traces for future trans people—to make something available that someone else might encounter later and find sustaining, useful, or meaningful. But, on the other hand, there’s also this really robust body of thought around the right not to explain oneself, not to disclose, not to make oneself available or legible to others.

So I’m curious whether that tension comes into your thinking at all. How do you think about the relationship between creating or preserving traces for others and the equally important possibility of withholding, refusing, or choosing not to make oneself available? Where does that right to opacity, privacy, or non-disclosure sit within the kind of trans information work you’re describing?

TW

I mean—and I perhaps could have done a better job of this in the piece—anytime I don’t see evidence of trans work in spaces, I know that that is likely an act of refusal by the people doing it. Or, even if it’s not a refusal, it’s a choice not to make that work visible so it cannot be subject to that sort of exploitation, right?

So, to your question, are there trans information professionals who do jobs in information spaces who don’t do that work? I know tons of them, right? And they just simply draw a line in the sand and say that my identity is not part of this professional work. And I think that’s a fair and legitimate choice that people make.

So there are absences in that continuity, I would speculate, that are exactly those, and we shouldn’t expect a person to do that work, right?

And I think then choosing to do the work grapples with, like, well, then I’ve chosen to enter into this sort of economy of labor and value that I will have to learn and relearn over and over again, right? 

nc

And finally—and this is really just a “what’s next?” kind of question—after writing, revising, and now publishing the piece, what feels most unresolved for you, or maybe just still really alive?

I’m thinking both about trans information work as a concept—what still feels unfinished, unsettled, or in need of further articulation—and about it as something you’re continuing to work with in your own research. What questions or possibilities are you still carrying forward from the piece?

TW

So, the encounter that I describe at the end is part of a continued process that I’m doing to think more materially about evidence of queer and trans work in time and space, and particularly in archives. But, you know, I don’t have to be theoretical about what I mean by an archive for this particular group of people. I mean those things that are in archives around us, and looking at how that work shows up in surprising places, right?

And part of the reason I put so much emphasis on Oliver Haimson’s work is that we’re still trying to figure out what the material histories of trans labor were—the tools and technologies they used to do that—never mind how we make those appear to people who want evidence of that.

So the thing that’s resonating with me right now is how to identify the technologies of trans information creation across the past couple of decades and then tell a sort of new—and not just cyclical, but, to use your word, continuous—story of that visible valuing of labor.

And then make a case that, if we aren’t seeing that visibility, it might be because trans folks are really good at imagining new ways of doing technology, new ways of creating themselves. And that’s actually the problem that institutions have: embracing their value and creativity across time rather than refusing it.

And I know that sounds like the same thing, but what I’m arguing here is that trans folks are so good at doing their information work that institutions are bad at keeping up with it.

nc

And actually, one last thing! As part of our process, we always ask contributors to pick a favorite or beloved bird to feature as part of the promotional posts on social media. You picked the Baltimore oriole; can you tell me a bit more about why that bird?

TW

Just to expand on what I said in that message before: prior to becoming faculty at the University of Illinois, I was at the University of Maryland and lived in Baltimore. My partner and I started attending Baltimore Orioles games while living there and became fans. I now associate the bird with the city, which I came to love during the brief time I was there!

nc

Thank you so much. This has been really helpful, compelling, and generative—both the piece itself and the conversation we’ve had today. I think this will be such a moving counterpart and complement to the article, and will give readers another way into the ideas you’re working through there. 

Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want me to know, or anything you wish I had asked? Anything that feels important to say that we haven’t quite gotten to yet?

TW

No, I just want to emphasize that Murmurations is such a vital and incredible thing right now for what we’ve been talking about. And I’m really excited to be part of its inaugural process, and I couldn’t be more grateful to you folks and for what you’re hoping to do here. I’m just excited to see it grow.