Digital Transgender Archive

Navigating Heteronormativity or Early Transgender Identity?

The Digital Transgender Archive is excited to announce a new collection of materials from one of our newest international collaborating institutions, Skeivt arkiv, the Norwegian national archive for queer and LGBT history. Skeivt arkiv, based in Bergen, Norway, is developing an ever-expanding digital repository with a number of transgender-related materials.

One object contained in our linked collection is an article from their Skeivopeda (Queeropedia) that describes an early 18th century church record documenting the marriage of two female-assigned persons, one of whom was presenting as male. According to the article, there are actually several records of these sorts of marriages between a masculine-presenting, female-born person marrying a feminine-presenting, female-born person in Norway around the 18th century. When the assigned sexes of couples such as these were discovered, there were often legal consequences such as imprisonment for the male-presenting person. The DTA team found it fascinating to see documentation suggesting that people were transgressing boundaries of gender as early as the 1700’s and all over the world.