“Congratulations to the TIHA team for launching this vital, brilliant and beautiful initiative. Trans and intersex people have historically been marginalized from the main currents of lgbtiq+ activism, with trans folks typically assumed to be gay or butch lesbian and the intersexed often completely disregarded, even as a token in the acronym. The interactive, generative nature of this project thus promises to create an essential counter to that marginalization. The ambition to counter the predominance of South Africa in the existing scholarship on lgbtiq+ struggles is another extremely welcome aspect of it. The accessibility of language meanwhile fulfills a longtime aspiration of many of us academic workers, that is, to render very challenging research, subtle and shifting identities, and complex ideas into a language that is open to a much broader audience than us eggheads tend to reach. Bravo!

Trans and intersex people obviously existed long before 1992, but the time frame selected here imposes the discipline of a very clear logic: to archive moments when the struggle for trans and intersex visibility and human rights are explicitly asserted or, in many cases, denied. Closing it off in 2016 makes sense as well, although this will likely limit input from many African countries where trans and intersex activism has only just begun (or indeed, has yet to begin). Yet this keeps the focus on documenting the early history and avoids getting bogged down in contemporary partisan or other contestations. My hope is that this strategy – and the beautiful graphics – open the door of welcome to submissions from far and wide, in diverse forms of expression, so to that help build and preserve a more inclusive history than we have seen so far.”