Abstract
The goal of this thesis was to create transgender visibility by enabling the trans community to interact with history and literature. To do this, I created three series of works, which make up the three chapters in this thesis: The Closest Thing to Time Travel I Could Manage, Stitching Myself Together, and Bonds Stretched Across Time. All three chapters interact with the concepts of past and present in different capacities, allowing for trans and nonbinary people in the past and the present to have their stories told. This is done through a combination of historical and literary research, interviews with modern-day transgender people, as well as photography and mixed media artwork. Through a combination of text and images, this project is intended to be accessible to readers of a variety of different backgrounds in an attempt to begin to remedy the problem of the American education system’s failure to address the topic of trans history. These stories are individual, and often personal, and this project is only able to address a very small number of different voices. But these voices are loud, and they are present, impossible to ignore.