WORCESTER – The history of transgender people is at times gritty, at times fascinating, and goes further back than Caitlyn Jenner appearing on a magazine cover.

Up until recently, it was also practically impossible to find, said K.J. Rawson, an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross.

Doing research on the subject years ago, “I had a hard time finding where transgender materials even were,” he said. “It was a problem I figured out early in my career. And after talking with other people, I found it was a pretty widespread concern.”

Mr. Rawson and a team of students at Holy Cross are now working on the solution, a first-of-its-kind digital archive that is gradually piecing together decades of transgender history. After receiving a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, he is working on the project, called the Digital Transgender Archive, full-time this school year.

“Every single day I learn something new – that’s not an exaggeration,” he said Friday, seated at a table in his office, where dozens of archive materials sit in boxes stacked against the wall.

Already, Mr. Rawson and his team have collected close to 1,000 pieces of history, ranging from newsletters and clippings to photo collections, most of which are available to the public on the project’s growing online archive: www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net. Many document the history of actual transgender individuals, while others chronicle the activities of people who engaged in what Mr. Rawson referred to as “trans-ing gender,” such as cross-dressing societies.

Some of the materials were donated by supporters of the project who found out about it; one of the boxes in his office, for instance, contained documents provided by a cross-dressing group in Albany, New York. In other cases, Mr. Rawson depended on a wide-ranging network of sources. He obtained help from a friend, for example, to get in contact with someone in South Africa who knew of a local cross-dressing society in that country, whose newsletters he was able to acquire.

Turning those materials into searchable archives is the tricky part, and where Mr. Rawson’s team of student assistants, who work in a special lab set up for the project in the campus’ Fenwick Hall, has played a major role. Their duties include processing the items, and creating metadata that allows easy access to individual online files.

“It’s a lot like detective work,” said sophomore Catarina-Oliva Beal of Palm Springs, California, who has been working on the project since the start of the academic year.

Facing pressure from societies that looked down upon them, many of the groups featured in the archive had to conceal their activities, Mr. Rawson said.

“Some of the newsletters had codes in them,” he said. “It’s really fascinating that there was codebreaking involved just to be in a community.”

It’s a side of the transgender experience that many transgender people don’t even know about, as Mr. Rawson learned. He recalled receiving emails from people who discovered the archive, telling him it has helped “change the way they understand themselves,” he said.

He hopes the project will also dispel popular myths that transgenderism is a new phenomenon, and that someone like Ms. Jenner coming out is breaking new ground.

“We expect that it’s the first time that has happened, and there’s this media frenzy that ignores the fact that it’s already happened time and time again,” Mr. Rawson said.

Not all of what the archive documents is sanitized for the general public, either, as student assistant Jeimy Hernandez found out: “There are some things you can’t unsee,” she said, jokingly.

But the sophomore from Los Angeles said she and other students also have grown “really attached” to the stories of the people and groups whose histories they pore over each week. She recalled one old newspaper in particular as being an engrossing saga.

“It would be like, ‘Oh my God, they changed editors,’ or ‘they changed the whole staff,’” she said.

Mr. Rawson’s hope is that their efforts won’t end when his grant does at the end of this year; he is already fishing for more funding to continue the project, with an eye on expanding his search to '90s-era materials, for instance, like early Internet listservs. It’s not as if the history will find itself, after all.

“As far as trans-related stuff, it’s the only (archive) of its kind,” he said.

Scott O’Connell can be reached at Scott.O’Connell@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG