By Ruth Pearce
Hello and welcome! This website provides an archive for materials from the Trans Pregnancy Project, an international study which took place from 2017-2021.
We produced an enormous amount of data from the project, so are still publishing findings as of 2025. We also have some materials from our 2020 conference which never saw the light of day due to Covid-19. As such, you can expect a few updates in coming months.
This is actually our third website to date, and hopefully the last, as for the first time we have full hosting rights.
Our original website (and the most long-lived) was hosted by the University of Leeds. We lost access to editing rights for the site after the two researchers based there moved onto new jobs in different institutions. The site then taken down by the university in 2023, reportedly because it did not meet the institution’s new standards for website accessibility, and there was no-one left to update it.
We are fortunate that the original site was, however, captured by the Internet Archive. You can explore it via the Wayback Engine by clicking here.
We recreated the website in the early 2020s, but this second version also had hosting issues and rapidly disappeared from the internet.
These experiences highlight the precarity of web hosting for academic projects – a topic rarely discussed until the US government began deleting academic materials en-masse in early 2025. Our project was not subject to this kind of extreme censorship, but instead suffered a more mundane fate.
The original website for the Trans Pregnancy Project was built and maintained by administrators at the University of Leeds, and later myself, using funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. Once that funding ran out, the university was not compelled in any way to maintain it. This problem was compounded once no Leeds employees were left to advocate for the site.
On this occasion, we have paid ourselves for a new web domain, and intend to maintain it for the foreseeable future. However, we are all very busy, and none of us receive workload hours or payment for retaining this site (which is why it took so long to restore). I wonder how many similar websites quietly disappear from the internet, taking years of archived research and resources with them.
There is therefore a lesson here for funding councils and research institutions. It is vital that money and resources are committed to the longevity of academic websites, especially once projects are formally complete.
But there is also a lesson for our trans, queer, and feminist communities. We cannot assume that new resources will last forever. Be this due to “anti-woke” moral panics or humdrum resourcing issues, websites often disappear. We therefore need to build archives of our own.
The Transfeminine Review have addressed this problem at great length in an important series of posts reflecting on the potential consequences of Project 2025 for trans people (especially trans women) in the USA. A great place to start is Bethany Karsten’s November 2024 post The Trans Literature Preservation Project: A Practical Guide to Resisting Censorship.
Rest assured that all material associated with this research project is backed up on hard drives as well as cloud storage and this new site. Thanks to the generosity of many research participants and colleagues, we produced an enormous amount of very exciting findings and resources, and intend to maintain these into the future.