2025 Computer History Museum Prize winner

Avery Dame Griff, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023).

The CHM prize committee awards this year’s prize to Avery Dame-Griff for The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023). The committee lauds Dame-Griff’s fascinating and nuanced study on a topic of critical importance to both the history of technology and the history of US social change in the 20th and 21st centuries. Dame-Griff skillfully argues that the “two revolutions” of trans political visibility and online community-building were inextricably linked—and shows how the technological affordances of the internet enabled and altered aspects of trans community, identity, and political organizing offline as well as online. Dame-Griff’s impressive use of different kinds of historical sources, and ability to also read against the archive and its silences, is a model for histories of computing that must consider the power relations inherent in modern technologies. The Two Revolutions promises to be a foundational work both for students of the history of computing and those studying the history of trans rights.