What do you think?
Rate this book
Histories of the Transgender Child
A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender children
With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.
Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.
Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.
With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.
Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.
Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.
288 pages, Paperback
First published October 23, 2018
93 people are currently reading
3804 people want to read
About the author
Jules Gill-Peterson
8 books107 followersJules Gill-Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University and has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Kinsey Institute. She was honored with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020.
Jules is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), the first book to shatter the widespread myth that transgender children are a brand new generation in the twenty-first century. Uncovering a surprising archive dating from the 1920s through 1970s, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the concept of gender relies on the medicalization of children's presumed racial plasticity, challenging the very terms of how we talk about today's medical model. The book was awarded a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.
Her next book, coming in January 2024 from Verso Books, is A Short History of Trans Misogyny.
Jules has also written for The New York Times, CNN, The Lily (by The Washington Post), Jewish Currents, The New Inquiry, The Funambulist, and more. She has been interviewed extensively in The Guardian, CBS, NPR, and Xtra Magazine. She also serves as a General Co-Editor at TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Jules is currently working on Gender Underground: A History of Trans DIY, a book that reframes the trans twentieth century not through institutional medicine, but the myriad do-it-yourself practices of trans people that forged parallel medical and social worlds of transition.
Jules also writes a regular Substack newsletter, Sad Brown Girl. She is a member of the Death Panel podcast and a co-host of the Outward podcast.
Jules is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), the first book to shatter the widespread myth that transgender children are a brand new generation in the twenty-first century. Uncovering a surprising archive dating from the 1920s through 1970s, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the concept of gender relies on the medicalization of children's presumed racial plasticity, challenging the very terms of how we talk about today's medical model. The book was awarded a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.
Her next book, coming in January 2024 from Verso Books, is A Short History of Trans Misogyny.
Jules has also written for The New York Times, CNN, The Lily (by The Washington Post), Jewish Currents, The New Inquiry, The Funambulist, and more. She has been interviewed extensively in The Guardian, CBS, NPR, and Xtra Magazine. She also serves as a General Co-Editor at TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.
Jules is currently working on Gender Underground: A History of Trans DIY, a book that reframes the trans twentieth century not through institutional medicine, but the myriad do-it-yourself practices of trans people that forged parallel medical and social worlds of transition.
Jules also writes a regular Substack newsletter, Sad Brown Girl. She is a member of the Death Panel podcast and a co-host of the Outward podcast.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews
June 3, 2021
In the 1970s feminists like Dr. Gayle Rubin and Dr. Suzanne Kessler (1978) began to use the term “gender” as a way to challenge dislodge male supremacy. The term “gender”Differentiating “gender” from “sex” (the exclusive term used before the mid 20th century) allowed women to argue that discrimination against women was not prescribed by biology, it was established by social conditions. Because socially constructed gender norms were responsible for women’s oppression, that meant they could re-written. In this way, patriarchy was not an inevitable outcome, but a political choice.
While this use of gender was and continues to be politically powerful, it’s important to also acknowledge that the first use of gender was far less emancipatory. Dr. Gill-Peterson’s deeply researched work shows how the term gender actually emerged in the US from racist eugenics as doctors sought to justify performing coercive surgeries on intersex children.
In 1955 Johns Hopkins physician John Money coined the terms “gender role” and “gender identity” as part of his exploitative “research” on intersex children. One of the dominant ideas of racist science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that only white people had “racially evolved” to display a clear distinction between the sexes (the sex binary). The existence of intersex people – and especially white intersex children -- threatened the sex binary that Western civilization was based on, one of the essential ways that it defined itself against the “savage” nations of the world.
The existence of intersex people was contrary to the cultural belief of the sex binary. Money and his peers couldn’t accept this biological reality, so they invented the concept of gender to “save the sex binary from imminent collapse by offering a new developmental justification for coercive…medical intervention into intersex children’s bodies” (98). He argued: “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the public construes a hermaphrodite as being half boy, half girl. The parents of a hermaphrodite should be disabused of this conception immediately. They should be given, instead, the concept that their child is a boy or a girl, one or the other, whose sex organs did not completely get differentiated or finished” (120). Physicians argued that it was their role to intervene on intersex children (without their consent) and “help” them develop into the “true” “gender identity” that they were supposed to become (100).
Gender emerged first as a conservative concept to stabilize the sex binary in the face of collapse.
Prior to Money’s concept of gender, in the early 20th century the science began to show that there was no biological basis to the sex binary. In fact, several scientists had begun to argue that humans were “naturally bisexual” (meaning both male and female) or “sexually indeterminate” (119). In particular, many endocrinologists had come to believe that “all humans were, to a certain degree, normally intersex” meaning that “masculinity and femininity were seen as mere tendencies, rather than absolute forms, and human life existed along a range of benign variation” (119-120). The concept of gender “breathed new life” into the sex binary (119) and “neutralized the theory of natural human bisexuality” (122) by establishing that all people had to be either a boy or a girl, and that there was no natural nonbinary form.
This project was explicitly about race. Physicians believed that white intersex and trans children could be “fixed,” into “normality” but Black trans and intersex children in particular were seen as inherently incapable of transformation, stuck in a “primitive animality” (80). In fact, Black trans and intersex youth were more likely to be sent to “infinite detention in psychiatric facilities” (31), even when seeking help from medical practitioners. Their gender and sexual non-conformity was seen as a function of their race that could not be “corrected.”
We should all be concerned about this foundational violence against intersex people has been erased from the history of gender. Feminism should be about moving beyond the sex binary and affirming the bodily autonomy of all people, especially intersex people.
While this use of gender was and continues to be politically powerful, it’s important to also acknowledge that the first use of gender was far less emancipatory. Dr. Gill-Peterson’s deeply researched work shows how the term gender actually emerged in the US from racist eugenics as doctors sought to justify performing coercive surgeries on intersex children.
In 1955 Johns Hopkins physician John Money coined the terms “gender role” and “gender identity” as part of his exploitative “research” on intersex children. One of the dominant ideas of racist science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that only white people had “racially evolved” to display a clear distinction between the sexes (the sex binary). The existence of intersex people – and especially white intersex children -- threatened the sex binary that Western civilization was based on, one of the essential ways that it defined itself against the “savage” nations of the world.
The existence of intersex people was contrary to the cultural belief of the sex binary. Money and his peers couldn’t accept this biological reality, so they invented the concept of gender to “save the sex binary from imminent collapse by offering a new developmental justification for coercive…medical intervention into intersex children’s bodies” (98). He argued: “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the public construes a hermaphrodite as being half boy, half girl. The parents of a hermaphrodite should be disabused of this conception immediately. They should be given, instead, the concept that their child is a boy or a girl, one or the other, whose sex organs did not completely get differentiated or finished” (120). Physicians argued that it was their role to intervene on intersex children (without their consent) and “help” them develop into the “true” “gender identity” that they were supposed to become (100).
Gender emerged first as a conservative concept to stabilize the sex binary in the face of collapse.
Prior to Money’s concept of gender, in the early 20th century the science began to show that there was no biological basis to the sex binary. In fact, several scientists had begun to argue that humans were “naturally bisexual” (meaning both male and female) or “sexually indeterminate” (119). In particular, many endocrinologists had come to believe that “all humans were, to a certain degree, normally intersex” meaning that “masculinity and femininity were seen as mere tendencies, rather than absolute forms, and human life existed along a range of benign variation” (119-120). The concept of gender “breathed new life” into the sex binary (119) and “neutralized the theory of natural human bisexuality” (122) by establishing that all people had to be either a boy or a girl, and that there was no natural nonbinary form.
This project was explicitly about race. Physicians believed that white intersex and trans children could be “fixed,” into “normality” but Black trans and intersex children in particular were seen as inherently incapable of transformation, stuck in a “primitive animality” (80). In fact, Black trans and intersex youth were more likely to be sent to “infinite detention in psychiatric facilities” (31), even when seeking help from medical practitioners. Their gender and sexual non-conformity was seen as a function of their race that could not be “corrected.”
We should all be concerned about this foundational violence against intersex people has been erased from the history of gender. Feminism should be about moving beyond the sex binary and affirming the bodily autonomy of all people, especially intersex people.
Read
June 3, 2021In order to review this book, I have to say that I read it, but I could not get past the first few pages because of the convoluted and jargon-filled writing. Half the sentences were unintelligible to me after multiple readings trying to parse it out. Some examples: "Children became the incarnation and etiology of sex's plasticity as an abstract form of whiteness." What in the world is an "abstract form of whiteness?" I thought if it would be explained anywhere, it'd be explained after the first use of the phrase in the introduction, but it was not. Also, "sex became synonymous with a concept of biological plasticity that made it an alterable morphology, and... was racialized as a phenotype." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Is this book specifically for PhD students in gender and/or race studies? You can try to skim and find where the author talks about trans children writing to gender clinics in the 60's, for example, but any analysis was totally lost on me. Honestly, I don't know why someone would write in such an unclear way when the subject is so important and obviously the author wants the information to get out there. I'm very surprised the other reviews don't mention this. I'm sorry to leave this negative review, especially when I've read very little, but I'm very frustrated and I hardly think I'll be the only person to feel this way.
April 9, 2025
my god, what a brilliant fucking book. i could feel this actively rearranging my brain on basically every page--not just as a document of the history of trans kids, but also the history of the intersection of gender and race (because the racial is always gendered, and the colonial gender binary is always racialized) and the history of the interactions between transness and medicine (contrary to popular thought, the medical industry did not invent us in the 50s!). it's like. actually fucking crazy how the entire history of gender medicine (both gender-affirming care for trans people and the coercive surgical violence done to intersex kids) was, like, a bunch of dudes going "fuuuuuck... we can't figure out how to define sex without implying that human variation is so much broader than an easy sex binary... we have to figure out a new framework to kill that implication forever" and then inventing a new framework that didn't kill anything and was sort of like painting over a giant hole in the wall. (surely if we let trans people exist, but ONLY in a very specific way where there is a definite end goal and it's assimilation to cisness... surely THAT will solve the inherent contradictions of the system!) AND they were doing it using kids' bodies as their personal laboratories. white kids because white kids are salvageable into Correct Gendered Existence; Black kids because hey, those are free to use for medicine, right? don't worry, we're equal opportunity--we don't care about the white kids' psychological trauma, either!
there's so so so much more in here--the book revolves around the concept of plasticity, in this context referring to the malleability and changeability of the human body (which doctors tried to harness but could never entirely control), and the way this concept was adopted to defend a LOT of eugenicist theory. but i cannot summarize the whole thing quickly or at all. you really just have to dig into it. ough. i DID wish at times this were more accessible; obviously any academic text beyond a 101 is going to require some level of jargon for shorthand, and expect that a reader will show up with some background knowledge, but even so, i think some of this was denser than it perhaps needed to be. but i think i am mostly bummed about this because it means i can't recommend this willy-nilly to everyone (like my parents, or anyone who hasn't read a bunch of literary queer theory), and i want to recommend it to everyone so bad. i'm fucking biting electrical wires i'm running up and down the walls
because here is where i confess that this nonfiction theory text made me cry three fucking times. i am so absolutely overpowered every time i think about the sheer epistemological violence our society does--did then and does now--to trans people AND to teenagers. when you are trans, you're a liability; you can't be trusted to know yourself, to define yourself or predict what's best for you; your feelings and experiences are suspect and must be routed through a properly "objective" medical figure who holds all the power to decide who you are. when you're a teenager, the world doesn't give a shit about your pain; teenagers are always griping about something, always emo, always on those damn hormonal mood swings, which is how we justify making them live almost wholly under the rule of their parents (children are an oppressed class!!!). the common note between my experiences of Being Trans and Being A Teenager is that the people close to me were very kind to me and loved me very much, and at no point did that ever make me less bleakly aware of how little power i had over myself.
gill-peterson spends half a chapter quoting letters that trans teens in the 1960s wrote to the only gender doctors, asking for medical help. begging for medical help, rather. taking great care to employ all the right scientific language, even as they babbled on about school and their friends and said things like "fab!", because they knew they had to prove they had read all the literature about transness and knew what they were talking about enough to know they wanted this. and begging, because they couldn't keep waiting to start living their real lives, they couldn't keep existing in these bodies, they couldn't keep enduring the bullying and the depression and the suicide attempts--to read these letters, and to know that these doctors answered with form responses, platitudes, "why don't you talk to your parents until you're sure?," "you can find more information on gender in this book i wrote," "have you considered not being a child?"
as i've recovered from top surgery, i've realized how much easier it is for me to simply exist now, how much future pain this one procedure has saved me--a procedure that was, on all levels but financial, very very easy. so i am sensitive right now. i know this. but i also know that doctors were doing these surgeries back then, too. i know it would have been very very easy to spare a great deal of suffering. i kept thinking the same useless fanciful thought: i wish i could go back and get them. i wish i could travel back in time to these kids. i wish i could bring them back with me. they were real, and they were here, and i don't know what happened to them in the end, and i wish i could save them.
there's so so so much more in here--the book revolves around the concept of plasticity, in this context referring to the malleability and changeability of the human body (which doctors tried to harness but could never entirely control), and the way this concept was adopted to defend a LOT of eugenicist theory. but i cannot summarize the whole thing quickly or at all. you really just have to dig into it. ough. i DID wish at times this were more accessible; obviously any academic text beyond a 101 is going to require some level of jargon for shorthand, and expect that a reader will show up with some background knowledge, but even so, i think some of this was denser than it perhaps needed to be. but i think i am mostly bummed about this because it means i can't recommend this willy-nilly to everyone (like my parents, or anyone who hasn't read a bunch of literary queer theory), and i want to recommend it to everyone so bad. i'm fucking biting electrical wires i'm running up and down the walls
because here is where i confess that this nonfiction theory text made me cry three fucking times. i am so absolutely overpowered every time i think about the sheer epistemological violence our society does--did then and does now--to trans people AND to teenagers. when you are trans, you're a liability; you can't be trusted to know yourself, to define yourself or predict what's best for you; your feelings and experiences are suspect and must be routed through a properly "objective" medical figure who holds all the power to decide who you are. when you're a teenager, the world doesn't give a shit about your pain; teenagers are always griping about something, always emo, always on those damn hormonal mood swings, which is how we justify making them live almost wholly under the rule of their parents (children are an oppressed class!!!). the common note between my experiences of Being Trans and Being A Teenager is that the people close to me were very kind to me and loved me very much, and at no point did that ever make me less bleakly aware of how little power i had over myself.
gill-peterson spends half a chapter quoting letters that trans teens in the 1960s wrote to the only gender doctors, asking for medical help. begging for medical help, rather. taking great care to employ all the right scientific language, even as they babbled on about school and their friends and said things like "fab!", because they knew they had to prove they had read all the literature about transness and knew what they were talking about enough to know they wanted this. and begging, because they couldn't keep waiting to start living their real lives, they couldn't keep existing in these bodies, they couldn't keep enduring the bullying and the depression and the suicide attempts--to read these letters, and to know that these doctors answered with form responses, platitudes, "why don't you talk to your parents until you're sure?," "you can find more information on gender in this book i wrote," "have you considered not being a child?"
as i've recovered from top surgery, i've realized how much easier it is for me to simply exist now, how much future pain this one procedure has saved me--a procedure that was, on all levels but financial, very very easy. so i am sensitive right now. i know this. but i also know that doctors were doing these surgeries back then, too. i know it would have been very very easy to spare a great deal of suffering. i kept thinking the same useless fanciful thought: i wish i could go back and get them. i wish i could travel back in time to these kids. i wish i could bring them back with me. they were real, and they were here, and i don't know what happened to them in the end, and i wish i could save them.
July 10, 2022
A fantastically dynamic and complex history of transgender childhood in the United States in the twentieth century. This book is an important intervention that helps us to think about how trans people shaped the form of trans healthcare, rather than being influenced solely by the ideas of doctors and 'experts', as one may be led to believe by some historical accounts. Gill-Peterson's critique of gender as a category distinct from sex was a revelation to me. She argues that gender was constructed as a way of bolstering up norms as the notion of distinct binary biological sex became — in the 1940s and 1950s — harder to sustain empirically. Her consideration of eugenics and the broader racist priorities of twentieth-century medicine was also instructive. The only significant problem with the book is that its source base is quite small when one considers the wideness of Gill-Peterson's claims (a point I've stolen from my supervisor).
February 4, 2021
This is a difficult book to read. Difficult in part because of the language, which presumes prior immersion in contemporary academic literary theory, but more so because of the material. Since Gill-Peterson finds in clinical archives evidence of the lives of trans children going back almost a century, unfortunately many of those cases include evidence that the children were made to suffer, by parents, medics, and other authorities, by neglect and disdain. While I do not think that the author quite nails down the case for all the points she wished to make, all the points are provocative and worth considering.
September 18, 2018
Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson, is a must-have resource. While most people would not dare to come near this subject, Julian does so with ease. The terminology is spot on and not offensive in any way. This would be the place to start, anyone wanting to learn about transgender history. Transgender children’s voices are now being heard across the world. With more and more parents jumping on board to help their kids, this would be an illuminating and eye-opening read. While this is one of a few, if not the only book in its genre and field. I was shocked at how much I was able to learn. Being part of the transgender community, I knew at the age of 5 that I wasn’t the sex I was assigned at birth. Back in the 90s, it wasn’t very common. Being open about being trans* has only now been brought to light within the past few years. Knowing how children think and operate before, can help them live the lives they were born to in the body they were suppose to be in. Overall, this book does a wonderful job diving deep into the rich history of the transgender child. It brings the past to light and makes the present known. What will the future hold for these children?
I wanted to thank Net Galley for allowing me to read this rich and informative book.
I wanted to thank Net Galley for allowing me to read this rich and informative book.
Read
August 15, 2022I’m unable to give a star judgment to this book because I’m not sure where the book was unclear or wether I’m an ignorant.
I really enjoyed the parts about actual history, especially when the stories of individuals came in, but some parts of analysis were just plain unintelligible to me. I found myself unable to decode whole paragraphs. I can’t help but think that maybe there was a simpler way to express some concepts.
For example, take this:
“Plasticity is a good example of how under what Rebecca Sheldon calls ‘somatic capitalism’ the extraction of value from children’s biology encounters its own limit in the threat of ‘life’s withdrawal’, a runaway animacy activated at the point where too much life tips over into a rouge inhuman force”
I must have read it a thousand times. Did that make sense to anyone? Or is it just me? I would love some clarifications.
I really enjoyed the parts about actual history, especially when the stories of individuals came in, but some parts of analysis were just plain unintelligible to me. I found myself unable to decode whole paragraphs. I can’t help but think that maybe there was a simpler way to express some concepts.
For example, take this:
“Plasticity is a good example of how under what Rebecca Sheldon calls ‘somatic capitalism’ the extraction of value from children’s biology encounters its own limit in the threat of ‘life’s withdrawal’, a runaway animacy activated at the point where too much life tips over into a rouge inhuman force”
I must have read it a thousand times. Did that make sense to anyone? Or is it just me? I would love some clarifications.
December 29, 2024
This is a fascinating and necessary book!
Did you know that people were studying sexuality and gender as early as the 1910s and 1920s?
The Nazis did their level best to destroy the knowledge gained through that research, but they didn’t quite succeed.
Did you also know that children and adults have been identifying as transgender, albeit by different names, for just as long?
Real talk: it’s probably been much longer, but we have written records, in people’s own voices, from the 20th century.
This is a hefty book to get through as a reader. It is written by an academic, and published by an academic press.
There are a lot of big words and big concepts.
I’m glad this book exists as it is, and I would also love to see the author release a version that tells these stories using everyday language.
I am eager to explore this author’s other work, as well as other books investigating gender history.
Did you know that people were studying sexuality and gender as early as the 1910s and 1920s?
The Nazis did their level best to destroy the knowledge gained through that research, but they didn’t quite succeed.
Did you also know that children and adults have been identifying as transgender, albeit by different names, for just as long?
Real talk: it’s probably been much longer, but we have written records, in people’s own voices, from the 20th century.
This is a hefty book to get through as a reader. It is written by an academic, and published by an academic press.
There are a lot of big words and big concepts.
I’m glad this book exists as it is, and I would also love to see the author release a version that tells these stories using everyday language.
I am eager to explore this author’s other work, as well as other books investigating gender history.
August 18, 2023
Mitjançant un profund estudi historiogràfic d'arxiu, Gill-Peterson articula una història de la infància trans (i de la intersexualitat) des dels antecedents del s. XIX, travessant tot el s.XX fins a l'actualitat. El llibre demostra que la infància trans no és una novetat del sXXI i que els infants no han estat simples objectes produïts per la medicina transsexual, sinó agents actius en lluitar per rebre el suport mèdic que consideraven i en la producció de coneixement trans. El mètode d'estudi de l'autora opera a través de la lectura de testimonis trans i dels textos dels metges i psiquiatres d'època, acompanyat d'un extens coneixement de la història de la medicina del segle passat. Per exemple, la investigació sobre la Hiperplàsia Suprarenal Congènita va ser un terreny prolífic en el desenvolupament de la visió mèdica sobre les persones trans i amb el sorgiment del gènere.
La investigació sobre la plasticitat del sexe i les persones intersexuals de la primera meitat del sXX va portar una crisi del sexe. Els anys 50s ja tremolava el binarisme sexual. Per això els metges (i no les feministes dels 70s) van recórrer a la invenció de la categoria "gènere". Ens diu l'autora: "El género [...] se describe mejor como un dispositivo médico creado para hacer frente al potencial colapso del sexo binario"(p153).
Tot plegat ens permet tenir una visió crítica d'una medicina que en nom de la ciència ha mantingut una pràctica terapèutica transfòbica, racista, sexista i heteronormativa. Qui cregui que tot això només són fantasmes del passat, ni coneix el passat ni comprèn el present.
Un petonet i un desig de l'existència d'infàncies trans perquè "créixer com a trans i viure una infància trans no és només una possibilitat, sinó una possibilitat feliç i desitjable. I hem d'assumir aquest desig ara, no en el futur"(p.294).
La investigació sobre la plasticitat del sexe i les persones intersexuals de la primera meitat del sXX va portar una crisi del sexe. Els anys 50s ja tremolava el binarisme sexual. Per això els metges (i no les feministes dels 70s) van recórrer a la invenció de la categoria "gènere". Ens diu l'autora: "El género [...] se describe mejor como un dispositivo médico creado para hacer frente al potencial colapso del sexo binario"(p153).
Tot plegat ens permet tenir una visió crítica d'una medicina que en nom de la ciència ha mantingut una pràctica terapèutica transfòbica, racista, sexista i heteronormativa. Qui cregui que tot això només són fantasmes del passat, ni coneix el passat ni comprèn el present.
Un petonet i un desig de l'existència d'infàncies trans perquè "créixer com a trans i viure una infància trans no és només una possibilitat, sinó una possibilitat feliç i desitjable. I hem d'assumir aquest desig ara, no en el futur"(p.294).
June 2, 2021
Histories of the Transgender Child is a short but dense nonfiction history of trans children and adults, and intersex children in the twentieth century. Getting through this book was a feat I’m proud of, and very glad to have undertaken. Gill-Peterson's language is challengingly academic for someone not used to that space, but I relished learning so much from her meticulous research, and I cheered for her thesis that trans childhood is far from a new phenomenon. Her research demonstrates how trans people, including children, have had a long and complicated history with the medical establishment and have been active participants in research that has shaped our understanding of sex and gender, rather than the passive bystanders they’re often painted to be. There’s a lot of interesting stuff too about childhood and how that’s been constructed, a topic on which Gill-Peterson is clearly an expert. One facet I was very interested in was her discussions of the intersection between transness, childhood, and race, but unfortunately those were frequently the places where I felt most lost in jargon, and ultimately I didn’t come away from the book fully sure what she was saying there. I continue to be interested in reading about this subject (both of trans history broadly but also trans of color studies specifically) from academic thinkers, and this book made a great companion to another book I read earlier this year, C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Let me know in the comments if you have any other recommendations in this arena! Overall a tough but refreshing read telling a lot of important stories and context, I’d for sure recommend this to anyone interested in learning more about twentieth century trans history.
Read
May 11, 2022This scholarly work provides a valuable counterargument to a common line of attack against trans rights: that gender affirming healthcare for trans minors should be banned because there was no such thing as trans kids until the medical profession created them (rather than simply affirming their existence) a few decades back. Au contraire, Julian Gill-Peterson argues, and she brings receipts in the form of decades of evidence from the medical archive, embedded in an analysis of how the medical establishment's thinking about sex and gender developed over the course of the 20th century, and thus impacted how trans children interacted with and were defined by it. The work is dense at times, in particular at the start when Gill-Peterson lays out her theoretical framework, and the paucity of archival evidence from the early decades of the century cause her to focus more on intersex youth, with whose fortunes trans youths' were intertwined for much of the century. The glimpses we are afforded even then, however, and the more in-depth portraits that start to emerge as of the 1930s and '40s, amply bear out her assertion that if trans folks have become visible to cis people largely due to the medical literature about us, there have long (always) been "many ways in which trans children had no need for medicine to live trans lives" (p. 6). I should also mention that a revelatory part of her study is her analysis of how the medical treatment of trans children was long rooted in assumptions that were not just virulently cis- and heteronormative, but also deeply racist.
February 23, 2023
This book is really interesting. Jules Gill-Peterson’s essential point is that trans kids are not some new phenomenon to be looked at with skepticism or goggled at, they’ve been here all along, and that trans history didn’t start in the 1950s. The bit about the invention of the concept of ‘gender’ in the 40s and 50s (ch 3)—basically just to pathologize intersex kids, I think?—is wild. 4 stars because the academic language was too chewy for me to sort out about a third of the time (I recognize that’s by design because it’s written for an academic audience).
October 23, 2023
Profoundly moving read as a trans woman. I’m not an academic and I found the text almost impenetrable to start but through patience and looking up a lot of words, I was able to eke out the book’s meaning. The juice was absolutely worth the squeeze. Gill-Peterson expertly synthesizes over a century’s worth of archival medical data into a compelling exploration of the development of the gender binary and trans discourse and medicalization, trans children’s role in the cis imagination, and the diversity of trans life. I found it to be incredibly powerful.
July 11, 2023
Reading this was a challenge. And like all worthy challenges, finishing it was equal parts exhausting and rewarding.
This book has a strong, relevant, and compelling thesis that was sometimes lost in the weeds of the argument’s sharp yet inaccessible language. I haven’t read information-dense history like this in a long time, so I had a hard time following the show/tell aspect of Gill-Peterson’s storytelling to make it stick in my dummy-brain. I found myself drawing on a great deal of information I’ve learned thus far in medical school (plus a considerable amount of googling and re-reading) in order to stay in stride with the argument.
With that being said, this felt like an invaluable read for my future as queer health provider. The historical accounts were fresh and necessary, coloring a timeline that has been ostensibly nonexistent. I was struck by the personal anecdotes of trans children navigating an openly hostile medical infrastructure with no support other than their own embodied knowledge. I wish the culmination of these histories lead to further commentary on trans childhood in the early aughts and 2010s, but I’ll take that as motivation for future reading.
———————————————————————————
“Trans children have been reduced to figures for what they are so clearly not, abstract ciphers of this or that etiology of gender, this or that political platform. Trans childhood, under such circumstances, has yet to visit us. Yet trans children already exist, left to fend for themselves in a culture that suffers from being unable to imagine children with a richly expressive sense of who they are.”
“By limiting trans children’s value to an abstract biological force through which medicine aimed to alter sex and gender as phenotypes, those children became living laboratories, proxies for working out broader questions about human sex and gender that had little investment in their personhood.”
“This book militates against the implication, born of the discourse of transsexuality, that trans people need medical knowledge about themselves to name or understand their lives. Ironically, it is the medical archive itself that shows this to be untrue. The records of many trans people who interacted with American doctors contain their rich reminiscences of childhoods, adolescence, and years lived openly as trans, often with the acceptance of local communities, without searching for or even wondering about medical support or terminology. Very often medicine became important only after children and adults had lived significant trans lives. And medicine was transformed by its experience with their trans lives as much as the inverse was true.”
“The twenty-first-century figuration of the trans child as futuristic does harm when its novelty erases the historical precedents to the demands for recognition, dignity, and a livable life that are being made by and on behalf of trans children today. This book has worked directly against the conceit of the newness of trans childhood, not just to point out that it is historically inaccurate but also to demonstrate that it has politically infantilizing consequences for trans children, now deprived of a century's worth of precedent that might enfranchise them.”
This book has a strong, relevant, and compelling thesis that was sometimes lost in the weeds of the argument’s sharp yet inaccessible language. I haven’t read information-dense history like this in a long time, so I had a hard time following the show/tell aspect of Gill-Peterson’s storytelling to make it stick in my dummy-brain. I found myself drawing on a great deal of information I’ve learned thus far in medical school (plus a considerable amount of googling and re-reading) in order to stay in stride with the argument.
With that being said, this felt like an invaluable read for my future as queer health provider. The historical accounts were fresh and necessary, coloring a timeline that has been ostensibly nonexistent. I was struck by the personal anecdotes of trans children navigating an openly hostile medical infrastructure with no support other than their own embodied knowledge. I wish the culmination of these histories lead to further commentary on trans childhood in the early aughts and 2010s, but I’ll take that as motivation for future reading.
———————————————————————————
“Trans children have been reduced to figures for what they are so clearly not, abstract ciphers of this or that etiology of gender, this or that political platform. Trans childhood, under such circumstances, has yet to visit us. Yet trans children already exist, left to fend for themselves in a culture that suffers from being unable to imagine children with a richly expressive sense of who they are.”
“By limiting trans children’s value to an abstract biological force through which medicine aimed to alter sex and gender as phenotypes, those children became living laboratories, proxies for working out broader questions about human sex and gender that had little investment in their personhood.”
“This book militates against the implication, born of the discourse of transsexuality, that trans people need medical knowledge about themselves to name or understand their lives. Ironically, it is the medical archive itself that shows this to be untrue. The records of many trans people who interacted with American doctors contain their rich reminiscences of childhoods, adolescence, and years lived openly as trans, often with the acceptance of local communities, without searching for or even wondering about medical support or terminology. Very often medicine became important only after children and adults had lived significant trans lives. And medicine was transformed by its experience with their trans lives as much as the inverse was true.”
“The twenty-first-century figuration of the trans child as futuristic does harm when its novelty erases the historical precedents to the demands for recognition, dignity, and a livable life that are being made by and on behalf of trans children today. This book has worked directly against the conceit of the newness of trans childhood, not just to point out that it is historically inaccurate but also to demonstrate that it has politically infantilizing consequences for trans children, now deprived of a century's worth of precedent that might enfranchise them.”
July 25, 2020
The first thing that struck me was the rather hard language and writing style, especially in Preface and Introduction. However, later I learned that there were many references to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and that explained the hard language. The subject is also new to me as I had never heard discussions about transgender children. This book rereads the histories of transgender children from early twentieth century through the normative medical archives.
The focus on children in this book (especially from the 60s onward) is because of their supposed body plasticity. Moreover, it was supposed that their bodies would develop and "heal" later on (without leaving behind any psychological or physical scars) as a result of its natural biological model.
Peterson argues that transchildren have always lived and the fact that there is not many visible documents about them does not mean that we should poke our fingers at them and treat them like novel subjects. Treating transchildren as novelties of 21st century deprives them of a history that involves lifetimes of transchildren's struggle.
Transchildren have always been present throughout the history but the use of metaphors such as child and animal in medical industrial complex has turned them into abstract objects rather than living beings who deserve to live just like any other gender and color. They have always been decided for throughout history and never been asked what they actually wanted or needed.
Peterson says: "'Human'=plasticity racialized as whiteness" and this is the reason intersex children in the 50s were "fixed" in surgery rooms.
This is all I think I have learned from this book. In the beginning I wrongly assumed the author must not have very much to say, but then I learned I was very wrong. All the proofs and documents from transchildren, pieces of their writings to the doctor and the author's arguments are very brilliant.
The focus on children in this book (especially from the 60s onward) is because of their supposed body plasticity. Moreover, it was supposed that their bodies would develop and "heal" later on (without leaving behind any psychological or physical scars) as a result of its natural biological model.
Peterson argues that transchildren have always lived and the fact that there is not many visible documents about them does not mean that we should poke our fingers at them and treat them like novel subjects. Treating transchildren as novelties of 21st century deprives them of a history that involves lifetimes of transchildren's struggle.
Transchildren have always been present throughout the history but the use of metaphors such as child and animal in medical industrial complex has turned them into abstract objects rather than living beings who deserve to live just like any other gender and color. They have always been decided for throughout history and never been asked what they actually wanted or needed.
Peterson says: "'Human'=plasticity racialized as whiteness" and this is the reason intersex children in the 50s were "fixed" in surgery rooms.
This is all I think I have learned from this book. In the beginning I wrongly assumed the author must not have very much to say, but then I learned I was very wrong. All the proofs and documents from transchildren, pieces of their writings to the doctor and the author's arguments are very brilliant.
May 19, 2025
I started the book hoping to read about a text with an anthropological emphasis on the global lives of transgender children across different cultures through ancientry to modernity, though the book differed from my expectation, it does a good job telling about the focused history of transgender childhood in 20th century America under the nascency of rapid growth of modern medicine. Greatly informative and surprisingly distinct from many of the mainstream sentiments I've seen across social media. Will read The Short History of Trans Misogyny certainly.
September 12, 2025
I love JGP and admire her so much - this book felt like it was missing a chapter or two to bring these ideas together. It commits to optimism in the face of recounting a devastating history, but to me doesn’t convincingly examine the actual culmination of the history it explicates. I think the lessons on plasticity and racialization are so good and still difficult for me to completely understand, and convicting on a personal level. I had a couple lightbulb moments reading this and am grateful for the education.
July 19, 2025
Massive disappointment. Extremely dense which I chose to be patient with, but was never met with an idea as complex as the language used to describe it. The way “abstract form of whiteness” is used over and over again and never explained, reworded, or elaborated upon makes me feel like the author herself doesn’t really know what she means by this and is maybe using this expression more because it sounds interesting than because it’s the best choice of language to describe her idea. (This could be reader error but still my impression of the book after giving it a really solid try).
I think there was a genuine challenge of gaps in the archive which was handled by making flashy claims instead of committing to integrity. I personally feel the amount of historical information on this topic (at least presented in this book) makes it kind of hard to make any real argument. It felt more like anecdote—>argument which felt very jumpy and flimsy.
The history was also almost entirely a medical history despite her argument’s attempts to emphasize trans kids self knowledge and advocacy (this is what I mean by the history presented does not back the arguments).
I did learn from this book, especially about the history of the idea of the sex binary. Super interesting how the distinction of gender and sex was initially created in attempt to reify the imagined sex binary.
I’m sad this book is so inaccessible to even people like me because I had hoped this could be a shareable resource.
I think there was a genuine challenge of gaps in the archive which was handled by making flashy claims instead of committing to integrity. I personally feel the amount of historical information on this topic (at least presented in this book) makes it kind of hard to make any real argument. It felt more like anecdote—>argument which felt very jumpy and flimsy.
The history was also almost entirely a medical history despite her argument’s attempts to emphasize trans kids self knowledge and advocacy (this is what I mean by the history presented does not back the arguments).
I did learn from this book, especially about the history of the idea of the sex binary. Super interesting how the distinction of gender and sex was initially created in attempt to reify the imagined sex binary.
I’m sad this book is so inaccessible to even people like me because I had hoped this could be a shareable resource.
February 6, 2025
Incredible read. I learned so much about the science behind intersex and trans studies and the book makes remarkable arguments in favor of the long existence of trans children and the need to analyze the archives in search of instances of trans medicine.
abandoned
March 16, 2022Broadly speaking, this topic looks very interesting. An example:
“By 1950, sex was in crisis….Sex had become an unwieldy biological category, now composed of genotype, gonads, hormones, genitals, internal organs, secondary anatomical features, and psychology, with none of them exerting what amounted to deterministic influence.” The passage continues to describe how a new term, gender, began to be used for clarity instead of sex.
The author focuses on how intersex people have always existed but only recently, in the past century, have they been discovered and (mis)classified by the medical establishment. The result is that the trans identity has been inextricably linked with surgery. He argues that, starting from the malleable concept of gender, individuals should have more power to choose their own psychological diagnoses, and guide their own surgical journeys.
A slightly different question has captivated me. I've been seeking for more information on the history and identify of trans people and culture. This is the first book that has provided anything like that. I’m struck by two thoughts:
First, it is strange and unprecedented for an entire group identity and culture to have been *co-created* by the medical profession over the past century. What does this origin story mean? How does it constrain and direct the future potential of trans culture, community, and politics? I would love to read a book that explores this theme further. I wonder specifically, without readily available surgery and psychology professionals, how would trans people be different? Would they even exist?
Second, it was the parents who brought their intersex children to physicians in the early 20th century, seeking clarity on the sex of their children. Is the trans movement about trans people being able to be themselves in society? Or is it about parents being able to be good parents when raising trans children? Today, this still seems to be a parent-driven movement, and I think there's potential for error here. What parents want for their intersex children, may be different from what trans adults want for themselves.
“By 1950, sex was in crisis….Sex had become an unwieldy biological category, now composed of genotype, gonads, hormones, genitals, internal organs, secondary anatomical features, and psychology, with none of them exerting what amounted to deterministic influence.” The passage continues to describe how a new term, gender, began to be used for clarity instead of sex.
The author focuses on how intersex people have always existed but only recently, in the past century, have they been discovered and (mis)classified by the medical establishment. The result is that the trans identity has been inextricably linked with surgery. He argues that, starting from the malleable concept of gender, individuals should have more power to choose their own psychological diagnoses, and guide their own surgical journeys.
A slightly different question has captivated me. I've been seeking for more information on the history and identify of trans people and culture. This is the first book that has provided anything like that. I’m struck by two thoughts:
First, it is strange and unprecedented for an entire group identity and culture to have been *co-created* by the medical profession over the past century. What does this origin story mean? How does it constrain and direct the future potential of trans culture, community, and politics? I would love to read a book that explores this theme further. I wonder specifically, without readily available surgery and psychology professionals, how would trans people be different? Would they even exist?
Second, it was the parents who brought their intersex children to physicians in the early 20th century, seeking clarity on the sex of their children. Is the trans movement about trans people being able to be themselves in society? Or is it about parents being able to be good parents when raising trans children? Today, this still seems to be a parent-driven movement, and I think there's potential for error here. What parents want for their intersex children, may be different from what trans adults want for themselves.
February 18, 2025
as someone who both considers myself to have had a trans-girlhood and who interacted with the medical infrastructure of transsexuality in both its most antiquated form (pediatric endocrinology) and at a time when that form was being rapidly transmogrified and reshaped into a vision of trans children like myself as futuristic objects of medical advancement (the mid 2010s “transgender tipping point”), i cannot express how much a book like this means to the understanding of both my own medical and social experiences (albeit 30+ years after the book’s timeframe) and the experiences of those either gatekept out of what was (for me) both a complicated and paradoxically lifesaving medical apparatus or else unaware of it. in discussing this book with my fiancé (who i met in high school while beginning the medical stage of my transition and who only two weeks ago themself started testosterone) i keep coming back to how far we as transgender people have come in regards to our ability for self-advocacy both in adolescence and adulthood. simultaneously, of course, the occasion of my reading this book comes at a moment of extreme repression (against transgender medicine and self-identification specifically) that is almost entirely unheard of and not considered within the scope of this book. needless to say, i have a lot of charged feelings, both hopeful and despairing, and i have a profound love for and faith in transgender children and adults (both living today and in the future) and their/our ability to simply Be.
October 13, 2019
A very well written and compelling book. Rigorous in its research and yet highly readable in its prose. Especially poignant for today's political climate, this book deals with a lot of the big questions of contemporary gender politics by framing them in the context of transgender childhood over the last century.
For any historian writing on this subject, getting enough source material together is always difficult, particularly when archives and academies dominated by white cisgender heterosexuals are the ones who organise and label the relevant documents. Gill-Peterson has worked diligently and thoroughly on the material available in order to put together a book that feels coherent and consummate. The focus on children is a fascinating approach to the quite underdeveloped field of transgender history. The attention paid towards racialised experiences puts me in mind of the work of C. Riley Snorton (not least because I am currently reading "Black on Both Sides"), but Gill-Peterson would definitely win out in terms of readability and clarity of argument.
If you do not have time to read the whole book, it is worth getting just for its concluding chapter: "How to Bring Your Kids Up Trans". It is rare to find a history book that takes such a blunt approach towards a controversial topic like this. It is far more common for historians to slide their agenda in subtly under the table, as it were. However, Gill-Peterson is not your average historian, (in fact, they lecture in English, not history), and this brilliant conclusion teaches us all that we should not be afraid to share the lessons our research has taught us.
The America-centrism is unfortunate, but definitely understandable given the scope of this book, otherwise it would have taken many more years to write (and read), and it is definitely a book that is relevant for the contemporary climate.
For any historian writing on this subject, getting enough source material together is always difficult, particularly when archives and academies dominated by white cisgender heterosexuals are the ones who organise and label the relevant documents. Gill-Peterson has worked diligently and thoroughly on the material available in order to put together a book that feels coherent and consummate. The focus on children is a fascinating approach to the quite underdeveloped field of transgender history. The attention paid towards racialised experiences puts me in mind of the work of C. Riley Snorton (not least because I am currently reading "Black on Both Sides"), but Gill-Peterson would definitely win out in terms of readability and clarity of argument.
If you do not have time to read the whole book, it is worth getting just for its concluding chapter: "How to Bring Your Kids Up Trans". It is rare to find a history book that takes such a blunt approach towards a controversial topic like this. It is far more common for historians to slide their agenda in subtly under the table, as it were. However, Gill-Peterson is not your average historian, (in fact, they lecture in English, not history), and this brilliant conclusion teaches us all that we should not be afraid to share the lessons our research has taught us.
The America-centrism is unfortunate, but definitely understandable given the scope of this book, otherwise it would have taken many more years to write (and read), and it is definitely a book that is relevant for the contemporary climate.
September 24, 2024
Read for my master's degree work to get more comprehensive case studies before research on trans-identified children in the 70s. This book is well-researched in the American history of clinical work on intersex children and sex reassignment surgeries developed on them. But the rhetoric used in this book for an affirmative approach is what I find problematic - "As simple as it sounds, pediatric trans medicine would be radically transformed by actually asking trans children what they want and truly basing care on that knowledge." - Detransioners will wholeheartedly agree that this what should be happening and there shouldn't be any gatekeeping for minors getting irreversible operations... It is also an accusation that giving trans people the label of schizophrenia is a ploy not to provide them with sex reassignment surgeries. It's a fact that sometimes psychotic states in schizophrenia-suffering clients may lead to gender dysphoria. As reported by áCampo, a psychiatrist in the Netherlands, where he gave antipsychotics to a new patient in his care after sex reassignment surgery which resulted in the ceasation of gender dysphoria and questions from the client about how this could be done to him. In 2012 there was another report from the UK where a physician was stripped of his right to prescribe cross-sex hormones after he sent a client for a sex-change operation and she didn't come - because she was dancing in the streets saying she was Jesus. After antipsychotics? Cessation. Yes, there was the case in Czechia in the 90s in which a schizophrenia-suffering client whose psychosis was taken care of afterward was successfully sex reassigned and was looked after for years by doctors to control if he was living happily. As such schizophrenia was taken out from DSM as a condition preventing work on gender dysphoria in clients. As existential psychotherapist, Yalom said: Psychotherapist has many clients. However the client has only one psychotherapist. - so sometimes the client is truly trans and sometimes you don't want to butcher someone's life... Call it medical gatekeeping or infantilization of children but in the end, it's a safety measure for cases as mentioned above. Not to mention that even WPATH acknowledges that 90-70% of children with symptoms of gender dysphoria will grow up into gays and lesbians. The parents fearing that their children may maybe gay are mentioned but the fact that the same pressure of those parents may lead to such symptoms - as sometimes these studies are criticized that those children that desist (stop having gender dysphoria) are not "truly" trans but egodistonic gays/lesbians are left out. Instead, we get tirades on the eugenic plasticity of children propagated by clinicians... Or is it maybe because we don't have objective measures of "transness"? And so clinicians are not so in haste to do something that cannot be undone? Oh, yeah I almost forgot what the author wrote at the beginning - to undermine the rationality of medical science from its inside by reading trans people as complex participants in the production of scientific knowledge, rather than its objects... For that, some things must be left unsaid. It's not that I cannot see from what perspective the writer comes from, but still...
Cases and facts from the book worth mentioning:
- Ralph Werther, who went by the name Jennie June and whose peculiar 1919 text, Autobiography of an Androgyne, details her life as an “invert” and lower-class “fairie” in New York City from around the 1890s to the 1910s. June’s repeated professions to be “really a woman whom Nature disguised as a man” —having wished to be a girl from early childhood, using the name “Jennie” from a young age, wearing women’s clothing from childhood on, wishing to have her genitals recognized as a woman’s, and eventually choosing to be medically castrated—invites a strongly trans reading. As June puts it herself: “Were it not for certain masculine conformations of the body, I ought to go about in dresses as a woman, and always identify myself with the female sex”.
- In Europe, particularly Germany, the sexological paradigm championed by Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft provided a medical transition for trans people as early as the 1920s. Hirschfeld’s sexological community fostered a productive dialogue between the German sense of “intersexuality” and a new category, “transvestism,” which referred not only to the desire to cross-dress but also to the desire to live as a sex different from the one assigned at birth.
- In England, Michael Dillon, likely the first trans man to undergo testosterone therapy in the 1940s, became a physician and penned what could be read as a major volume of trans knowledge before transsexuality, Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics. In the United States, Alan L. Hart, a physician, radiologist, and tuberculosis researcher, was one of the first trans men to transition with medical support, including surgeries, even earlier, from 1917 to 1918.
- Other lay persons, such as Louise Lawrence, a major trans community leader in the San Francisco Bay Area and the head of a national network of trans correspondents, actively sought out and challenged medical experts and practicing clinicians, significantly shaping research on transsexuality in midcentury.
- Reed Erickson, a wealthy businessman and trans man who founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) in 1964 after his own medical transition, Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte have worked to shift thinking in this direction. By personally overseeing the dispensation of millions of dollars in philanthropic funding from the 1960s to 1980s, they argue, Erickson directly financed much of American transsexual medicine in the postwar era. His funding provided Harry Benjamin, often canonized as a founding figure, with the actual resources he needed for his clinical work; the EEF provided Hopkins with the money needed to open its Gender Identity Clinic in 1965; and the vital professional networks for researchers and doctors treating trans people in these decades were likewise financed by the foundation.
- In the 1940 Val, who was then in her early twenties, recounted her childhood to a psychiatrist - One of the first trans women to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to obtain access to surgery in the United States. At age two she had become unwilling to wear boy’s clothes, and her parents relented, letting her dress full-time as a girl. When she started school, around 1930, her parents, who were on the local school board and who were close to the county judge, arranged for her to officially attend school as a girl. “Special arrangements for toilet, etc. were made,” and even though classmates knew Val “was actually a boy,” they treated her “with respect and did not tease or shun” her. When she was ten, Val even joined the 4H Club “and took cooking and flower gardening.”
- In 1966 John Hopkins University opened its gender identity clinic - with the first affirmed client being afro-american mtf. At the press conference, the Committee explained that the clinic had been created “to deal with the problems of the transsexual, physically normal people who are psychologically the opposite sex,” and that it had “been in operation de facto for one year,” though only the one person so far had advanced to the surgery stage. The funding for the clinic was also, like Benjamin’s, underwritten by the Erickson Educational Foundation, a philanthropic organization funded by the oil magnate and transman Reed Erickson. However in January 1965 the Criminal Court for Baltimore City, the prospective patient “G.L.” was on trial for burglary, issued a court order for “surgical sex repair” at Hopkins in lieu of incarceration. The judge was convinced by Money and his peers that the defendant’s criminal record was really a side effect of a misunderstood medical condition, “transsexualism,” and that surgery would break a spell of delinquency, arrest, and state institutionalization that stretched back some five years. The patient was transferred from jail to a ward at Hopkins to await surgery. At the time, however, G.L. was only seventeen years old; their mother had to consent to the judge’s order and sign the medical consent form for the surgery. Psychiatrists at Hopkins had been in contact with G.L. since age thirteen when G.L. was referred to the hospital by school officials for delinquent behavior.11 G.L.’s case history indicates that the first official gender confirmation surgery for a trans patient at Hopkins was actually arranged for a child. Or rather, it should have been. Conservative forces in the psychiatric faculty at Hopkins succeeded in delaying the surgery date several times, and in the interval G.L. ran away from the ward, never to return.
Cases and facts from the book worth mentioning:
- Ralph Werther, who went by the name Jennie June and whose peculiar 1919 text, Autobiography of an Androgyne, details her life as an “invert” and lower-class “fairie” in New York City from around the 1890s to the 1910s. June’s repeated professions to be “really a woman whom Nature disguised as a man” —having wished to be a girl from early childhood, using the name “Jennie” from a young age, wearing women’s clothing from childhood on, wishing to have her genitals recognized as a woman’s, and eventually choosing to be medically castrated—invites a strongly trans reading. As June puts it herself: “Were it not for certain masculine conformations of the body, I ought to go about in dresses as a woman, and always identify myself with the female sex”.
- In Europe, particularly Germany, the sexological paradigm championed by Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft provided a medical transition for trans people as early as the 1920s. Hirschfeld’s sexological community fostered a productive dialogue between the German sense of “intersexuality” and a new category, “transvestism,” which referred not only to the desire to cross-dress but also to the desire to live as a sex different from the one assigned at birth.
- In England, Michael Dillon, likely the first trans man to undergo testosterone therapy in the 1940s, became a physician and penned what could be read as a major volume of trans knowledge before transsexuality, Self: A Study in Endocrinology and Ethics. In the United States, Alan L. Hart, a physician, radiologist, and tuberculosis researcher, was one of the first trans men to transition with medical support, including surgeries, even earlier, from 1917 to 1918.
- Other lay persons, such as Louise Lawrence, a major trans community leader in the San Francisco Bay Area and the head of a national network of trans correspondents, actively sought out and challenged medical experts and practicing clinicians, significantly shaping research on transsexuality in midcentury.
- Reed Erickson, a wealthy businessman and trans man who founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) in 1964 after his own medical transition, Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte have worked to shift thinking in this direction. By personally overseeing the dispensation of millions of dollars in philanthropic funding from the 1960s to 1980s, they argue, Erickson directly financed much of American transsexual medicine in the postwar era. His funding provided Harry Benjamin, often canonized as a founding figure, with the actual resources he needed for his clinical work; the EEF provided Hopkins with the money needed to open its Gender Identity Clinic in 1965; and the vital professional networks for researchers and doctors treating trans people in these decades were likewise financed by the foundation.
- In the 1940 Val, who was then in her early twenties, recounted her childhood to a psychiatrist - One of the first trans women to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to obtain access to surgery in the United States. At age two she had become unwilling to wear boy’s clothes, and her parents relented, letting her dress full-time as a girl. When she started school, around 1930, her parents, who were on the local school board and who were close to the county judge, arranged for her to officially attend school as a girl. “Special arrangements for toilet, etc. were made,” and even though classmates knew Val “was actually a boy,” they treated her “with respect and did not tease or shun” her. When she was ten, Val even joined the 4H Club “and took cooking and flower gardening.”
- In 1966 John Hopkins University opened its gender identity clinic - with the first affirmed client being afro-american mtf. At the press conference, the Committee explained that the clinic had been created “to deal with the problems of the transsexual, physically normal people who are psychologically the opposite sex,” and that it had “been in operation de facto for one year,” though only the one person so far had advanced to the surgery stage. The funding for the clinic was also, like Benjamin’s, underwritten by the Erickson Educational Foundation, a philanthropic organization funded by the oil magnate and transman Reed Erickson. However in January 1965 the Criminal Court for Baltimore City, the prospective patient “G.L.” was on trial for burglary, issued a court order for “surgical sex repair” at Hopkins in lieu of incarceration. The judge was convinced by Money and his peers that the defendant’s criminal record was really a side effect of a misunderstood medical condition, “transsexualism,” and that surgery would break a spell of delinquency, arrest, and state institutionalization that stretched back some five years. The patient was transferred from jail to a ward at Hopkins to await surgery. At the time, however, G.L. was only seventeen years old; their mother had to consent to the judge’s order and sign the medical consent form for the surgery. Psychiatrists at Hopkins had been in contact with G.L. since age thirteen when G.L. was referred to the hospital by school officials for delinquent behavior.11 G.L.’s case history indicates that the first official gender confirmation surgery for a trans patient at Hopkins was actually arranged for a child. Or rather, it should have been. Conservative forces in the psychiatric faculty at Hopkins succeeded in delaying the surgery date several times, and in the interval G.L. ran away from the ward, never to return.
October 11, 2020
Just an incredible work. Gill-Peterson manages to rewrite much of the standard narrative of transitional medicine by drawing on histories of gender medical intervention in children, and ideas about their development as they shifted over time, and does so just so powerfully. I probably need to return to this to understand just how the concept of plasticity is being used, though I think its inscrutability is to some extent the point--that is is too slippery to be actually useful even by the people who constructed it as a concept.
Gill-Peterson's deep care for the children written about in the book is obvious and makes the book all the more compelling, as well as the argumentation about how the figure of the trans child as a marker of futurity, and with no history attached, does damage to actual trans kids (and, I would argue, also trans adults.) All of this is just so important and really challenging me to rethink not only my own work but also the way I frame my politics around urging care for trans kids. The conclusion kind of made me cry! It was so good and so important and I'm going to return to this again and again.
Gill-Peterson's deep care for the children written about in the book is obvious and makes the book all the more compelling, as well as the argumentation about how the figure of the trans child as a marker of futurity, and with no history attached, does damage to actual trans kids (and, I would argue, also trans adults.) All of this is just so important and really challenging me to rethink not only my own work but also the way I frame my politics around urging care for trans kids. The conclusion kind of made me cry! It was so good and so important and I'm going to return to this again and again.
June 6, 2019
A model piece of trans scholarship that is richly researched and historicized. We need more of this kind of intersectional and critical work.
July 31, 2019
Gill-Peterson's research into the long, contradictory, painful, and fitful history of transgender children in the 20th century is a far genealogical analysis of archives spanning decades and coasts, bringing to the forefront young people whose bodies became laboratories for medical research, experimentation, and ugly bias. That they endured, and so often persisted in living authentically, is a series of powerful rebukes of the scientific community which sought and still seeks to destroy them. The academic language of the book could use more extrapolation at times, but Gill-Peterson's argumentation is solid and passion clear.
November 6, 2021
Good history explaining how the first medical interventions were done (experimentally, nonconsensually) on intersex children, and how this scientific knowledge was gradually applied to trans people who asked for medical support. From the trans person's perspective, it was so they could live more comfortably in their gender. I wrote a little more on Medium.
November 8, 2023
UGH! what an incredible challenge it would be to write this book, I respect tf out of Jules Gill-Peterson for this- attempting to point out the inadequacies of the archive and pointing out how trans children's lives go beyond it while confining herself to that archive. amazing. a challenging read (i felt unqualified to read it at times) but well worth it. I recommend everyone read this - with a dictionary or google on hand.
December 29, 2024
Hugely insightful! The historical narrative Jules forms is not just relevant to being an ally to trans children - this text has been so influential on my relationship to authoritative concepts of medicine and gender too. It's not written with a general audience in mind but I wish it was!
Read
January 22, 2019306.76808 G4756 2018
Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews