Histories of the Transgender Child
Jules Gill-Peterson

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.

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 to 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.

Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, this book reaches back to a time when the category "transgender" was not available but surely existed in the lives of the children and parents. 

'Histories of the Transgender Child is a tour de force contribution to transgender studies, tracing little-noticed pathways from the past toward convergences that increasingly take center stage in the next field. An elegant combination of sophisticated theorization with equally sophisticated attention to archival and historical materials, this is one of the best books in trans studies in recent years.' — Susan Stryker, University of Arizona

'Julian Gill-Peterson excavates the history of medicine, introducing readers to a century's worth of gender nonconforming youth. This remarkable book is not merely a backward glance; it offers an urgent call to reimagine trans as a form of self-knowledge children can hold and for an ethics of care that focuses on affirmation.' — Tey Meadow, author of Trans Kids

'Meticulously researched and compellingly argued, this book is a welcome addition to a number of fields, including trans of color critique, childhood studies, and queer and trans history.' — C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides