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.