Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

Histories of the Transgender Child is an engaging work that sets out to dismantle the current driving narrative that Transgender children are new phenomena, offering important historical, political and theoretical insights along the journey. The driving analysis is the overlap of the medicalisation and racialisation of children’s bodies. Through this lens, Julian Gill-Peterson examines how the scientific concepts of plasticity and gender were instrumentalised in clinical settings to reinforce the social gender binary and erase subjective narratives. The final chapters attempt to pull out that subjectivity, drawing on correspondence and archival material. The ‘new’ presentation of Trans children as ‘sanitized, innocent, and always highly medicalized’ (p.2) is the product of more than a century of experimentation on transgender and intersex children. Gill-Peterson focuses on the twentieth century and the ‘racialized discourse of plasticity’ to ‘explain, precisely, why trans children have so easily gone unnoticed or been ignored’ (p.3), providing an in-depth look at scientific theory, clinical practice and subjectivities

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Presentation (obstetrics · Psychoanalysis · Social constructionism · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Transgender · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Psychology · Gender Studies · Philosophy