Histories of the Transgender Child

Twenty-first-century debates over bathroom access, school dress codes, and medical consent converge in ostensibly novel considerations of the needs of transgender young people. Drawing on medical records, case studies, and correspondence over the twentieth century, Julian Gill-Peterson suggests that transgender children are not new, instead asserting that “multiple trans childhoods [were] in play” across this era (p. 96). Histories of the Transgender Child argues that transgender children have been central not only to the development of transgender history and medicine but also to conceptualizations of race, sex, and gender in twentieth-century science and medicine more generally. The book contributes to a growing literature that regards “trans” not primarily as a marginal identitarian position but rather as a salient site through which to analyze the processes and effects of pathologization and resistance. The book is particularly successful in its nuanced discussion of the racialized and racializing continuities between intersex and trans medicine. Arguing that regimes of racialized plasticity and malleability (and normativity) shaped these intertwined fields, Gill-Peterson posits the medicalization of sex as an inextricably racializing project. While this insight has been advanced by others, Gill-Peterson offers these claims through a strikingly rich archive that centers the often-recalcitrant “perspective of trans children” and convincingly extends these analyses to the contemporary terrain of trans health (p. 11). The book demonstrates, for example, that the disavowed historical racialization of trans medicine shapes its enduring effects on racially stratified access to health care, disproportionate risk of psychiatric institutionalization, and narrowed possibilities for (nonmedicalized) expressions of trans futurity

Medicalization · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · Transgender · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society