Transgender History, Politics, and Culture
Jules Gill-Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University in 2015 and has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2023-24), the American Council of Learned Societies (2018-19), and the Kinsey Institute (2015). She was honored with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020.
Jules is the author of two books. Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is the first book to shatter the 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.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso Books, 2024) explains the origins of the staggering violence faced by transgender women and authors a bold vision for a world freed from its ravages. The book chronicles how violence directed at trans femininity emerged out of state and police repression in a 200 year arc from British India to New York, to American military bases in the Philippines, and throughout Latin America. Focusing on Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor trans women’s survival, its chapters forward a bold vision of trans feminism that could break this centuries’ old structure of violence. The book has been profiled in The Cut (by New York Magazine), Dazed, The Yale Review, and The Gay Times.
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 media and has appeared in a number of documentary films and television programs, including the award-winning Framing Agnes (dir. Chase Joynt, 2022), Fluid (dir. Michelle Mama, 2024), The Freedom to Exist (ABC, 2023), Pride (FX, 2021) and Escaping Twin Flames Universe (Amazon, 2024).
Jules is currently working on a book entitled Transgender Liberalism (under contract with Harvard University Press), a new US history of practices of gender transition through the lens of class. Beginning in the New Deal era in the 1930s, book will detail the predominant role of the welfare state and political-economic factors in structuring gender transitions both medical and non-medical. This is the first book to seriously treat the historical relationships between trans women and men, transvestites and transsexuals, and the middle-class emergence of queer and nonbinary social distinction at the turn of the twenty-first century.
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.