A Pathbreaking History of Transgender Childhood
Winner of a Lambda Literary Award
Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Book Award
Named one of “The Best of Transgender Literature” by Susan Stryker
Histories of the Transgender Child is the first book of its kind, uncovering a century of the hidden history of transgender children. Shattering the widespread myth that today's transgender children are a brand new generation, Jules Gill-Peterson shows how modern transgender medicine, as well as the very concept of gender itself, depend upon the often invisible medicalization of trans and intersex children's presumed biological plasticity.
Through a trans of color critique of medicine and its archive, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the medical model built in a racial divide through plasticity, by design disqualifying black and trans of color children from access to care and support, setting the strict gatekeeping boundaries of the medical field that have harmed trans people for decades. The histories of trans children Gill-Peterson has brought to light open up an array of possibilities for reimagining today’s clinic by learning to listen to what trans children know about themselves, grounding medical care in the recognition of their selfhood, and critiquing binary models of transition and dysphoria.