Histories of the Transgender Child

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 todays transgender children are a brand new generationpioneers 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 childrens 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 childrens bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of genders 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 centurya time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.