Histories of the Transgender Child

American professor and author Julian Gill-Peterson’s non-fiction book Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) offers a history of transgender children throughout the twentieth century, examining how medical communities and other institutions have evolved in their attitudes toward transgender patients. According to The Social History of Medicine journal, "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."

In the book's preface, Gill-Peterson describes their reasons for researching transgender children. Children, they write, are in a challenging position in trans culture. On one hand, transgender children often bear the worst of the violence and trauma inflicted on trans individuals. On the other hand, many professionals across medicine, psychology, and social studies fail to recognize children as affirmative members of the broader trans community. At the very least, the author writes, trans children have been viewed as an "unprecedented" development, suggesting that there would be little evidence of trans children throughout history. However, while such cases weren't heavily publicized, the author discovered "whispers" across medical records of doctors treating children with various psychotherapeutic approaches and even, in some cases, hormone therapy. This served as the entry point for the author's research.

The introduction and subsequent chapter 1 reveal that Gill-Peterson's research is heavily tilted toward discussing the experiences of trans people of color. The introduction, "Toward a Trans of Color Critique of Medicine," discusses how the disparity in understanding and communication between the white cis medical establishment and trans patients is further exacerbated when the patient is a child of color. As a case study, the author discusses an example from the 1930s at Johns Hopkins Hospital in which a black trans patient refused to cooperate with doctors, thus confounding some of the smartest and most experienced medical professionals on the planet. In this section, the author also explains that one of the biggest challenges faced in researching this book is the fact that federal regulations are designed to keep the doctor's privacy safe, not the patient's.



In the first chapter, "The Racial Plasticity of Gender and the Child," the author posits, "Sex and gender are derived from larger racial projects." In the early twentieth century, eugenics was still the dominant philosophy guiding the biological study of human life. This philosophy assumed a great deal of inevitability in an individual's inherited biological characteristics. Combined with widespread prejudice and junk science, eugenics enabled a scourge of racism to run through many scientific and medical communities. Conversely, sex and gender were beginning to be viewed in non-eugenics terms as more plastic or malleable human characteristics, sensitive to alteration through a person's lived experience. However, because people of color were still sorted by eugenics terms, trans children of color did not receive the same interest and attention from medical professionals as white trans children.

In "Before Transsexuality: The Transgender Child from the 1900s to the 1930s," Gill-Peterson asserts most of the medical records from this period focus on patients with discrete physiological abnormalities. Today, these patients would be classified as Intersex, meaning that the person's reproductive or sexual anatomy exists outside the typical definitions of male and female. Many doctors during this period characterized a baby born with ambiguous sex organs as a "social emergency" necessitating immediate surgical intervention. However, the psychological and physical health-related consequences of such interventions are well documented, the author points out.

Gill-Peterson goes into great detail about the landmark work of Dr. Hugh Hampton Young, the head of the Johns Hopkins Brady Urological Institute in "Sex in Crisis: Intersex Children in the 1950s and the Invention of Gender." In 1937, Dr. Young published "Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism, and Related Adrenal Diseases." On one hand, the cases cited here—such as the teenager Emma born with a vagina and a penis-sized clitoris—are presented without judgment, suggesting that surgical intervention toward a more "optimal" gender identity is neither necessary nor helpful. On the other, the work still presents the cases as "abnormalities" that exist apart from the binary definition of gender. By presenting the exceptions, the rules of gender binaries were only fortified.



Gill-Peterson tells the story of the nation's first Gender Identity Clinic, opened in secret at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1966 in "From Johns Hopkins to the Midwest: Transgender Childhood in the 1960s." The surgeries conducted here were on patients who were "almost always physically normal, but they have a total aversion to their biological sex that dates from early childhood," according to a New York Times article published after the clinic was exposed to the public.

"Transgender Boyhood, Race, and Puberty in the 1970s" looks at a particular case study of a fifteen-year-old girl referred to the revolutionary New Zealand doctor of sexual studies, John Money. The book concludes with a chapter on "How to Bring Your Kids Up Trans," in which Gill-Peterson emphasizes the historical erasure of trans children, and how that erasure is harmful to trans children growing up today.