Journal of Critical Race Inquiry Volume 12, Number 1 (2025) pp. 58-60 BOOK REVIEW: A Short History of Trans Misogyny, by Jules Gill-Peterson. Verso Books, 2024. Book Review Author: Christopher Bennett Queen  s University In A Short History of Trans Misogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson offers a timely and trenchant etiological analysis of violence against trans women, weaving materialist critique with acute attention to the cracks and fissures of historical archives. Framing trans misogyny as a global issue in which all people are implicated, Gill-Peterson asks: What is it about trans  women that makes them objects of both desire and hatred? Where can we locate the historical emergence of trans misogyny? How can we trace its development and challenge its persistence? This text will be of interest to any student or scholar researching the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation.  Gill-Peterson critiques the institutionalization of   transgender   as a universal  category, arguing that it often excludes working-class women of color  particularly sex workers. The use of   transgender   as a collective identity, she contends,   arrived for many girls on the street not as an activist cry, but as an institutional word to abstractly separate gender identity and sexual orientation   (3). Thus, an etiological approach to trans misogyny is crucial given the limitations of legal and psychological analyses of violence  against trans women. While these frameworks are valuable in situating trans misogyny  within broader patterns of misogynistic violence, they can obfuscate intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality, and too often rely on the same institutional mechanisms that perpetuate oppression. For example, many legal responses to trans misogyny advocate for stronger hate crime legislation  tools that are also used to  criminalize people of color. Both legal and psychological analyses tend to center gender as  the primary axis of identity, disregarding the foundational role racism plays in structuring trans misogynistic violence. To address these erasures, Gill-Peterson introduces the term   trans-feminized,   which she uses   to describe what happens to groups subjected to trans misogyny though they did not, or still do not, wish to be known as transgender women   (13). She draws  attention to culturally specific embodiments of gender variance that do not translate into the categories of   transgender   or   trans,   but were instead forcefully subsumed under a  collective identity they did not  and often still do not  claim. Chapter 1 locates the emergence of trans misogyny in the colonial expansion of the British Empire into India and North America, as well as the enslavement of African peoples that facilitated this expansion. Through case studies spanning from the mid 19th century to  2020, Gill-Peterson illuminates the material impacts of trans feminization across time and  REVIEW: A SHORT HISTORY OF TRANS MISOGYNY  59  place. The studies show how the global trans panic intertwines state and interpersonal violence, framing trans femininity as a threat to which the rational response is violence. In 1852, five years before the Indian Rebellion of 1857, colonial officials crafted narratives around the murder of Bhoorah, a hijra, to justify anti-hijra legislation. Hijras,  who have long held important social roles in South Asia, were criminalized under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Gill-Peterson rejects the anachronistic labeling of hijras as   transgender,   framing this as another form of trans feminization that erases cultural specificity. Gill-Peterson reads Bhoorah  s case alongside other instances of trans misogyny, including the incarceration of badés (also spelled bate) from the Crow Tribe and the memoirs of self-proclaimed   androgyne   Jennie June. She also analyzes the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude by U.S. Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton, illustrating how trans panic  operates through colonial legacies and interpersonal violence.  In each case, transfeminized individuals are blamed for the violence inflicted upon them. Chapter 2,   Sex and the Antebellum City   focuses on Mary Jones, a Black trans  woman charged with grand larceny in 1836 in New York City. The official record is paltry;  Jones  s testimony fits on a single page. New York had just abolished slavery in 1827 and Jones  s status as a free Black woman significantly shaped both her portrayal and the limited archival record. While neither sex work nor interracial sex was illegal at the time, Jones  engaged in practices of intimacy that crossed colonial hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality.  Jones  s testimony reveals that she did not view her way of living as extraordinary:   I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in that way   and in New Orleans, I always dressed in this way   (69). Focusing on this fragment and using the tools of Black feminist historians  like Saidiya Hartman  s   critical fabulation   and Marisa Fuentes  s   reading along the bias grain    Gill-Peterson offers a reading of Jones  s  life and possible motivations for her travel. This approach brings sustained attention to Black social life in the antebellum United States, tracing seemingly impossible contradictions. For example, while New York had abolished slavery at the time, Louisianna had not. Even if one were free elsewhere in the country,   Black skin was the only pretext  needed to arbitrarily lose one  s freedom   (80). New Orleans was home to one of the  nation  s largest slave markets, yet it also had one of the largest populations of free Black people. Jones  s mobility within the United States was shaped by these contradictions, not a  neat division between slavery and freedom. As Gill-Peterson observes,   She lived by  crossing certain gender and color lines, exploiting their many contradictions as much as they criminalized her in return   (93). What unites Bhoorah and Mary Jones is not a shared identity as transgender, but a  shared resistance to the legacies of global colonial violence and trans-feminization. Chapter 3,   Queens of the Gay World,   further explores the phenomenon of trans-feminization by examining the repudiation of femininity in post-Stonewall gay liberation movements. Citing the work of anthropologist Esther Newton, who published Mother Camp: Female  Impersonators in America (1972), Gill-Peterson challenges the historical misconception that    sees gay men and trans women as separate groups   using the figure of the   queen   to  REVIEW: A SHORT HISTORY OF TRANS MISOGYNY  60  illustrate this complexity (101). In the 1960  s United States, the drag queen was   the central symbol of being gay,   while the street queen occupied   the very bottom of the gay social hierarchy   (104-105). The former was seen as respectable for monetizing her femininity, whereas the street queen was demonized for expressing femininity   in public and outside of professional work   (105). Despite their marginalized status, street queens  played vital roles in community activism. It was their dedication to action that spurred  what became known as the Stonewall Riots of 1969, which included Black trans women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.  Gill-Peterson  s main point of contention is how Rivera and Johnson are framed as central figures in contemporary queer liberation movements, despite having been  ostracized from their communities for being street queens. She criticizes contemporary   annual hagiographies of Rivera and Jonhson   for reducing their lives to   the function of inspiring martyr   (125). These commemorations, she argues, produce a generic figure of   the trans woman of color,   emptied of her own desire. As symbolic figures, Johnson and  Rivera   have become whoever anyone wants them to be, instead of who or what they asked others to think of them   (131). Gill-Peterson concludes by extending her analysis to contemporary feminist movements, focusing on the Spanish neologism mujerísma, used by travestis in Latin  America to signal an unapologetic embrace of femininity. The term can be roughly  translated to English as   extremely woman   or   the most woman   (144). From the British colonies of the mid 1800s to present day   gender critical feminists,   the logic of trans misogyny is largely unchanged:   Trans misogyny magically converts trans women from the empirically disproportionate recipients of sexual violence into its all-powerful, ontological  perpetrators   (137). Combatting this logic, Gill-Peterson argues, requires embracing the notion that   trans women are extra,   that   trans femininity is too much,   and not   flattening  what makes trans femininity and womanhood different from the generic standard   (141, emphasis in original). In this context, the term mujerísma is especially instructive, as it calls  for an embrace of femininity that is also a   rejection of assimilation, including into transgender womanhood   (145).