num_pages: 288
description: A groundbreaking twentieth-century history of transgender childrenWith 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.
language: English
title: Histories of the Transgender Child
publisher: University of Minnesota Press