Books like Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson

Histories of the Transgender Child uncovers a largely forgotten record of transgender children from the early 1900s through the 1970s. The book documents how children with “ambiguous” sex sought medical care, how doctors began to alter bodies, and how emerging categories of gender and trans identity were constructed within biomedical and racialized frameworks. Through archival research—hospital records, personal letters, and contemporary medical literature—the author reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies, emphasizing the exclusion of Black and trans people of color from these narratives. By tracing the development of gender categories and the institutionalization of transgender care, the work challenges the myth that transgender children are a wholly new phenomenon and situates them within a deeper historical context.

First publish date: 2018