Histories of the Transgender Child

Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child directly challenges the claim that trans children are a recent cultural invention. She enters twentieth-century US medical archives to find children who lacked today’s vocabulary yet described their gender to physicians and sought bodily change. The point is not to assign every historical subject a retrospective identity. It is to show that children helped make modern knowledge about gender; what medicine called its discovery of childhood sex and gender often began in children’s letters, persistence, and strategy.

This history is closely entangled with the treatment of intersex children. Physicians first studied bodies under the sign of “ambiguous sex,” then used surgery, hormones, and psychological norms to invent a gender that could be diagnosed, corrected, and stabilized. The book does not collapse intersex and trans histories. It shows how both were shaped by a medical belief in childhood bodily plasticity and expert authority over its proper direction. By the 1960s and 1970s, some children also used clinics to obtain names, puberty interventions, and affirmation, making power more than one-directional.

Gill-Peterson’s decisive contribution is to place “plasticity” inside racial history. Medicine did not equally imagine every child as future-bearing, individually malleable, and worthy of care. White bodies were more often represented as capable of transformation and rescue, while Black children and other children of color were excluded, neglected, or subjected to discipline. Trans childhood cannot therefore be narrated as medical progress alone; it is also a history of who was allowed childhood, innocence, and individualized attention.

Children’s letters disrupt the assumption that adults simply shaped passive subjects. Young people learned medical language, searched for doctors, interpreted bodily experience, and negotiated treatment, sometimes knowing their needs better than institutions did. Yet those able to write, receive referrals, or leave case files cannot stand for all trans children. The medical archive is itself a gatekeeper, amplifying lives that reached a clinic, interested a physician, or arrived with adult support.

This US medical history cannot substitute for accounts of families, schools, communities, or transnational life, and historical vocabulary should not be forced into present identities. Its ethical force is to remove the alibi that trans children “never existed” without turning history into an inevitable march toward today’s model of care. For FemRes readers, the book asks us to recognize children’s knowledge and agency, criticize medicine’s racialized power, and understand bodily autonomy as a double right: access to desired care and freedom from compulsory normalization.