A Short History of Trans Misogyny

Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny rejects a narrow story in which transmisogyny is recent prejudice directed only at people who hold a modern Western identity label. The book follows the policing of transfeminized people through colonial statecraft, racial classification, urban regulation, sex-work criminalization, and public spectacle. “Transfeminized” names people made vulnerable through an imposed association with femininity, allowing the history to cross places and periods without pretending that every subject understood themselves through the same category.

Cases across the Americas and beyond show authorities treating gender variance as evidence of racial disorder, sexual deviance, failed labor discipline, or resistance to colonial modernity. Police, medical institutions, prisons, and reform campaigns did not merely react to a preexisting minority; they helped create governable populations and made femininity punishable in particular bodies. Sex workers and poor transfeminine communities are therefore central, not peripheral, to the history of gender regulation and to traditions of survival and revolt.

The book’s compressed, polemical scale is a strength and a limitation. Its global sweep cannot substitute for local archives, and the analytic term “transfeminized” must not erase Indigenous or culturally specific identities. Gill-Peterson’s intervention is nevertheless crucial for feminism: anti-trans violence is not separate from misogyny but reveals how femininity is racialized, classed, policed, and distributed. Coalition must begin with those most exposed to that system rather than asking them to prove resemblance to respectable womanhood.