Children's Book Woefully Lacking Pictures

Abstract

Trans children remain a consistent object of concern in public debates over the validity of trans identity writ large as well as the imagined model for a future of authoritative medical and legal transition. In that regard, Jules Gill-Peterson's Histories of the Transgender Child is a groundbreaking contribution to the field of trans studies and the twentieth-century history of gender more broadly. Firmly refuting the “novelty” of trans children's existence, this historical overview of trans children's role in early gender clinics simultaneously undercuts presumptions regarding children as an atemporal class that is innocent to the question of gender identity while also identifying how attempts to correct gender nonconformity in a “child” indexed a eugenic framework for mastering human plasticity.Gill-Peterson demands that we disabuse ourselves that we yet know what it means to be a “trans child” as something other than evidence for or against the validity of trans subjectivity. Histories of the Transgender Child is an archives story narrated through the records of early twentieth-century medical clinics and the papers of their doctors and staff (including among them Harry Benjamin, Hugh Hampton Young, and John Money). It is in these clinics where trans children repeatedly appeared under a breadth of investigatory technologies and sex-gender ideologies. Contrary to the presumption that trans children are a “new frontier” for transgender health and political personhood, this book presents a finely curated collection of reports and theories on sex and gender variance in children, firmly situated within the sites of white American racial anxiety.Building on Gill-Peterson's prior published work studying the impact of colonial racism on the development of sex and gender science more broadly, Histories of the Transgender Child is an excellent resource for scholars and educators of transgender studies who are interested in the entangled theories of the gendered and racialized individual as a phenotypical species. The book's chapter structure begins with a foundational exploration of racial plasticity of gender in children, followed by clinic histories and case studies that trace significant shifts in the field from the 1930s through the 1970s. This historical analysis culminates in the provocation that we do not yet know how to raise trans children without this sedimented history of medical “care.”Drawing on a biopolitical critique of gender as a property of racialized liberal personhood, Gill-Peterson's analysis traces a critical genealogy of trans children as they appear in clinical case reports as forms of variably adaptable “raw material” for developmental investigation. Akin to Kyla Schuller's contributions toward the sentimentalist origins of “impressibility” in The Biopolitics of Feeling and C. Riley Snorton's investigation of Black flesh as fungible medical material for the discipline of gynecology in Black on Both Sides, Gill-Peterson argues against the techno-determinist slant that “trans” came into existence through 1950s medical intervention. She convincingly argues instead for a historiological shift in which trans medicine, as we understand it, was developed out of the life experiences of very young patients who were alternately (de)selected by physicians as candidates for medical interventions promising to eliminate the trace of gender ambiguity. In a narrative that coincides with the overarching eugenicist framework of early twentieth-century endocrinology, Gill-Peterson shares how white patients at clinics like the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins University served as tokens of sexual indeterminacy mastered by medical intervention and psychological treatment, while their Black counterparts were regarded as difficult, combative, irrational, and ultimately disposable research material. Following this thread of evidence, she offers us a history of the medicalization of a trans phenomenon born of a racially anxious theory of developmentalism, concluding that the “trans child has paid one of the heaviest prices for the sex and gender binary, silenced as the raw material of its medical foundation” (191).Histories of the Transgender Child is both a rigorous archival investigation of the eugenicist development of trans health care and a useful corrective to the post-1950 periodization of transexual science. Potentially, its most pertinent contribution to trans studies scholarship is its kaleidoscopic effect in which the contemporary discourse of trans children's nondestructive plasticity is placed alongside its own historical trail as a key component of medically enforced gender normativity and white supremacy. It provides an unrelenting criticism of this alignment as a hope for the historical concept to abate the ontological obstacles of its own intervention.I find myself in affinity with her provocation that we have already lived our entire lives with an entitled relationship to trans children as silenced raw material. What we actually want now—to make it possible for there to be trans children—would require reevaluating how to raise a child to exist without being an explanation of ourselves, or a means to some other end.