Histories of the transgender child

274 Pages·2018·3.083 MB·English

by  Gill-Peterson, Julian

HISTORIES OF THE TRANSGENDER CHILD
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Histories of the
Transgender Child
• • • •
Julian Gill- Peterson
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as
“Implanting Plasticity into Sex and Trans/Gender: Animal and
Child Metaphors in the History of Endocrinology,” Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22, no. 2 (2017): 47– 60,
www.tandfonline.com.
Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gill-Peterson, Julian, author.
Title: Histories of the transgender child / Julian Gill-Peterson.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2018]. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008947 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0466-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0467-8 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Transgender children—United States—History. | Gender
nonconformity—United States—History.
Classification: LCC HQ77.95.U6 G55 2018 (print) | DDC 306.76/80835—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008947
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Toward a Trans of Color Critique of Medicine 1
1. The Racial Plasticity of Gender and the Child 35
2. Before Transsexuality: The Transgender Child from the
1900s to the 1930s 59
3. Sex in Crisis: Intersex Children in the 1950s and the Invention
of Gender 97
4. From Johns Hopkins to the Midwest: Transgender Childhood
in the 1960s 129
5. Transgender Boyhood, Race, and Puberty in the 1970s 163
Conclusion: How to Bring Your Kids Up Trans 195
Acknowledgments 209
Abbreviations 213
Notes 215
Index 257
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Preface
We fear the children we would protect.
— Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child
A libel placed on the very existence of trans children, a
vicious question mark snaked around being, is what passes for a
rational object of “debate” among adults every day in the media, online, in
schools and clinics, and in the social milieu in which trans children must
find a way, despite all the odds, to survive, to grow, and to endure. Subject
to radical skepticism and verification in the best instances and to being
dismissed as unreal or brainwashed in the worst, trans children’s consistent
experience in this country is to be excluded from having a voice, from hav-
ing a say in the public battle over whether they should find themselves
allowed to be, as if such determinations are not procedurally genocidal in
their holding open the door to a world where trans life would be violently
extinguished from growing in the first place. We have not even yet begun
to ask what it would mean to let trans children name their own desires
and be recognized as entitled to direct their own affairs. Adults, whether
anti- trans hate groups, trans exclusionary feminists, conservative activists,
parents, so- called interested observers, or even allies and advocates, tarry
within the dangerously limiting circumstances of a system that continues
to assay the value of trans children’s being in terms not of their human-
ity and personhood but via questions absurd in their abstraction for how
they ask us instead to wonder if trans children “prove something” about
the biological basis of sex and gender or how identity politics have so
injured a cis, white, heteronormative imaginary that cannot fathom the
obvious fragility of its claims to universalism in the face of a defiant no.
While anti- trans forces mobilize and collude to enforce binary childhoods
in schools, in gender- segregated organizations, in the normative family,
and in public accommodations that make trans childhood a life- threatening
place to be every day, trans- inclusive and trans- affirmative voices strug-
gle to find a way to protect trans children that does not imagine them as
• vii •
viii PREFACE
deserving of protection because they are, finally, the property of adults, not
people with the right to gender self- determination. In the midst of this
false fight, the real demographic majority of trans children, who do not
have access to medicine, who do not fit the white, middle- class, desexual-
ized image trafficked in the media, and whose lives go on and grow in spite
of the many denials of being thrown at them, have no viable status in which
to be recognized or welcomed. Trans children have been reduced to fig-
ures for what they are so clearly not, abstract ciphers of this or that etiology
of gender, this or that political platform. Trans childhood, under such cir-
cumstances, has yet to visit us. Yet trans children already exist, left to fend
for themselves in a culture that suffers from being unable to imagine chil-
dren with a richly expressive sense of who they are.
If childhood is already a very dangerous time and space for children
in the United States, trans childhoods— and, so much more specifically
and insistently, black trans and trans of color childhoods, nonbinary trans
childhoods, low- income trans childhoods, disabled trans childhoods, and
undocumented trans childhoods— have been evacuated of formal meaning
and abandoned by adults as less- than- human precincts, caustic reminders
of the effects of a culture in which the delusional adoration of the rosy fig-
ure of the Child abuts the most heinous quotidian modes of violence
in the lives of real children. We make children vulnerable by the force of
law, the deprivation of their economic earnings, and the infantilization of
their personalities, only to raid their bodies, minds, and souls to enrich an
order of things that cannot stomach their savvy and enviable divergences
from normativity.
This book works slowly and at length, over diachronic and synchronic
modes of historiography, to visit as much destruction as possible upon one
central libel that limits the livelihood of trans children: that they have no
history, that they are fundamentally new and, somehow, therefore deserv-
ing of less than human recognition. Throughout, my point of departure
is that trans children’s right to be is not up for debate. Instead, the affirma-
tion of that right directs my thinking. Such a project of historiography
requires a certain way of writing and engaging with the grain of the incred-
ible twentieth- century archive of trans childhood, race, and medicine. But
before entering that mode, which necessitates giving up others, let me
speak a little differently, to say that the urgency of giving up our foolish
attachment to an adult innocence about trans childhood also motivates
me in the pages that follow (and not, say, a retrospective desire for a trans
PREFACE ix
childhood that I or anyone else might have had). The truth is, we don’t
know trans children because we have inherited, reinforced, and perpetu-
ated a cultural system of gender and childhood in which they are unknow-
able and, what’s worst of all, unable to be cared for except through forms of
harm. The staggering, nauseating arithmetic of trans youth suicide and the
truth that we have just witnessed again, in 2017 more than in any year on
record before it, of the murder of black and brown trans women, are two
real costs of that innocence and its normative delusions about childhood,
gender, and race.
In writing this book, I have become possessed by the haunting insis-
tence of the many trans children who populate it, archived under circum-
stances of simultaneous violence and remarkable flourishing that inspire
in me— and, I hope, you— a profound responsibility to understand that our
relation to trans children is not given but must be thoughtfully and care-
fully negotiated. Throughout the text, I use “[sic]” to mark instances in
which quoted materials contradict the pronouns used by the person being
discussed. In underlining my disagreement with discourses that have
refused to honor trans people’s pronouns, I hope that these trans children
from the past are far from contained by it. On the contrary, they might
erupt out of history and into the present, finding company alongside the
countless trans children, today and tomorrow, whose vulnerabilities are
not really by reason of age but actually engineered by adults and who call
upon us each to account for our complicity with the violent arithmetic
of bullying, suicide, murder, and life deprived of safety and collective
or self- determination. I find myself confronted at the end of writing this
book with the certain knowledge that we are not worthy of the care of
trans children we have accorded ourselves. Until we see that, and from
such a realization work toward a radical reckoning with the ways that the
concept of childhood, binary gender, medicine, racism, and capitalism
have transacted unbelievable degrees of harm in the name of care, guard-
ianship, development, and pedagogy, we will find ourselves ever lacking in
the company, comfort, rich knowledge, inspiring worlds, and tenacity of
the trans children who, despite adults, call this world home. We scarcely
yet know what it would mean to care for trans children, and in that way,
they are not ours.
India Monroe
Mesha Caldwell