Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson (review)

Julian Gill-Peterson sets out to right several contemporary misconceptions about the transgender child. Most people—including scholars in LGBTQ studies—point to the current visibility of transgender children as something quite distinct from the gender variance of earlier eras. Gill-Peterson aims to put this notion to rest by pulling from the archival records of early sexology to show that children were key early subjects in the field's formative decades. This very smart book is critically engaged with major claims in queer and trans studies. It posits four main historiographic goals: "to continue the work of displacing the 1950s as the default starting point for trans history; to undermine the rationality of medical science from its inside by reading trans people as complex participants in the production of scientific knowledge, rather than its objects; to highlight the overlooked entanglement of intersex and trans bodies during the first half of the twentieth century; and to uncover the vital but unexamined role of the child's body in the medicalization of sex and gender as racially plastic, alterable phenotypes" (11). This is a very tall order—and the book delivers.

Histories of the Transgender Child charts early advances in several related areas of scientific research, including endocrinology. Children figure in this work more metaphorically than literally—the idea of plasticity in children was key in fueling researchers' vision that altering hormones in humans was possible (50). In these early decades of the twentieth century, doctors viewed sex as something defined by a universal bisexuality rather than a distinct binary. Sex was malleable. It is not surprising that in the era before the 1950s, many doctors and psychiatrists considered the occurrence of non-binary and intersex conditions in children to be common and natural. The book focuses extensively on the records of Johns Hopkins University Hospital, examining how doctors viewed and treated children diagnosed with intersex conditions.

Gill-Peterson notes the blinding whiteness of today's transgender child juxtaposed with the highly visible black trans women who figure as both media darlings (Janet Mock, Laverne Cox) and social outcasts (often poor women whose all-too-frequent killings are neglected). The erasure of black trans kids in the twenty-first century emerged from the medicalization of gender in the 1950s, defined by a racialized plasticity that rendered the gender of white children a model of abstraction for infinite malleability. Hugh Hampton Young, who ran the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins, routinely evaluated the sex of children and determined their course of treatment. Race played a key role in this: "Young saw an abstract sense of alterability in white children, while he projected a fungibility onto black children that has a genealogy in American medicine stretching back to slavery" (79). Medical intervention could make white children normal because of their plasticity, whereas black intersex children were seen as degraded and compared to animals.

Though we often associate early sexology with trans women, people assigned female frequently sought medical attention. One of the Brady Urological Institute's first patients, Robert Stonestreet, was diagnosed as a hermaphrodite as a child in 1915 (71). Doctors determined that Stonestreet had a normal uterus and ovaries, which, according to gonadic theory, meant Stonestreet should undergo sex reassignment to be female. But Stonestreet was comfortable living as a boy and later as a man. On the eve of marriage to a woman at the age of thirty, his priest refused the vows upon learning of his hermaphroditic diagnosis from childhood. Stonestreet begged the doctor from his youth, Hugh Young, to affirm in writing that he was a man so he could legally marry. Young refused and Stonestreet took his own life. Cases like this powerfully illustrate the importance of expanding our framework for what constitutes trans lives, trans science, and trans history.

This genealogy of transgender individuals is anchored in intersex lives, struggles, and treatment. That particular context gives the presentation of a familiar story—that...