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This Historian Has Seen the Future of Trans Health Care
Jules Gill-Peterson doesn’t want to fight for trans joy. She wants to fight for what trans people really need: resources, hormones, and surgery. Her latest arena? The US Supreme Court.
A response, in part, to the post–“ Tipping Point ” narrative that would frame transness as a novel phenomenon (“Trans people are in a constant state of being discovered,” as filmmaker and historian Morgan M. Page once wrote), Gill-Peterson’s book examined how youth have medically altered their sex as far back as the early 20th century, decades before most of the loudest anti-trans mouthpieces in Congress were even born. As lawmakers have banned trans health care for minors, even criminalized its provision in a handful of states, often on the grounds of its being “experimental,” as Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey claimed in 2023, the research undergirding Histories of the Transgender Child has only proven more vital, and its thesis more eerily prescient. A vital new contribution to a lineage of transfeminist scholarship that includes the work of Julia Serano and Viviane K. Namaste, among others, the text interrogates how seemingly progressive neoliberal politics make trans people into assimilable subjects only through the exclusion of transsexual women, particularly those who are poor, Black, brown, sex workers, or immigrants.
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