Overview

Why are trans women the most targeted of LGBT people? Why are they in the crosshairs of a resurgent anti-trans politics around the world? And what is to be done about it by activists, organizers, and allies? A Short History of Transmisogyny is the first book-length study to answer these urgent but long overdue questions. Combining new historical analysis with political and activist accessibility, the book shows why it matters to understand trans misogyny as a specific form of violence with a documentable history. Ironically, it is through attending to the specificity of trans misogyny that trans women are no longer treated as inevitably tragic figures. They emerge instead as embattled but tenacious, locked in a struggle over the meaning and material stakes of gender, labor, race, and freedom. The book travels across bustling port cities like New York, New Orleans, London and Paris, the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai'i, and the lively travesti communities of Latin America. The book shows how trans femininity has become legible as a fault line of broader global histories, including colonial government, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public space, and the line between the formal and informal economy. This transnational and intersectional approach reinforces that trans women are not isolated social subjects who appear alone; they are in fact central to the modern social world.

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9781804291566

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Reviews

"Jules Gill-Peterson is one of the most original thinkers on gender of the past decade; now in this beautifully written and argued book, she makes her compelling vision accessible to everyone. -- Torrey Peters, author of <i>Detransition, Baby</i> This is a sharply argued work by a brilliant thinker. By placing current the familiar and current political attack on trans femininity in Europe and North America within a much broader global and historical context, this text provides us with a rigorous and scholarly understanding of the origins and rationale of such violence. It educated and challenged me and it will become a vital contribution to political thought and organising around gender. -- Shon Faye, author of <i>The Transgender Issue</i> In Jules Gill-Peterson's provocative and generative framing, trans misogyny is not a minoritizing term for describing the disparagement of femininity in trans women; it is a ubiquitous, infrastructural pressure that effects everyone to some degree, informing the hierarchy of lives deemed worth living. Details inside. -- Susan Stryker, <i>Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution</i> A Short History of Trans Misogyny is a nuanced, wide-ranging, and instantly canonical account from one of our foremost historians. Rich and eloquent with archival detail, this is a trans history that honors the complexity the subject deserves, that exposes the violence of colonial and neocolonial forms of sexualization, and that describes spaces of refusal to this brutality, both within the past and as threads of resistance in our present political landscape. An urgent, propulsive, and profound book."" -- Jordy Rosenberg, author of <i>Confessions of the Fox</i>"

a tour de force...tracing little-noticed pathways from the past toward convergences that increasingly take center stage in the next field. An elegant combination of sophisticated theorization with equally sophisticated attention to archival and historical materials, this is one of the best books in trans studies in recent years. -- Susan Stryker, author of <i>Transgender History</i> Gill-Peterson's first book entered the scene this October to an expectant audience as Amazon and Barns & Noble both struggled to fulfill all their preorders. * Women's Studies * Histories of the Transgender Child is the first thorough investigation of its kind, and Gill-Peterson's fierce commitment to trans children produces an unparalleled look into the intimate and often devastating narratives recorded by a medical archive that will never fulfill our critical desires to rescue contradictory subjects from effacement * GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies * this book is essential reading for its insights that transgender children are not new and that binary sex and gender are extremely recent and fragile ideas reliant on a dehumanizing, racially coded conceptualization of the child as plasticity * The Lion and the Unicorn * Gill-Peterson excavates the history of medicine, introducing readers to a century's worth of gender nonconforming youth. This remarkable book is not merely a backward glance; it offers an urgent call to reimagine trans as a form of self-knowledge children can hold and for an ethics of care that focuses on affirmation. -- Tey Meadow, author of <i>Trans Kids</i>

a tour de force.tracing little-noticed pathways from the past toward convergences that increasingly take center stage in the next field. An elegant combination of sophisticated theorization with equally sophisticated attention to archival and historical materials, this is one of the best books in trans studies in recent years. -- Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History Gill-Peterson's first book entered the scene this October to an expectant audience as Amazon and Barns & Noble both struggled to fulfill all their preorders. * Women's Studies * Histories of the Transgender Child is the first thorough investigation of its kind, and Gill-Peterson's fierce commitment to trans children produces an unparalleled look into the intimate and often devastating narratives recorded by a medical archive that will never fulfill our critical desires to rescue contradictory subjects from effacement * GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies * this book is essential reading for its insights that transgender children are not new and that binary sex and gender are extremely recent and fragile ideas reliant on a dehumanizing, racially coded conceptualization of the child as plasticity * The Lion and the Unicorn * Gill-Peterson excavates the history of medicine, introducing readers to a century's worth of gender nonconforming youth. This remarkable book is not merely a backward glance; it offers an urgent call to reimagine trans as a form of self-knowledge children can hold and for an ethics of care that focuses on affirmation. -- Tey Meadow, author of Trans Kids

Author Information

Jules Gill-Peterson is US based writer, activist, professor, and the author of the award-winning book Histories of the Transgender Child, published in 2018. Gill-Peterson is a tenured professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a General Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the journal of record in the field. She has earned a public reputation for fiercely advocating for transgender children and women, with contributions to and appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered and On the Media, CNN, CBS, the BBC, and Xtra magazine. She was profiled by the Guardian and published an op-ed on trans kids in The New York Times in March 2021. She is active on Twitter (with over 20K followers) and has written articles on trans politics for Them, Jewish Currents, The New Inquiry, The Lily, The Funambulist,and The Conversation. She is a cohost of the flagship LGBT podcast at Slate, Outward. She is an executive producer, starring opposite Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, and Zackary Drucker as narrator in the feature documentary Framing Agnes (director Chase Joynt), which world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2022, where it won the Next Innovator Award and the Next Audience Award.

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