65:"I started to think about what happens when you're part of a group that gets framed as brand new. There's this cloak of caution and fear around trans kids, this idea that "We don't know what it means for a child to transition"...I had a sense as a historian that these ideas were probably not true and wanted to do historical research that would challenge this, by showing that trans kids have been around for a long time."
226:. In the edition's introduction, trans author Rebekah Sheldon writes, "Gill-Peterson’s refusal of these adulterated pleasures, her conviction that the world is already adequate to itself and needs no missing language to mark the utopian horizon, may be her book’s most decisive break with something that was once called homosexual reading, and the one from which I find myself the most, if you’ll excuse me, left behind."
167:’s concept of "situated knowledge," which rejects the supposed "objective universality" of medical establishment ideas about transness. Gill-Peterson sees the limits of the archive as "less a reason to abandon the archive than an invitation to invent better interpretive practices that break from dominant epistemologies and ontologies."
141:, who attempted to prove that sex characteristics changed according to climate, and that different ethnic and geographic groups therefore had different sex characteristics. According to Gill-Peterson, Steinach and Kammerer "mobilized the endocrine system’s now established developmental plasticity to bind sex to race."
207:, claimed that "for children's literature scholars who work on gender and sexuality, this book is essential reading." She recommended the book for its "insights that transgender children are not new, and binary sex and gender are...ideas reliant on a dehumanizing, racially coded conceptualization of the child."
69:
To accomplish this, the book describes the history of transgender children in the United States in the early 1900s. Gill-Peterson uses medical and psychotherapeutic records to describe specific children in the 1920s and '30s, such as a transgender girl using the alias Val. Other examples are found in
214:
and transgender studies scholar
Anthony Sansonetti praises the book as "bountiful and vibrant," especially its "meticulous read" of turn-of-the-century scientific literature on biological sex. They emphasize Gill-Peterson's "careful attention" to the nuances of archival details as an "active
149:
Gill-Peterson writes that the medical establishment uses white trans children as models of an idealized form of transness. Children who transition before puberty are deemed more adequately "transitioned." As Gill-Peterson writes throughout the book, these medical professionals have "packaged
162:
as a form of research that privileges medical professionals and those with access to institutional medical care. She explains her project as one that prioritizes the knowledge of people usually "disqualified as unscientific, such as women, people of color, and colonized peoples". She uses
150:
profoundly normalizing rhetoric as scientific and progressive". Gill-Peterson uses this narrative as a way to further develop her argument against the liberal "romance with plasticity," writing that these narratives risk reinforcing the hegemony of the binary gender system.
132:
Gill-Peterson argues that conceptions of plasticity are linked to race, and that plasticity is itself an "abstract form of whiteness." She discusses plasticity in the context of the scientific experiments of socialist eugenicists
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The book received positive reviews from scholars of trans studies and queer theory. Gabrielle Owen, professor of children's literature and queer theory at the
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as separate from biological sex "relied on an analogy to this same material, biological plasticity" to justify the assignation of gender to children.
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in completion of this text, listing 18 primary archives. Most are different records collections maintained by Johns
Hopkins Hospital or the
94:, rather than fixed by genitalia at birth. She argues that plasticity theory was created to justify and explain medical experimentation on
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36:. The book is an exploration of transgender childhood in the United States throughout the twentieth century. It received the 2019
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that she was motivated to write the book while thinking about media visibility of trans children in the twenty-first century:
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of intersex children to show the emergence of treatments based on the idea of the plasticity of sex. She also shows that
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listening practice," claiming this practice as an example of her positive attitude towards transgender children.
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for
Transgender Nonfiction and the John Leo and Dana Heller Award from the Popular Culture Association.
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as evidence of sex's susceptibility to environmental determination. Gill-Peterson examines records of
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children. Doctors interpreted children's relatively high potential for physical change of both
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Gill-Peterson discusses "plasticity," the theory that human sex is determined by
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and the
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810:""Histories of the Transgender Child" on Manifold @uminnpress"
659:"Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson"
459:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 197.
599:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 11.
564:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 29.
529:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 12.
424:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 52.
494:. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 5.
397:. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. p. 261.
372:. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. p. 61.
78:, usually in the context of transgender adults seeking
785:"31st Annual Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced"
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Women & Performance: A Journal of
Feminist Theory
295:"31st Annual Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced"
218:
In 2019, the
American academic and literary magazine
191:'s respective archives are also cited, as are the
82:who described their childhoods as transgender.
57:Gill-Peterson explained in an interview with
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158:Gill-Peterson criticizes the strict use of
40:for Transgender Nonfiction and the 2018
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889:LGBT literature in the United States
689:"Histories of the Transgender Child"
894:University of Minnesota Press books
884:Lambda Literary Award-winning works
240:published a Spanish translation of
687:Sansonetti, Anthony (2020-05-03).
630:Histories of the Transgender Child
596:Histories of the transgender child
561:Histories of the transgender child
526:Histories of the transgender child
491:Histories of the transgender child
456:Histories of the transgender child
421:Histories of the transgender child
395:Histories of the Transgender Child
370:Histories of the Transgender Child
267:Histories of the Transgender Child
242:Histories of the Transgender Child
224:Histories of the Transgender Child
80:gender-affirming medical treatment
21:Histories of the Transgender Child
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42:Children's Literature Association
899:2018 LGBT-related literary works
834:"Historias de la infancia trans"
222:published a special issue about
175:Gill-Peterson relied heavily on
16:2018 book by Jules Gill-Peterson
759:Sheldon, Rebekah (2019-11-26).
145:Idealization of trans childhood
246:Historias de la infancia trans
205:University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1:
874:Transgender non-fiction books
705:10.1080/0740770x.2020.1869427
634:University of Minnesota Press
628:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
593:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
558:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
523:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
488:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
453:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
418:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
393:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
368:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
271:University of Minnesota Press
265:Gill-Peterson, Jules (2018).
236:In 2022, Spanish sociologist
125:'s early articles theorizing
104:secondary sex characteristics
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72:Brady Urological Institute
761:"Listening/Loving/Liking"
189:University of Los Angeles
154:The limits of the archive
869:Books about LGBT history
185:University of Pittsburgh
193:Maryland State Archives
864:2018 non-fiction books
229:The book received the
76:Johns Hopkins Hospital
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879:2010s LGBT literature
238:Javier Sáez del Álamo
231:Lambda Literary Award
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38:Lambda Literary Award
814:Manifold @uminnpress
324:www.childlitassn.org
32:author and academic
838:Bellaterra Edicions
632:. Minneapolis, MN:
212:performance studies
210:In another review,
70:the records of the
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26:transgender studies
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735:"Issue 6 Archives"
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657:Owen, Gabrielle.
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123:John Money
120:sexologist
100:sex organs
24:is a 2018
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