Jules Gill-Peterson > Quotes

“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 humanity 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.”
― Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

“Lately I've reflected on how brittle I've become, at least by some measures. When the stakes are set so permanently high as life or death, catastrophe or salvation, it's difficult to front the cost of vulnerability, including the vulnerability needed to inhabit uncertainty or tender provisional thoughts.”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

“It makes more sense to think of misogyny as the continual policing and punishment of certain women for their perceived failures to stay subordinate to men.”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

“In his clinical work with both trans boys and girls at UCLA, however, Newman failed to follow his own words and often ended up overseeing transitions for his child patients, precisely because such “intensive individual therapy for the child and counseling for the family” had absolutely no anti-trans effect. He tended to see the onset of adolescence as the practical threshold at which there was no point in pursuing psychotherapy anymore to change a patient’s gender identity. “Georgina,” one of the trans girls he saw regularly in the 1960s, therefore began to live full time as a girl when she turned fifteen. With Newman’s guidance as supervising psychiatrist, as well as the permission of her parents and school officials, she was able to transfer to a new school in the Los Angeles area, legally change her name, and complete high school as Georgina, while continuing to visit UCLA for estrogen therapy.”
― Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

“The emergence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism [TERF] in the 1970s, with its own version of trans panic, is only one of many trans-misogynistic echoes in recent history. TERFs... didn't invent trans misogyny, nor did they put a particularly novel spin in it...portrayal of trans femininity as violent and depressed could have been lifted from the British denunciation of hijras in the 1870s, or from Nazi propaganda about transvestites in the 1930s... Recent work by historians has cat doubt in his popular TERF beliefs ever were outside a few loud agitators... If anything, TERFs, whether in the 1970s or in their contemporary "gender-critical" guise, are better understood as conventional boosters of statist and racist political institutions... TERFs, like the right-wing evangelicals or white supremacists who agree with them politically, are not the lynchpin to trans misogyny; rather, they are at best one of its latest manifestations.”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

“Trans children have been reduced to figures 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 circumstances, 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 children with a richly expressive sense of who they are.”
― Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

“The collective power of trans-feminized people, including trans women, lies in how many others rely on us to secure their claim to personhood.
In other words, the dolls hold all the receipts, and the time has come to call them in.”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

“For nearly two centuries, everyone but trans women have monopolized the meaning of trans femininity. Fearful of interdependence, many have tried to violently wish trans femininity away. The non-trans woman has become gender critical, willing to dispose of her trans sister to secure her claim on womanhood. The gay man celebrates queens as iconic but separates himself anxiously from faggotry’s intimacy with trans femininity, claiming he is only on the side of sexuality, not gender. The straight man acts out in violence to disavow his desire for the girls he watches in porn, the girls he cheats on his wife with, and the girls from whom he buys sex. The state has used trans femininity most of all to generate the pretense it needs to expand its sovereignty as a monopoly on violence. And even queer and trans people, whether as cultural producers, activists, or scholars, have used the symbolic value of trans femininity to guarantee their political authenticity.
But this is only to tell half of the story. The anxious and angry rejection of everyone’s interdependence with trans women is an attempt to refuse a social debt accrued, to refuse the power trans femininity holds.”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

“What proves good enough for transvestis, for trans-feminized people around the world, and for the divinity of trans-femininity itself, is nothing less than most.
Will you demand it all?”
― Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny