Histories of the Transgender Child

by Jules Gill-Peterson

trans children’s consistent experience in this country is to be excluded from having a voice, from having a say in the public battle over whether they should find themselves allowed to be, as if such determinations are not procedurally genocidal in their holding open the door to a world where trans life would be violently extinguished from growing in the first place. We have not even yet begun to ask what it would mean to let trans children name their own desires and be recognized as entitled to direct their own affairs.

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.

We make children vulnerable by the force of law, the deprivation of their economic earnings, and the infantilization of their personalities, only to raid their bodies, minds, and souls to enrich an order of things that cannot stomach their savvy and enviable divergences from normativity.

The truth is, we don’t know trans children because we have inherited, reinforced, and perpetuated a cultural system of gender and childhood in which they are unknowable and, what’s worst of all, unable to be cared for except through forms of harm.

Made to carry starkly different narratives for mass consumption, while simultaneously offering very narrow windows to contest the terms of their representation, images of black trans women and trans women of color on the one hand and transgender children on the other circulate seemingly without end. These very different figures are, somehow, meant to signify and embody the so-called newness and now-ness of trans life.

The publicness of black trans women and trans women of color is registered, paradoxically, through ongoing forms of social death that reduce their personhood to the barest zero degree, hiding it from view and converting their images and names more often into objects of necropolitical value.[3]

Trans children, meanwhile, are presented as powerful emblems of futurity. Sanitized, innocent, and always highly medicalized, they are domesticated figures, either reassuring that the so-called trans tipping point heralds a new generation of liberal progress and acceptance or, to the transphobic agitators involved in political campaigns focusing on bathrooms and schools, acting as proof that trans life deserves to be repressed in its incipient forms for the threat to the social order that its future would represent. Children, by design deprived of civil rights and infantilized, are easy targets for political violence—just as easily, it turns out, as concerned adults can claim them for protection.

The dominant figure of the trans child trafficked in the public sphere today underwrites, as the child has long done in the United States, a potent “racial innocence” that empties trans childhood of its content, including race, rendering it conceptually white while simultaneously libeling the existence of black trans and trans of color childhood.[5]

Trans children, these various gatekeepers say in unison, have no history at all. Trans children are unprecedented and must be treated as such, with caution or awe. What happens if this consensus turns out to be baseless? The bleached and medicalized image of the trans child circulating as unprecedented in the twenty-first century is actually prefaced by an entire century of trans children, including black trans children and trans children of color. And trans children played a decisive role in the medicalization of sex and gender, rather than being its newest objects.

By limiting trans children’s value to an abstract biological force through which medicine aimed to alter sex and gender as phenotypes, those children became living laboratories, proxies for working out broader questions about human sex and gender that had little investment in their personhood.

In the early part of the century this resulted in reading trans (and intersex, as we shall see) children’s “abnormal” or “mixed” sexual development through eugenic and evolutionist paradigms that sorted sexual morphology through racial typology. By the 1960s, it allowed the inaugural gatekeepers of transsexual medicine to imagine an etiology of transsexuality in the indeterminacy of childhood gender acquisition, opening the door to the genocidal fantasy of eradicating trans life altogether in its developing forms, even as children also successfully transitioned and secured access to gender confirmation surgery.

This book’s uncovering of a century of untold stories is therefore not a recuperative or reparative project. I instead underline a massively overlooked way that children’s bodies, because of their unfinishedness and plastic potential to be changed as they grow, have been key sites of the modernizing violence of medicine. Trans children have been forced to pay one of the heaviest prices for the sex and gender binary, silenced as the raw material of its medical foundation.

For that reason, this book names the trans child not as a distinct subgroup within the trans community but as a politically disenfranchised person subject to a regime of racially and gender normative governance by medicine and other social institutions, including the family.

The broader point is that trans life had no causal reliance upon medicine during the twentieth century and that the trans people who did interact with doctors brought their own embodied knowledge of the social realities of their transness with them to the clinic. What’s more, the medical model consisted of a strategy to deny the social reality of trans life and confine it to a wrong body narrative by suggesting that trans women and men were not already woman and men (as their lives frequently testified) but that they somehow aspired to become women and men.[43]

This book militates against the implication, born of the discourse of transsexuality, that trans people need medical knowledge about themselves to name or understand their lives. Ironically, it is the medical archive itself that shows this to be untrue. The records of many trans people who interacted with American doctors contain their rich reminiscences of childhoods, adolescence, and years lived openly as trans, often with the acceptance of local communities, without searching for or even wondering about medical support or terminology. Very often medicine became important only after children and adults had lived significant trans lives. And medicine was transformed by its experience with their trans lives as much as the inverse was true.

Lewis asks how positivist connotations of the discourse of transsexuality might change if New Age mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and research into animal communication were understood as integral threads of the ostensible rationality of transsexuality rather than its convenient foil.

Histories of the Transgender Child contributes to and extends Devor and Matte’s, Lewis’s, and Gossett’s careful rereading of the archive, working to undermine medicine’s self-appointed authority and self-referential rationality from within by emphasizing the ways that trans people were actively involved with the contested production of medical knowledge despite lacking, in most cases, expert education and, especially in the case of trans children, often producing theories of trans life that drew as much from magic or fantasy as from science.

The relation of blackness to trans life, as well as the relation of antiblackness to transsexuality and transgender, represents political problems of knowledge and being to be opened up through historical and politically engaged scholarship, rather than a frontier of new thinking to be discovered by more inclusive methodologies. Blackness problematizes the category trans—and vice versa.

A trans of color critique of medicine, then, insists on naming, following Susan Stryker, the “spectacular whiteness” of transsexuality as a colonial form of knowledge whose claims to jurisdiction over trans life must be contested.[85]

Medicine made of children’s living bodies proxies for the experimental alteration of racial plasticity and human sex, not by listening to children’s desires or demands for gender self-determination but by making them into the raw material of medical techniques. The same plasticity of sex that was racialized as white, making white trans children valuable in the clinic, also silenced them, making their experimental treatment a means to other ends.

In other words, through a feminist practice of situated knowledge, which does not pretend to proceed from a transcendent, detached position or to split the observer and the object of knowledge, “we might become answerable for what we learn to see.”[87]

By the 1960s and 1970s, as formal gender clinics began to open in the United States, their overwhelmingly white clientele was contrasted with the continuing use of willfully faulty homosexuality and schizophrenia diagnoses to reject outright black trans children’s personhood and to subject them to potentially infinite detention in psychiatric facilities, as well as more literal forms of incarceration.

To argue that their blackness therefore always sits in an irruptive position in relation to transsexuality, in certain instances threatening to puncture the racial order of things, also risks casting these black trans childhoods in a romanticized role as always-already outside the category transgender—not an easy position from which to find a livable life for a child.

domination has to be historically produced but is never a done deal.

this book provides only one account of black trans childhood’s historicity. We need more of these histories, and we do need different archives that produce alternate forms of knowledge richer in the grain of black trans and trans of color embodied objectivities than what this book can provide by focusing on the history of medicine.[97]

I propose an ethical relation that calls upon adults to stop questioning the being of trans children and affirm instead that there are trans children, that trans childhood is a happy and desired form—not a new form of life and experience but one richly, beautifully historical and multiple.

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life sciences, sex underwent two key transformations: sex became synonymous with a concept of biological plasticity that made it an alterable morphology, and, through experiments by largely eugenic scientists, it was racialized as a phenotype.

As a metaphor for an invisible but material plasticity, the child organized sex and growth along parallel phylogenetic and ontogenetic scales. Yet this metaphor also preserved and kept alive the tension between indeterminacy and form at the core of sex. As a result, the sex binary moved closer to conceptual collapse the more it became scientifically alterable.

it is precisely the partial misfit between plasticity and the child greased by the mechanics of metaphor that was so productive for medical science over the ensuing century.

If biological metaphors are images or ideas that guide the life sciences without corresponding to an actual object, we could understand almost any abstraction of human or nonhuman life through this framework. Sex and gender, certainly, could be considered rather broad metaphors for human form. More precisely, as phenotypes that pretend to derive themselves straightforwardly from an imagined genotype, they are metaphors that go too far in relation to biological life, overdetermining it with poorly fitted meaning. The endocrine system, as an anatomical abstraction, would also qualify well as metaphorical.

The absence of a body in tissue culture suggested that plasticity was a fundamental quality of life at various scales, rather than a property or part of specific biological structures, like the organism or the body.

While Burbank could not advance much further than romantic naturalism, suggesting good sunshine, clean air, and good food as the basis for cultivating children like plants, endocrinologists could turn to the newly modeled hormonal body for a more precise program of human enhancement.

A purely mixed bisexuality would never obey a doctor and differentiate into male or female, so the notion of progressive sequence was added to bring a temporal order to sex. Yet the material actions of plasticity in laboratories simultaneously undermined that developmental schema, leading to confusion that was well summarized by the biologist Allen Ezra in the 1920s: “One may well ask: Is any human being completely sexed?”[45] In the face of that increasingly complex question, Ezra reflects the growing consensus of the interwar era, claiming that that “sex is the expression of a combination of male or female characteristics within an individual,”[46] so that “a completely sexed individual is the result of a variety of forces acting in sequence on a progressively changing substratum.”[47]

The modern endocrine body incarnates one important instance of the persistence of eugenic logics after the war, as later chapters in this book explore in greater detail. The child metaphor was in large part what allowed the cultivation of sexual plasticity through development to proceed without reference to its eugenic heritage and without much acknowledgement of children at all. The figurative purchase of the child in endocrinology brought plasticity under the jurisdiction of experimental medicine, and the potential for more complex “sex reversals,” including in humans, grew over the next fifty years in ways that Riddle or Steinach could scarcely have imagined.

The child has been made a living figure in biology because children can metaphorically accommodate the ultimately paradoxical relationship between form and plasticity that, somehow, grows into the human and can be altered by medical science. This is a historical situation, not an ontological one: children are not intrinsically prone to figurative life, nor is that form the only one to which they are perpetually consigned. In the same way, the twentieth-century association of children with the racial plasticity of sex was not inevitable, nor must it necessarily endure into the future.

The metaphor of the child was meant to manage the paradox between indeterminacy and form that sex’s racial plasticity ignited, but it actually served to keep that tension alive, including in actual children’s bodies as their sex was medicalized in the early twentieth century.

Scientists and doctors maintained no pretense of being in control of sex and growth, as much as they clung to dogmatically binary and racialized definitions of sex. They could hope only to influence, nudge, and contour still largely metaphorical processes that began in natural bisexuality and, according to them, were meant to end in binary form. For the eugenicists, meanwhile, this indeterminacy of sex occasioned a litany of racist anxieties over individual pathology and population-level degeneration.

The eugenic heritage of endocrinology informs the medicalization of sex, gender, and trans life in the twentieth century, but it hardly exhausts plasticity’s meanings for forms. If intersex and trans children, as we will see in the next several chapters, have been forced to grow in the dislocation between the figurative and the material existence of race, sex, and plasticity, they may have accrued or encountered strange and unexpected plastic agencies along the way. If, as Steedman speculates, “figurative existence is a form of historical existence,” we cannot assume that the overriding power of the child metaphor was able to completely disenfranchise children—even if, most of the time, it nearly did.

The fact that trans life could fall under the sign of “homosexuality” is actually an important clue for how to read the early twentieth-century medical archive, for the wider category of sexual inversion regularly mixed gay and trans connotations.[3]

Intersex children were forced during these decades into a decisive role as the experimental subjects in whose bodies the abstract theories of endocrinology were translated into real medical technique for altering human sex. The very medical feasibility of Val’s request for surgery in 1948 was predicated on decades of medical sex reassignments performed on infants, children, and teenagers diagnosed as “hermaphrodites.”

This chapter shows that as sex became more alterable through experiments on intersex bodies, it became less obvious why trans people’s requests to change their sex would be disqualified from the same procedures, because in the absence of a medical discourse like transvestism, the sheer similarity between trans and intersex embodiment empowered some trans people to simply argue that they were intersex.

Sex reassignment was in many cases an attempt to medically produce and enforce heterosexuality.

Every so often a chilling, indirect vignette appears, as in the case of a child who had been reassigned to a sex that contradicted their[65] sense of self and who was referred to an ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist found nothing wrong with their eyes and was puzzled. The recorded complaint from the Brady Institute staff was that this child’s “eyes tear” constantly.[66] Apparently the doctors could not even imagine that constant crying might have been a traumatic effect of their aggressive medical protocol.

Translating the alterability of plasticity from the abstract realm of endocrinology into an actual child’s body proved quite difficult.

Where the plasticity of white children’s intersex bodies, in spite of being abnormal, was nevertheless valuable for its biological potentiality that medicine could cultivate, black children’s sexed plasticity was framed as atavistic. This differential between the abstract whiteness of plasticity and the visual regimes of race and antiblackness that inflected the clinical treatment of actual children is a central feature of the modern medicalization of sex, one whose change over time this book follows across the rest of its chapters.

Once synthetic hormones became available, on the rare occasion that Young did prescribe hormones to patients diagnosed with sexual inversion it was only to encourage a gender-normative, heterosexual effect.

The development of a protocol for altering the plastic sex of intersex infants and children, rather, served as proof to interested trans people that they, too, might change their sex.

the Cold War military, scientific, political, and capitalist milieu of state and medical biopolitics resulted in a new diffusion of techniques for making sexuality and the sexed body productive, and to that extent transsexuality was an artifact of that midcentury moment.

Yet beginning with World War II and its aftermath overlooks that sex reassignment was practiced long before the concept of gender existed, that phalloplasties were performed by surgeons like Young before Gillies, that Jorgensen was not the first celebrity trans figure, and that Benjamin’s work with trans people actually had begun three decades earlier, in the 1920s.

Trans life evidently preexisted any early twentieth-century medical discourse that could claim to know it. Trans children and adults in this era lived at a fairly wide distance from doctors, but this distance was not a product of a lack of knowledge or language to describe themselves, considering that the archive records a boy living out his teenage years in a lumber mill in New York, a girl in Missouri moving out on her own at eighteen, and a girl attending elementary school in rural Wisconsin. None of these children began living a trans life after encountering medicine. On the contrary, medicine was significantly challenged by its encounters with them. Rather than looking for a “specific” trans childhood in the early twentieth century, then, it is better to say that there were multiple trans childhoods in play in this era, that the definition of transness characterizing children takes a range of differing and competing forms, without any discursive resolution.