Histories of the Transgender Child 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

“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

“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