Histories of the Transgender Child

Book excerpt: Despite transgender rights being front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth that transgender children are a brand new generation--pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles--persists today. [This book] shatters this myth, revealing that gender nonconforming children preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors and played a central role in the medicalization of trans people. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics int he twentieth century, [the author] reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children's bodies, foregrounding the racial history of medicine that excludes trans of color children through the concept of gender's plasticity, placing race at the center of the analysis and of transgender studies.