Category: Issue 6

In her now-classic 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin uses the term “fallacy of misplaced scale” to describe how “sexual acts are burdened with an excess of significance.” As Rubin explains, the state pathologizes and criminalizes “benign sexual variation”: those preferences or behaviors that do […]

Decades are slipping together in the town of Port City. 1980 breaching the surface of 1970. On a day in the summer of 197X, there is a gap that snaps open the shore, slicing sky and water as though the landscape were a screen that could be cracked––and if cracked, then shattered. This glitch is […]

Gender theories reveal our attachments to certain ways of seeing and being in the world. In many cases, our attachment to specific ideas about gender rests in their ability to confirm what we want to know. Being open to theory requires the possibility of seeing differently, a reorientation, which might also require us to admit […]

“Nothing’s without obliquity, pain itself is not, language about pain least of all, but the shame itself of privacy should give place with a thud of longing to this much, this good, attention” -Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem is Being Written” *** Listening *** Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child is a book that […]

The media frequently suggests that the existence of young trans people is a new phenomenon. This libel about trans children’s newness reinforces the power, authority, and knowledge that adults have over children. Furthermore, this lie allows for trans children’s existence to be up for debate. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Gill-Peterson documents the long […]

Children are metaphors, Jules Gill-Peterson contends in Histories of the Transgender Child. In the nineteenth century, amid rapid transformations in medicine and the life sciences, the child became a metaphor for “sex’s plasticity as an abstract form of whiteness.” Endocrinology called upon the figure of the child as a “stabilizing metaphor” that gave a form […]

I come to Gill-Peterson’s timely piece of trans scholarship as a teacher of medical humanities and disability studies. Histories of the Transgender Child makes a powerful case for how a trans bioethics needs to be historicized in order to do its urgent reparative work. As Gill-Peterson underscores in the book’s conclusion, one of the crucial […]

Innocent does not mean virtuous. In the preface to Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson explains that innocence is partly what “motivates” her groundbreaking history of transgender youth throughout the twentieth century. “[T]he urgency of giving up our foolish attachment to an adult innocence about trans childhood,” she writes, “motivates me in the pages […]

When I was a little boy, I can’t remember ever consciously thinking that I wanted to be a girl. And when, as an adult, I was finally beginning to grow into a girl, I became even less certain what in my childhood had prepared me for this. When I was a little gay boy, I […]