Histories of the Transgender Child

"To follow up on Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity , there’s another new book out called Histories of the Transgender Child , by Julian Gill-Peterson. Again, its theme is what I’m currently fascinated with right now, which is how can we think about trans in a way that it doesn’t reproduce the psycho-medical minoritisation and pathologisation of it, and that gives us a way to use what history can teach us to imagine a more livable future. Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child takes another current hot topic—trans kids—and reframes the conversation. So much of the attention to early transitioning trans youth is about the use of hormone blockers and whether this is violence against girls and women—back to the TERF wars—or whether this is adult people, mostly trans women, driving the cultural conversation in ways that irrevocably impose their own understanding of gender on innocent children whose sense of self is still malleable, and not yet fixed in place. The horror at the core of that discourse is that some innocent child who is not really trans, just a tomboy or sissy, will be made trans, that they will become “trapped in the wrong body.” There’s also a popular sense that this is the first generation of youth who’ve grown up with the idea that they can pick what adult gender they want to be. What Gill-Peterson’s book shows is that notions of the transgender child have a history that stretches back to at least the early 20th century, and that it’s actually related to notions of emotional and physical plasticity or malleability that are intimately related to questions of race. As such, Gill-Peterson’s book is in a very interesting conversation with Snorton’s book. “Ideas about the ability of a particular body to receive, retain, accept, and absorb sensory impressions from the environment were profoundly racialised” If you look at the nineteenth-century medical literature—sexological literature, eugenics literature, scientific racist thought—ideas of both race and sex are couched in terms of plasticity and sensation, of impressibility and sensibility. As an aside, a really fascinating book on this topic was published last year, The Biopolitics of Feeling , by Kyla Schuller, which looks at sex, science and sensibility in the 19th century, revolving around notions of bodily plasticity. Schuller traces the history of an idea, one that was dominant from the late 18th- to perhaps the early 20th century, that race determines how sensitive or susceptible a particular body is to environmental influences. That idea was central to debates in evolutionary theory, between Lamarckian ideas of evolution happening through bodily changes in response to environmental stimuli like giraffe necks getting longer because giraffes keep reaching for fruit that’s higher on a tree, and Darwinian ideas of evolution happening through natural selection of randomly occurring changes at the genetic level. The Darwinists won that debate, but Lamarckian ideas survived in a lot of racialist thought. Ideas about the ability of a particular body to receive, retain, accept, and absorb sensory impressions from the environment were profoundly racialised: blacker bodies were considered less susceptible to environmental influences. White bodies were seen as being “made of a finer clay,” one that could receive a more precise imprint, while blacker bodies were cruder and more primitive, less evolved, more animalistic. These ideas of bodily transformability and plasticity are quite central to transgender discourse as well as racial ones. Transgender revolves around the idea of transformability, and of the body’s capacity to be transformed. To hearken back to Snorton, this is another way that transness gets marked as white—it’s white bodies, unburdened by the fixity of meaning attached to black skin that can’t be shed, that seem most able to transform. Whiteness becomes linked to greater plasticity rather than greater fixity. Right? Gill-Peterson writes on the idea of childhood plasticity, which is quite central to contemporary notions of psychological development. Children are more impressible than adults, they are at first unformed but then shaped by both the traumatic and pleasurable experiences they have, which leave marks that last a lifetime. By the time one’s an adult, your clay has been cast and fired in the kiln of experience, one’s psyche has this shape rather than that shape, but those little neonatal brains, early childhood brains, they’re still plastic, still in the process of becoming what they will be with greater fixity in the future. So there’s a window, a window for critical intervention in childhood, that will determine a child’s future. If a child seems to be developing in an undesired or non-normative direction, one can still intervene in that child’s life to cast it in a different mould. This idea of a critical phase in the childhood development of sexual orientation and gender identity goes back more than a century. It is a rationale in support of the ‘medical gaze’ that fixes us all in its sights, that not only assigns us to categories but that then works with an ensemble of other social techniques and apparatuses to try to steer and cultivate us in one direction or another, to reward or punish us for being normative or for failing to do so. The gender-plastic child—that is, all children, which is to say everyone, because those of us who are adults were once children—is the insertion point, the battlefield, the operating theatre, of this intervention. The child who grows up to have a transgender future is the one who has eluded the forms of power that seek to make that very future impossible, that work to instate cisgender as the norm. So once again, we are back to this theme running through the various books, of how a present concern—in this case the moral panic over trans kids—can look different in the light that historical research sheds on the past, while pointing us toward a different vision of futurity. “The logic that operates here is intimately caught up in racial and pseudo-scientific beliefs about what our bodies mean and what they can do” Gill-Peterson argues that attention to the ‘transgender child’ actually characterises the whole history of transgender medicine. He writes about how in the early 20th century you start to see childhood genital surgeries, performed mostly on intersex kids, motivated by the idea of their ‘normalisation.’ In the 1950s, the ‘problem’ of intersex gender identity development actually becomes the basis for making the sex/gender distinction that seems so intuitively obvious to many people now. These ideas motivate John Money’s work at John Hopkins University on the psychoneuroendocrinology of identity development. It underlies the protocols for neonatal intersex genital disambiguation surgeries. It informs work in the 1960s by this psychiatrist, Richard Green, who wrote about what he called the ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome.’ Throughout it all runs the assumption that childhood is a plastic time of life, and you need to shape it the right way to avoid a trans outcome. It’s like, a transgender adult is the worst thing imaginable. Anybody who is a trans adult has essentially made it through the killing fields –they are the person who has been the target of intervention, they have somehow not been normalised, and made it to a transgender adulthood. Gill-Peterson totally flips the script to say trans kids are not some new thing under the sun that we’ve never thought about before. This figure is actually what drives the whole history of medicalisation of trans bodies in the twentieth century, and the logic that operates here is intimately caught up in racial and pseudo-scientific beliefs about what our bodies mean and what they can do. It’s one of my favourite nerdy academic books on trans issues in the past several years. It really makes the cranks turn in my mind."