Histories of the Transgender Child

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With transgender rights at the forefront of American discourse, the misconception persists that today's transgender children are a new phenomenon facing unprecedented challenges. This work dispels that myth by revealing a hidden twentieth-century history where transgender children not only existed but played a pivotal role in the medicalization of gender long before the term "transgender" was coined. It traces the journey from the early 1900s, when children with "ambiguous" sex sought medical help, through the 1930s, when transgender individuals began consulting doctors for sex alteration, to the 1960s and '70s, when institutionalization allowed transgender children to access hormones and gender confirmation. The author meticulously reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children's bodies, emphasizing the exclusion of Black and trans children of color from historical narratives. By placing race at the core of the analysis, the work challenges existing frameworks in transgender studies. Drawing from extensive archival research, including personal letters from children to doctors and relevant medical literature, it illuminates the lives of transgender children in the early twentieth century—a time when the concept of transgender was not yet defined but undeniably present in the experiences of children and their families.