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Julian Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 288 pp. notes. index. pap., $24.95, ISBN 9781517904678.
Arlene Stein, Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity. Pantheon, 2018. 352 pp. gloss. notes. bibl. index. $27.95, ISBN 9781524747459.
Interest in scholarly studies of trans history and politics has grown in recent years. Historians and literary scholars have scrutinized texts and archival material, while sociologists and anthropologists have conducted fieldbased work on contemporary trans lived experiences. Yet despite a focus on trans history, health, and politics, there remains a general misunderstanding about parts of trans America. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Julian Gill-Peterson tackles one of these misconceptions - that the transgender child is a relatively recent phenomenon. By tracing a longer history of trans children, Gill-Peterson offers critical context for the current debates over genderaffirmation therapies and surgeries. This historical background is necessary for understanding Arlene Stein's Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity. Stein illuminates the experiences of four trans men who undergo gender-affirmation surgeries, documenting how these men refashion their gender identities and challenge others' adherence to the male-female binary. Stein's work is a critical exploration of trans men, who have not been covered in the scholarly literature as much as trans women have been.
Gill-Peterson examines the underexplored histories of transgender children in the 20th-century United States, drawing on the records of prominent medical institutions such as the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins and the Gender Identity Research Clinic at UCLA. GillPeterson probes the archives to analyze how medical understandings of sex changed at these medical facilities. Work on Dr. John Money and others has been covered by a range of historians, but Histories of the Transgender Child reveals a world where medical experts...