#jules gill-peterson

[ghelgheli]

In contrast with professional drag queens, who were only playing at being women onstage, [Esther] Newton learned that the very bottom of the gay social hierarchy was the province of street queens. In almost total contrast to professional queens, street queens were "the underclass of the gay world." Although they embraced effeminacy, too, they did so in the wrong place and for the wrong reason: in public and outside of professional work. As a result, Newton explained, the street queens "are never off stage. Their way of life is collective, illegal, and immediate." Because they didn't get paid to be feminine and were locked out of even the most menial of nightlife jobs, Newton observed that their lives were perceived to revolve around "confrontation, prostitution, and drug 'highs'." Even in a gay underworld where everyone was marked as deviant, it was the sincere street queens who tried to live as women who were punished most for what was celebrated-and paid-as an act onstage. When stage queens lost their jobs, they were often socially excluded like trans women. Newton explained that when she returned to Kansas City one night during her fieldwork, she learned that two poor queens she had met had recently lost their jobs as impersonators. Since then, they had become "indistinguishable from street fairies," growing out their hair long and wearing makeup in public-even "passing" as girls in certain situations," in addition to earning a reputation for taking pills. They were now treated harshly by everyone in the local scene. Most people wouldn't even speak to them in public. Professional drag queens who didn't live as women still had to avoid being seen as too "transy" in their style and demeanor. One professional queen that Newton interviewed explained why: it was dangerous to be transy because it reinforced the stigma of effeminacy without the safety of being onstage. "I think what you do in your bed is your business," he told Newton, echoing a middle-class understanding of gay privacy, "[but] what you do on the street is everybody's business."

The first street queen who appears in Mother Camp is named Lola, a young Black trans girl who is "becoming a woman,' as they say'." Newton met Lola at her dingy Kansas City apartment, where she lived with Tiger, a young gay man, and Godiva, a somewhat more respectable queen. What made Godiva more respectable than Lola wasn't just a lack of hormonal transition. It was that Godiva could work as a female impersonator because she wasn't trying to sincerely live as a woman. Lola, on the other hand, was permanently out of work because being Black and trans made her unhireable, including in female impersonation. When Newton entered their apartment, which had virtually no furniture, she found Lola lying on "a rumpled-up mattress on the floor" and entertaining three "very rough-looking young men." These kinds of apartments, wrote Newton, "are not 'homes.' They are places to come in off the street." The extremely poor trans women who lived as street queens, like Lola, "literally live outside the law," Newton explained. Violence and assault were their everyday experiences, drugs were omnipresent, and sex work was about the only work they could do. Even if they didn't have "homes," street queens "do live in the police system."

As a result of being policed and ostracized by their own gay peers, Newton felt that street queens were "dedicated to "staying out of it" as a way of life. "From their perspective, all of respectable society seems square, distant, and hypocritical. From their 'place' at the very bottom of the moral and status structure, they are in a strategic position to experience the numerous discrepancies between the ideals of American culture and the realities." Yet, however withdrawn or strung out they were perceived to be, the street queens were hardly afraid to act. On the contrary, they were regarded by many as the bravest and most combative in the gay world. In the summer of 1966, street queens in San Francisco fought back at Compton's Cafeteria, an all-night venue popular with sex workers and other poor gay people. After management had called the police on a table that was hanging out for hours ordering nothing but coffee, an officer grabbed the arm of one street queen. As the historian Susan Stryker recounts, that queen threw her coffee in the police officer's face, "and a melee erupted." As the queens led the patrons in throwing everything on their tables at the cops-who called for backup-a full-blown riot erupted onto the street. The queens beat the police with their purses "and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes." A similar incident was documented in 1959, when drag queens fought back against the police at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles by throwing donuts-and punches. How many more, unrecorded, times street queens fought back is anyone's guess. The most famous event came in 1969, when street queens led the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. Newton shares in Mother Camp that she wasn't surprised to learn it was the street queens who carried Stonewall. "Street fairies," she wrote, "have nothing to lose."

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

#reading #a short history of trans misogyny #transmisogyny #jules gill-peterson

[skimblyshanks]

This is ur local skimbly telling you that if you're comfortable reading academic style writing, you should really really really pick up Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson's 2018 book Histories of the Transgender Child. She explores the history of trans youth in the US through the 20th century, with open acknowledgement of both intersex medicalization and the racialization of pathology in terms of both intersexuality and the trans experience, and is openly critical of our medical framework of identity, with the historical reasoning to back this up.

From her site:

Histories of the Transgender Child is the first book of its kind, uncovering a century of the hidden history of transgender children. Shattering the widespread myth that today's transgender children are a brand new generation, Jules Gill-Peterson shows how modern transgender medicine, as well as the very concept of gender itself, depend upon the often invisible medicalization of trans and intersex children's presumed biological plasticity.

Through a trans of color critique of medicine and its archive, Histories of the Transgender Child shows how the medical model built in a racial divide through plasticity, by design disqualifying black and trans of color children from access to care and support, setting the strict gatekeeping boundaries of the medical field that have harmed trans people for decades. The histories of trans children Gill-Peterson has brought to light open up an array of possibilities for reimagining today’s clinic by learning to listen to what trans children know about themselves, grounding medical care in the recognition of their selfhood, and critiquing binary models of transition and dysphoria.

You can purchase it here

Similar trans/queer of color writings can be found underneath the option of purchase

#histories of the transgender child #jules gill-peterson #trans authors #trans history #trans children #transgender history #transgender authors #transgender children

[librarycards]

Trans misogyny magically converts trans women from the empirically disproportionate recipients of sexual violence into its all-powerful, ontological perpetrators. While trans women are in truth perhaps more than four times as likely to experience intimate violence than non-trans people of all genders, the trans misogynist instead fantasizes that trans women are responsible for that violence simply by existing. This is the logic of trans panic, a legal defense still admissible in most US states through which a defendant can be acquitted for murder, or have their sentence reduced, if they claim to have lost their sanity in a consensual sexual experience with a trans woman.

Trans panic remains a potent idea outside the law because it is circular. On the one hand, it charges that trans women are not women, because their “gender” is really a dangerous sexuality, reducible to an inherently violent penis (though actual men with penises, who outnumber trans women in the world by massive numbers, are conspicuously not the central targets of such TERF campaigns). On the other hand, it claims that non-trans “sexuality” is truthfully a matter of gender (or sex, used synonymously). Women are biologically endangered by penises, and men are driven to legitimate homicidal rage at their sight. When it is convenient, the TERF will ontologize gender as sexuality, turning trans womanhood into a sexual perversion. But, just as soon as it suits her, she will turn around and ontologize sexuality as gender, making non-trans sexuality derivative of immutable manhood or womanhood—of fossilized biological sex. It is, ironically, one of the most ideologically structured accounts of gender to be found anywhere in the world. This closed circuit forms the resilience of trans misogyny, where to be a woman is to be in constant danger and to be a man is to be inherently violent—no exceptions. Such a ghastly definition of feminism is made respectable by blaming trans women for the whole thing.

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny. [emphasis added]

#jules gill-peterson #transmisogyny #cissexism #readings #essentialism #biological essentialism #mine

[steveyockey]

This past week, members of the white supremacist organization the Proud Boys stormed a drag queen story hour pride event in the San Francisco Bay Area, harassing and threatening everyone in attendance. And 31 members of the far right Patriot Front were arrested separately in Idaho while en route to a pride festival in Coeur D’Alene.

How many in-depth stories were published by papers of record asking questions about the origins, character, and impact of political violence targeting queer and trans people, including the targeting of children? How many stories, by comparison, were published about the putative debate over whether trans people, especially youth, ought to be allowed to transition?

I have given more interviews than I can remember on trans healthcare’s politicization in recent years. In nearly all of them I have offered the most quotable way I know to explain to a public audience the material difference between transgender healthcare and non-transgender healthcare: the difference is transphobia. The medical resources needed to transition are not of a different species than the equally numerous ways that non-trans people’s sex and gender are routinely medicalized. Yet they are treated fundamentally differently. Although they share the same clinical and scientific history, one is treated as new, experimental, and potentially dangerous, while the other is rarely the subject of sustained news coverage at all. One is treated as always arriving too quickly, while the other is treated as so unremarkable it is as if it has always existed.

I have explained that, in my expertise as a professional historian, the foundation of the transgender healthcare we inherit today was deliberately designed to stop trans people from transitioning in most cases. It has primarily done so by establishing the narrowest of eligibility criteria possible. And the great expense of transition has kept it out of reach for most trans people regardless of whether or not they might be able to qualify under any medical model. These two primary harms remain serious for trans people to this day since that medical model still underpins contemporary institutional practice despite its many changes over the past 70 years.

Jules Gill-Peterson, “Three Questions for Every Paper of Record That Publishes a Story on Trans Healthcare,” June 15, 2022.

#jules gill-peterson #reading

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson

goodreads

Why are trans women the most targeted of LGBT people? Why are they in the crosshairs of a resurgent anti-trans politics around the world? And what is to be done about it by activists, organizers, and allies?

A Short History of Transmisogyny is the first book-length study to answer these urgent but long overdue questions. Combining new historical analysis with political and activist accessibility, the book shows why it matters to understand trans misogyny as a specific form of violence with a documentable history. Ironically, it is through attending to the specificity of trans misogyny that trans women are no longer treated as inevitably tragic figures. They emerge instead as embattled but tenacious, locked in a struggle over the meaning and material stakes of gender, labor, race, and freedom.

The book travels across bustling port cities like New York, New Orleans, London and Paris, the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai'i, and the lively travesti communities of Latin America.

The book shows how trans femininity has become legible as a fault line of broader global histories, including colonial government, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public space, and the line between the formal and informal economy. This transnational and intersectional approach reinforces that trans women are not isolated social subjects who appear alone; they are in fact central to the modern social world.

Mod opinion: I haven't read this book yet, but it sounds really interesting and I'm hoping to get around to it sometime soon.

#a short history of trans misogyny #jules gill-peterson #polls #trans lit #trans books #trans literature #lgbt books #lgbt lit #lgbt literature #nonfiction #history #feminism #trans woman

[alanshemper]

Norman Finkelstein is not a grifter. He's extremely well researched and correct on some topics and is unfortunately wrong about others. His life has been legitimately ruined by the Israel Lobby, and he has a better reason than most to have an opinion about "cancel culture". He doesn't take money from sketchy right-wing money sources (looking at you Jimmy Dore and Glenn Greenwald), and he generally seems to live a simple, somewhat monastic life of books and writing. He cares deeply about things, but by his own admission, he has a poorly developed moral instinct. (In a recent interview he admitted that he had leaned heavily on Chomsky for moral clarity for much of his adult life, and they no longer talk. This has been difficult for Norman.)

Somebody needs to get him a copy of Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson.

#norman finkelstein #Jules Gill-Peterson #Jules Gill Peterson

[secondimpact]

#Jules Gill-Peterson #Death Panel #A Short History of Trans Misogyny

[aronarchy]

#repost of someone else’s content #substack #Jules Gill-Peterson #adultism #child abuse #transphobia #racism

[pablolf]

“We don’t listen to children. We treat children as manifestly inferior to adults. We give them less rights,” says Gill-Peterson. “We make them economically and politically dependent on adults. We put them in dangerous and vulnerable situations all the time. They have no control or participation in authoring the world they live in, the schools they go to, the doctor’s offices they visit, the adults they’re left alone with. And then we say they’re incapable of knowing anything. Therefore, they have no ability to hold adults to account. That’s a very disturbing way to treat a group of people.”

What’s so scary about a transgender child?

#emily st. james #Jules Gill-Peterson #transgender #lgbtqiia+ #children #parenting #politics #media

[moviemosaics]

Framing Agnes

directed by Chase Joynt, 2022

#Framing Agnes #Chase Joynt #movie mosaics #Zackary Drucker #Angelica Ross #Jen Richards #Jules Gill-Peterson #Silas Howard #Max Wolf Valerio #Christine Jorgensen #Stephen Ira

[ghelgheli]

hey you might've been asked this before sorry if so, but have you read or do you have any thoughts on A short history of Trans Misogyny?

I have read it! I have a few thoughts.

I think it's a strong and important work that compiles historical archives into sharp analyses of how "trans misogyny" (using Jules Gill-Peterson's spacing) is not a recent phenomenon but a globalized structure with centuries of history. I also think it's flawed, for reasons I'll get into after a quick summary for those who haven't had the chance to read it yet.

JGP divides the book into three main chapters, the first on the notion of "trans panic". There, she traces how variants of this anxiety with the trans-feminized subject have presented—to deadly effect, for the subject—in such different settings as early colonial India, the colonization of the Americas, the racialized interactions between US soldiers stationed in the Philippines and the local trans women living there, and of course the contemporary United States itself. In every case she analyzes this "panic" as the reaction of the capitalist colonial enterprise to the conceptual threat that the trans-feminized subject poses; we are a destabilizing entity, a gender glitch that undermines the rigid guarantees of the patriarchal order maintaining capitalism. Punishment follows.

The second chapter is my favourite, and considers the relationship between transfeminine life and sex work. I posted a concluding excerpt but the thrust of the chapter is this: that the relegation of so many trans women and trans-feminized people to sex work, while accompanied by the derogation and degradation that is associated with sex work, is not itself the mere result of that degradation inflicted upon the subject. In other words, it is not out of pure helplessness and abjection that so many trans-feminized people are involved in sex work. Rather, sex work is a deliberate and calculated choice made by many trans-feminized people in increasingly service-based economies that present limited, often peripheralized, feminized, and/or reproductive, options for paid labour. Paired with a pretty bit of critical confabulation about the histories of Black trans-feminized people travelling the US in the 19th century, I think this made for great reading.

In her third chapter, JGP narrativizes the 20th century relationship between the "gay" and "trans" movements in north america—scare quoted precisely because the two went hand-in-hand for much of their history. She emphasizes this connection, not merely an embedding of one community within another but the tangled mutualism of experiences and subjectivities that co-constituted one another, though not without tension. Then came the liberal capture of the gay rights movement around the 70s, which brought about the famous clashes between the radicalisms of Silvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson (neither of whom, JGP notes, ever described themselves as trans women) and the institutions of gay liberalism that desired subsumption into the folds of capital. This is a "remember your history" type of chapter, and well-put.

I think JGP is correct to insist, in her introduction, on the globalizing-in-a-destructive-sense effects of the colonial export of trans womanhood. It is, after all, an identity conceived only mid-century to make sense of the medicalized trans subject; and "gender identity" itself (as JGP describes in Histories of the Transgender Child) is a psychomedical concept conceived to rein in the epistemic instability of trans existence. This is critical to keep in mind! But I also think JGP makes a few mistakes, and one of them has to do with this point.

In her first chapter, under the discussion of trans misogyny in colonial India, JGP of course uses the example of the hijra. Unfortunately, she commits two fundamental errors in her use: she mythologizes, however ambiguously, the "ascetic" lives of hijra prior to the arrival of British colonialism; and she says "it's important to say that hijras were not then—and are not today—transgender". In the first place, the reference to the "ascetism" of hijra life prior to the violence of colonialism is evocative of "third-gender" idealizations of primeval gender subjectivities. To put the problem simply: it's well and good to describe the "ritual" roles of gendered subjects people might try to construe contemporarily as "trans women", the priestesses and oracles and divinities of yore. But it is best not to do so too loftily. Being assigned to a particular form of ritualistic reproductive labour because of one's failure to be a man and inability to perform the primary reproductive labour of womanhood-proper is the very marker of the trans-feminized subject. "Ascetism" here obviates the reality that it wasn't all peachy before (I recommend reading Romancing the Transgender Native on this one). Meanwhile, in the after, it is just wrong that hijra are universally not transgender. Many organize specifically under the banners of transfeminism. It's a shame that JGP insists on keeping the trans-feminized life of hijra so firmly demarcated from what she herself acknowledges is globalized transness.

My second big complaint with the book is JGP's slip into a trap I have complained about many times: the equivocation of transfemininity with femininity (do you see why I'm not fond of being described as "transfem"?). She diagnoses the root of transmisogyny as a reaction to the femininity of trans women and other trans-feminized subjects. In this respect she explicitly subscribes to a form of mujerísima, and of the trans-feminized subject as "the most feminine" and (equivalent, as far as she's concerned) "the most woman". Moreover, she locates transfeminist liberation in a singular embrace of mujerísima as descriptive of trans-feminized subjectivity. As I've discussed previously, I think this is a misdiagnosis. Feminization is, of course, something that is done to people; it is certainly the case that the trans-feminized subject is in this way feminized for perceived gender-failure. This subject may simultaneously embrace feminized ways of being for all sorts of reasons. In both cases I think the feminization follows from, rather than precedes, the trans misogyny and trans-feminization, and there is a fair bit of masculinization as de-gendering at play too, to say nothing of the deliberate embrace of masculinity by "trans-feminized" subjects. Masculinity and femininity are already technologies of gender normalization—they are applied against gender deviation and adapted to by the gender deviant. The deviation happens first, in the failure to adhere to the expectations of gender assignment, and I don't think these expectations can be summarized by either masculinity or femininity alone. I think JGP is effectively describing the experience of many trans-feminized people, but I do not think what she presents can be the universalized locus of trans liberation she seems to want it to be.

Now for a pettier complaint that I've made before, but one that I think surfaces JGP's academic context. In her introduction she says:

In truth, everyone is implicated in and shaped by trans misogyny. There is no one who is purely affected by it to the point of living in a state of total victimization, just as there is no one who lives entirely exempt from its machinations. There is no perfect language to be discovered, or invented, to solve the problem of trans misogyny by labeling its proper perpetrator and victim.

Agreed that "there is no perfect language to be discovered"! But JGP is clearly critical of TMA/TME language here. Strange, then, that less than ten pages later she says this:

this book adds the phrase trans-feminized to describe what happens to groups subjected to trans misogyny though they did not, or still do not, wish to be known as transgender women.

So JGP believes it is coherent to talk about "groups subjected to trans misogyny", which she thinks consists of the union of trans women and what she called "trans-feminized" groups. If this is to be coherent, there must be groups not subjected to trans misogny. So we've come around to transmisogyny-subjected and not transmisogyny-subjected. Look: you cannot effectively theorize about transmisogyny without recognizing that its logic paints a particular target, and you will need to come up with a concise way of making this distinction. But JGP dismissing TMA/TME with skepticism about "perfect language" and immediately coining new language (basically TMS/not TMS) to solve the problem she un-solved by rejecting TMA/TME... it smells of a sloppy attempt to make a rhetorical point rather than theoretical rigour. It's frustrating.

I have other minor gripes, like her artificial separation of "trans women" from "nonbinary people" (cf. countless posts on here lamenting the narrow forms of existence granted TMA people if we want recognition as-such!) or her suggestion that "a politics of overcoming the gender binary" is mutually exclusive from rather than necessarily involved with struggles around "prison abolition, police violence, and sex work". Little things that give me the sense of theoretical tunnel-vision. But I don't think all this compromises the book's strengths as a work of broad historical analysis. I would simply not take every one of its claims as authoritative. Definitely give it a read if you have the chance, especially for the second and third chapters.

#ask answer #jules gill-peterson #(i haven't been asked this before ty for asking <3 🐐) #note that this was mostly off the cuff except what i had taken pictures of bc i left the book in toronto for my mom to read

[librarycards]

To understand how and why violence against trans women emerged, we need to be able to connect these two scales [the colonial and the interpersonal]. Panic and trans-feminization produced similar experiences for vastly different kinds of people around the world who had little in common—other than being targets. The men who picked up fairies on the street, or who paid to see female impersonators dance in nightclubs, acted out the same structure of violence when they threatened, assaulted, or robbed them as the colonial state in India or the settler-colonial state in America. This was the same violence wielded by municipal police forces that raided bars and locked people up for cross-dressing. The blending of state violence with interpersonal violence is a signature outcome of the global trans panic, a deadly merger that persists to this day.

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny. [emphasis added]

#jules gill-peterson #transmisogyny #state violence #colonialism #readings #mine

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson

goodreads

With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.

Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ’70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Jules Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, she foregrounds the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of her analysis and at the center of transgender studies.

Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

Mod opinion: This sounds like an interesting and important book and I hope to check it out sometime! (Unfortunately I'm not able to find a book cover with her actual name, so I've removed the old one.)

#histories of the transgender child #jules gill-peterson #polls #trans books #trans lit #trans literature #lgbt lit #lgbt literature #lgbt books #nonfiction #history #to read

[konkumina]

31.3. Den trans viditelnosti

Dneska je mezinárodní den trans viditelnosti, respektive, podstatněji je Buy a trans woman a pizza day.

Překvapivě,

su trans buzna, dívejte se na mě a kupte mi pizzu.

Ok, ale jestli chcete být užitečný,

kupte trans holce pizzu,

běžte 6.4. 12:30 na Staroměstském náměstí na blokádu klerofašistických zkurvenců z Pochodu pro život, a ideálně na nějaký další akce během Týdne pro reprodukční spravedlnost,

vzdělávejte lidi kolem sebe, že tu máme furt nucené sterilizace trans lidí KURVA,

přečtěte si kteroukoliv/všechny z následujících knížek od trans* autorstva:

Nevadu od Imogen Binnie,

Detransition, baby od Torrey Peters,

Who's afraid of gender od Judith Bulter,

A short history of trans misogyny od Jules Gill-Peterson;

5 - kviřte české prostory, poslouchejte a přijměte mezi sebe víc kvír kamarádstva. Zachraňuje to životy.

Díky, a trans práva jsou lidská práva! Info o akci ✨

#trans #lesbian #dyke #trans day of visibility #den trans viditelnosti #buy a trans woman a pizza day #kup trans holce pizzu #česky #čeština #čumblr #obrození #no pasarán #siamo tutti antifascisti #pro choice #moje tělo moje volba #stop sterilizaci #literatura #Imogen Binnie #Torrey Peters #Judith Butler #jules gill peterson #Kvír #Buď kvír šiř mír #jebat klerofašisty #jestli chce církev chránit děti mohla by začít tím že na ně přestane sahat

[aronarchy]

#repost of someone else’s content #NPR #Sophie Lewis #Jules Gill-Peterson #ageism #adultism #youth oppression #child abuse #youth rights #youthlib #youth liberation