https://prostasia.org/blog/trans-children-arent-new/
Trans children aren’t new: an interview with Jules Gill-Peterson
“We have not even yet begun to ask what it would mean to let trans children name their own desires and be recognized as entitled to direct their own affairs,” Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her groundbreaking 2018 monograph, Histories of the Transgender Child.
The book attempts to take trans children and their desires seriously first of all by acknowledging that trans children exist, and have existed for a long time. Gill-Peterson looks at medical archives from Johns Hopkins and other institutions dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. This was before the term transsexual was developed in the 1950s. But Gill-Peterson nonetheless found young people at that time who knew they were not the gender assigned to them at birth, and who sometimes lived as their actual gender, with or without parental and medical support.
Trans children are not new, Gill-Peterson insists. They aren’t caused by medicine, or social media, or something special about Gen Z. They’ve always been here. And that means we don’t need to find out how to stop them, or control them, or diagnose them. We need to learn how to let them live.
https://www.jgillpeterson.com/