A Short History of Trans Misogyny

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.

Jules Gill-Peterson is one of the most original thinkers on gender of the past decade; now in this beautifully written and argued book, she makes her compelling vision accessible to everyone. -- Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
This is a sharply argued work by a brilliant thinker. By placing current the familiar and current political attack on trans femininity in Europe and North America within a much broader global and historical context, this text provides us with a rigorous and scholarly understanding of the origins and rationale of such violence. It educated and challenged me and it will become a vital contribution to political thought and organising around gender. -- Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue
In Jules Gill-Peterson's provocative and generative framing, trans misogyny is not a minoritizing term for describing the disparagement of femininity in trans women; it is a ubiquitous, infrastructural pressure that effects everyone to some degree, informing the hierarchy of lives deemed worth living. Details inside. -- Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution
A Short History of Trans Misogyny is a nuanced, wide-ranging, and instantly canonical account from one of our foremost historians. Rich and eloquent with archival detail, this is a trans history that honors the complexity the subject deserves, that exposes the violence of colonial and neocolonial forms of sexualization, and that describes spaces of refusal to this brutality, both within the past and as threads of resistance in our present political landscape. An urgent, propulsive, and profound book." -- Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
Reading A Short History of Trans Misogyny, one can feel Gill-Peterson going to lengths to animate and honour the rich lives of the femmes she writes about through archival research. -- Amelia Abraham Gay Times
[Gill-Peterson] gives us a much-needed account of the genesis of trans misogyny and its subsequent history. -- McKenzie Wark Nation
Gill-Peterson's analysis enables us to think both more concretely and more ambitiously. In order to effectively counter the current surge of anti-trans legislation, we will need to follow her lead. -- Paisley Currah Yale Review
An interesting and necessary intervention...Gill-Peterson charts a historical course back through the past few centuries of Euro-American colonial violence to locate the birth of transmisogyny as we know it. -- Harron Walker

Jules Gill-Peterson is US based writer, activist, professor, and the author of the award-winning book Histories of the Transgender Child, published in 2018. Gill-Peterson is a tenured professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a General Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the journal of record in the field. She has earned a public reputation for fiercely advocating for transgender children and women, with contributions to and appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered and On the Media, CNN, CBS, the BBC, and Xtra magazine. She was profiled by the Guardian and published an op-ed on trans kids in The New York Times in March 2021. She is active on Twitter (with over 20K followers) and has written articles on trans politics for Them, Jewish Currents, The New Inquiry, The Lily, The Funambulist,and The Conversation. She is a cohost of the flagship LGBT podcast at Slate, Outward. She is an executive producer, starring opposite Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, and Zackary Drucker as narrator in the feature documentary Framing Agnes (director Chase Joynt), which world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2022, where it won the Next Innovator Award and the Next Audience Award.

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