About

Jules Gill-Peterson is an Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a Diversity Champion. She is a scholar specializing in transgender history and the history of sexuality, with a focus on racial histories of sex, gender, and trans embodiment that span institutional and vernacular science and medicine. Gill-Peterson is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2018, which received the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. Her work challenges the myth that transgender children are a recent phenomenon, drawing on a century’s worth of medical archival evidence to demonstrate that trans children have a verifiable history and that their gender plasticity was central to the development and racialization of transgender medicine. She has been featured and written about in prominent outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post’s The Lily, and CNN. Currently, she is working on a book titled “A Trans History of DIY,” which reframes post-1945 transgender history by focusing on the DIY practices that have been central to trans survival and transition outside institutional medicine, legality, or state recognition. Gill-Peterson serves as a General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and has received research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, and the Kinsey Institute for Sexological Research. She was awarded a Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Archaeology
• Psychology
• History
• Psychoanalysis
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Letting The Domestic Fail

  GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · 2024-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The home looms large in queer and trans studies, albeit paradoxically. It invites the charge of depoliticized retreat from the public sphere, but it also signifies as a marker of authenticity—the domicile of the self. The trans domestic, specifically, is a condition of possibility for thinking queer sexuality and gender writ large. The cover of Michael Warner's foundational book Publics and Counterpublics (2002) is a slightly grainy 1962 photograph of five transvestites in someone's home, all holding cameras. Three figures on the front cover, perfect portraits of midcentury white femininity, point their shutters at Lili, a Japanese woman in a turquoise mod dress, who returns their gaze with her own camera. A fifth white woman points her camera directly at the photographer, locking one eye with the viewer. The picture comes from a scrapbook of photos taken at Casa Susanna, a transvestite resort in upstate New York that hosted regular get-togethers in the 1950s and 1960s. The queering of domesticity depends in this text, as it has in so much queer theory, on interpreting trans femininity.For Warner, the photo ignites the signal question of his book: what constitutes a public? The home answers counterintuitively. The women of Casa Susanna “might seem not to be public at all,” writes Warner. “They might seem merely to imitate familiar mass media genres” by dressing up and posing for one another behind closed doors. “If so,” however, “it is at least interesting that the ambition of publicity matters so much to them. Why should it?” (2002: 12 – 13). The question is not rhetorical, though it is difficult to answer definitively. “The suburban, domestic scene in which we find them,” he continues, “is being put to an unusual use. It is a space of collective improvisation, transformative in a way that depends on its connection to several publics—inducing a dominant and alien mass public.” In short, “the private setting protects them from an environment of stigma, but clearly their aspiration is to do a different kind of publicness” (13). The women of Casa Susanna are not mournfully domesticating a femininity they cannot risk enjoying in public. Rather, the circulation of domesticity through photographs configures the home to mediate an “indefinite” sorority of like-minded strangers, which Warner calls a counterpublic. The transvestites are conscious that they lack the sanction of, and thus they express a desire to alter, the mass public in which they cannot participate openly.Warner's is a seductive reading, although by relying on a single magazine article, it gets several details wrong. Most importantly, he terms the pictured women “drag queens” when they and their host, Susanna Valenti, a featured columnist in Virginia Prince's magazine Transvestia, hailed from the distinct and wealthy social class of transvestites. The flattening of trans femininity in queer theory and gay male cultural imaginaries is not a special fault of Warner's. Both Casa Susanna (Hurst and Swope 2014), a coffee-table book of photographs, and a PBS documentary of the same title (American Experience 2023) about the resort repeat the error, calling its patrons “transgender women” in the contemporary declassed sense, which these 1960s transvestites would have also rejected. Warner (2002: 14) is right that “the queens of Casa Susanna are revising what it means to be public,” but queer theory's impulse to declare they are making a better world by virtue of world-making misrepresents them by ignoring their class interests.The pages of Transvestia in which Valenti and other regulars at Casa Susanna wrote demonstrate that their privacy, though it constituted a counterpublic, nevertheless ratified a bourgeois distinction between public and private. Casa Susanna – type transvestites predominantly dressed only part time, on evenings and weekends, and some exclusively at the resort. How happy that made them varied, but the practice permitted them to retain the powerful station of married white men in 1960s America. Valenti (1962: 69), who ran the resort as a business, described “most of the members of the group” as “fairly well educated people (many college graduates, professional people: lawyers, doctors, etc.).” Their domesticity was arranged so that they did not risk their public jobs, their legal rights as white men, and especially their marriages to women, many of whom accompanied them upstate. Although the desire to dress in public was a perennial source of angst and debate, these midcentury transvestites distinguished their aspirations (Prince 1962: 72 – 75) from contemporaneous gay and transsexual publics, especially those seeking political transformations of the public sphere.In short, Casa Susanna's transvestites fail the political test of “queering domesticity.” They cultivated a form of publicness from the privacy of their homes by affirming their wealth, whiteness, and heterosexuality. That cultivation, moreover, relied on its antagonistic relationship to the trans feminine publicity associated with poor street queens and sex workers, especially Black transvestites. A contemporary film, Behind Every Good Man (Ursin 1967), dramatizes the difference. The eight-minute short follows an unnamed Black transvestite for a day in Los Angeles. She first appears, unsurprisingly, in public, walking down the street. Her voiceover narrates, “I'd like to live a respectable life, that's for sure . . . I'd like to settle down,” but her words are played for irony. Close-up shots depict an incredulous white-male public overreacting to her presence. Managing their latent threats with demure playfulness, she chats up a young man, flirting with him until they make plans for a date. The film then cuts to her apartment, lingering on the spectacle of her getting dressed for the evening, alone. Waiting beside a candlelit table for her date, it becomes clear that he isn't going to show. She blows out the candles, sits alone in the dark, and the film fades to black.Pairing Casa Susanna with Behind Every Good Man, I'd suggest that it's important to let the white trans domestic fail our queer idealizations. Otherwise, we cannot appreciate how the Black trans domestic was constituted as failure—an iteration of the impossibility often ascribed to midcentury Black trans femininity, as C. Riley Snorton (2017: 157) has shown. As I see it, the home is not a willing participant for theorizing whatever meaning we might wish to retrieve out of the genuinely strange privacy that attends forms of queer and trans living. It is, rather, a fault line composed of class and race, one that routinely punctures the aspirational unity of queer and trans as the ideational anchors of our fields.

  PublisherDOI

• Sex in Nature Darwin, Depersonalized

  Regeneration. · 2024-08-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Caring for Trans Kids, Transnationally, or, Against “Gender-Critical” Moms

  2024-03-29 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter names and indicts transnational anti-trans political alliances that target children explicitly for harassment, bullying, and legislative and administrative violence. Trans children are in the crosshairs of legislative efforts to make trans-affirmative healthcare a crime and to ban their participation in education and organized sports; the saturation of UK corporate media outlets with moral panic stories; the circulation of pseudoscientific theories; and their invocation as moral degeneracy incarnate by right-wing movements. This chapter focuses on the most “respectable” of such crusaders: “gender-critical moms,” who have organized around the aggrieved identity category of “mom” or “mommy.” Making use of a sentimental political mode from which white women, as mothers, have long benefited, these well-funded, organized groups claim to be sincerely alarmed at the supposed growing ranks among their children who are coming out as trans.

  PublisherDOI

• Troubling Anti-Gender Attacks: Transnational Activist and Academic Perspectives

  Thinking gender in transnational times · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Whiteness and Trans Genre, Whiteness as Trans Genre

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-05-16 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  What makes a text generically trans? A central plank of the term 'transgender' and prefixial 'trans' was a genre shift. After the modernist and transsexual fixation on autobiography and medical case studies, trans writing was meant to play on a far more open semiotic field. Whether that transformation took place, however, is a matter of debate. If 'trans' as the denotive for a genre of writing remains vague and not very well distinguished from its cousin 'queer,' and so trans still generates few genres beyond the first person, perhaps the issue is not the narratological genealogy of trans, but an unspoken racial haunting of the very same, a presence that is unspoken even as it is explicitly conjured and exorcised. This chapter investigates three recent works of trans genre—Torrey Peters's Detransition, Baby, Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox, and T. Fleischmann's Time is the Thing A Body Moves Through—to propose an undisclosed inter-racial relation that trans conventionally serves to cover over. The foundational relation of trans genre may prove to be the white trans author to the trans woman of color, she who occupies the text through either absence or idealization.

  PublisherDOI

• Who Is the Subject of Gender Self-determination?

  differences · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay poses two critical questions about trans politics as elaborated in the Global North today: Who is the subject of gender self-determination? And what, precisely, is mobilized by tying political sovereignty to gendered persecution and ethical world-making, trans or otherwise? To answer those questions, both liberal and antistate iterations of gender self-determination are read through the lens of Judith Butler’s writing on the fractious relationship between ethical responsibility and politics. Focusing on Butler’s engagement with Emmanuel Levinas through a Jewish tradition, the author argues that trans politics have grounded claims to liberal individual and radical collective sovereignty alike in a diasporic metaphor of displacement from a rightful home. In the final analysis, Butler’s work outside of the theory of gender’s performativity helps make clear that gender, as a vector of self-determination and political assembly, advances colonial and settler interests—even when trans.

  PublisherDOI

• Children of the Sexual Politics of Abortion and Transition

  GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article elucidates the connection between anti-trans and anti-abortion political movements, looking closely at laws banning gender-affirming care in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022. In particular, the article claims, “anti-abortion and anti-trans political successes are floated by a moral crisis over a fantasized, imperiled child.”

  PublisherDOI

• The Trans Woman of Color’s History of Sexuality

  Journal of the History of Sexuality · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trans Auto-Antonym Theory (The Masc–Femme Dialectic)

  Paragraph · 2023-03-01 · 16 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Despite its imperative to include all gendered positions under one umbrella, ‘trans’ is continually riven by intramural confrontation over the differences between its masculine and feminine iterations. Whether in political organizing, on social media or in the pages of academic trans theory, it sometimes seems like ‘trans’ is subject to an interminable and gendered custody battle. Dissatisfied with the terms of masc–femme antagonism, this essay uses the gendered interfaces of critique and autotheory to enmesh the work of Jules Gill-Peterson and Paul B. Preciado. Reading into the interdependence of Gill-Peterson’s and Preciado’s texts yields a different theory: trans as an auto-antonym, a word that produces opposite meanings depending on context. Treating trans as auto-antonymic conjures a relational and even erotic escape from the naturalization of gendered antagonism in trans theory, affirming the unexpected bridges, reversals or ‘sex changes’ of specifically trans writing.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a historiography of the lesbian transsexual, or the TERF's nightmare

  2023-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This essay asks after the possibility of making the transsexual lesbian signify as a historical mode of sexuality, as a contribution to an anti-TERF method in trans and lesbian studies. What logics of mid twentieth century gender and sexuality are responsible for the opacity of transsexual and transvestite lesbians prior to the 1970s, despite the ample evidence that desire between femmes played a central role in trans social life? To move towards such a historiography and method, the author considers two paradigmatically difficult cases. First, Louise Lawrence, a well-known trans women in the San Francisco Bay Area who transitioned entirely do-it-yourself in 1944, and whose long term relationship with a partner, Gay Elkins, is high opaque in the archival record. Second, the essay considers the compulsory heterosexuality embedded in the medical logic of transsexuality in the 1960s, arguing that the medical ontology of the transsexual vagina was itself dependent upon the avowal of its immediate and exclusive use for penetration by straight men, making transsexual lesbians implausible despite their evident existence.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eli Erlick

  Harvard University

  100 shared

• Fernando J. Benetti

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  100 shared

• Joanna Marie Harper

  100 shared

• Christopher G. AhnAllen

  Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital

  100 shared

• Alex S. Keuroghlian

  Harvard University

  100 shared

• Genny Beemyn

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  100 shared

• Daphna Stroumsa

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  100 shared

• Christina L. Macenski

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  100 shared

Awards & honors

• Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction
• Children’s Literature Association Book Award
• Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the Universit…
• research fellowships from the American Council of Learned So…
• Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria