Depathologizing trans childhood: Racial justice and the history of plasticity by Julian Gill-Peterson

Presented by the USC Department of American Studies and Ethnicity’s Race, Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster.

As trans health care shifts toward an ostensibly affirmative model, how has it actually foreclosed the depathologization of trans childhood? This talk explored the histories of trans children and the interactions with medicine during the twentieth century. Paying attention to how the invention of gender and the medical model both relied upon a racialized concept of children’s presumed plasticity, the political project of depathologizng and defending trans childhood today is reframed as a question of racial justice.