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A Short History of Trans Misogyny
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An accessible, bold new vision for trans feminism’s intersectional and global future
“A beautifully written and argued book.” - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
There is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one frighteningly basic question seems never to be answered: why does it happen? If men are not inherently evil and trans women do not intrinsically invite reprisal—which would make violence unstoppable—then the psychology of that violence had to arise at a certain place and time. The trans panic had to be invented.
Award-winning historian Jules Gill-Peterson takes us from the bustling port cities of New York and New Orleans to the streets of London and Paris in search of the emergence of modern trans misogyny. She connects the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai’i to the lively travesti communities of Latin America, where state violence has stamped a trans label on vastly different ways of life. Weaving together the stories of historical figures in a richly detailed narrative, the book shows how trans femininity emerged under colonial governments, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public spaces, and the area between the formal and informal economy.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny is the first book to explain why trans women are burdened by such a weight of injustice and hatred.
Reviews
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.
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.
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.
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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.”
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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.
, Gay Times -
[Gill-Peterson] gives us a much-needed account of the genesis of trans misogyny and its subsequent history.
, 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.
, 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.