“Contagion’s Antonym, or One Hundred Years of Waiting.”
A talk by Jules Gill-Peterson
Trans Youth Now series. Registration required.
This talk interrogates the charge of social contagion attached to trans youth, from the social sciences and psychology, to right wing media ecosystems and gender affirming care. Unconvinced that labeling social contagion pseudoscientific is an effective mode of critique, the history of trans medicalization suggests a deeper problem: institutional medicine largely agrees with its antagonists that the spread of transition in the general population ought to be, above all, reduced.
Jules Gill-Peterson, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a scholar of transgender history and the history of sexuality, focusing on racial histories of sex, gender, and trans embodiment spanning both institutional and vernacular science and medicine.
Gill-Peterson is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), recipient of a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. The book was the first to challenge the myth that transgender children are a new phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Drawing on a century’s worth of medical archival evidence, Histories of the Transgender Child establishes not just that trans children have a verifiable history, but that their presumed gender plasticity was in fact central to the development and racialization of transgender medicine. Gill-Peterson has been featured and written about the histories comprising the book in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post’s The Lily, and CNN.
About Trans Youth Now:
2023 has seen over 550 anti-trans bills proposed in the United States, aimed at everything from criminalizing gender-affirming care to banning trans people from using public restrooms. This series of lunchtime Zoom talks aims to analyze and decode the ways “transgender” “non-binary” and “child/youth” are constructed in the American socio-political imaginary as well as address the real life impact of oppression and stigmatization on the lives of trans/non-binary young people. Trans Youth Now features high profile thinkers from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, legal studies, and public health.
Free and open to the public. Brought to you by the Pembroke Public Health Collaborative. This series is co-sponsored by the Pembroke LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, the Brown Women’s Network, and the LGBTQ Center.