Jules Gill-Peterson

Just an incredible work. Gill-Peterson manages to rewrite much of the standard narrative of transitional medicine by drawing on histories of gender medical intervention in children, and ideas about their development as they shifted over time, and does so just so powerfully. I probably need to return to this to understand just how the concept of plasticity is being used, though I think its inscrutability is to some extent the point--that is is too slippery to be actually useful even by the people who constructed it as a concept.

Gill-Peterson's deep care for the children written about in the book is obvious and makes the book all the more compelling, as well as the argumentation about how the figure of the trans child as a marker of futurity, and with no history attached, does damage to actual trans kids (and, I would argue, also trans adults.) All of this is just so important and really challenging me to rethink not only my own work but also the way I frame my politics around urging care for trans kids. The conclusion kind of made me cry! It was so good and so important and I'm going to return to this again and again.… (altro)