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Trans Kids Are Found in History, Too
First and foremost, they teach us about themselves.
I learned some things from Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). It’s an academic book, and here I’ve phrased some of its arguments in more simple language. If you’re interested in the topic, I encourage you to buy and read this book.
How Long Have There Been Trans Children?
Although it is popularly claimed that trans children are a new phenomenon, they’ve been around a while. Trans children were documented throughout the 20th century, even before the word “transsexual” existed and even before there were gender clinics that offered medical support. For example, one trans girl who attended school in rural Wisconsin circa 1930 was allowed, with her parents’ permission, to use a bathroom appropriate to her gender.
Medicalization
Medicalization of sex and gender has a long history. Doctors experimented with altering the physical sex of intersex children beginning in the 1910s, often “against the personal feelings, lived experiences or family wishes of those subject to research,” Gill-Peterson writes.
Transgender adults advocated for similar procedures for themselves. Nearly always the person had to present “a recognized endocrine or genital ‘abnormality’,” essentially claiming to be intersex. One of the first trans men to receive medical support was Alan Hart in 1917–18. There is evidence of trans people receiving medical support in Germany in the 1920s. Dr. Hugh Hampton Young, a urologist at Johns Hopkins, was approached with such requests in the 1930s.
The “intersex” line of argument did not always work. Sometimes, when a person claimed to be intersex (whether they actually believed it or not, and whether it was true or not) to receive medical support for a gender transition, the doctor would deny their request, telling them they were “just homosexual” and not really intersex. As trans people advocated for themselves, however, medical professionals gradually began to change their assumptions. Johns Hopkins quietly opened the first gender clinic in 1965.
