Jules Gill-Peterson is speaking to me from the future. She’s 11 hours ahead of me when I reach her over Zoom. While I’m sniffling and congested on a rainy Wednesday evening on my side of the screen in Brooklyn, Jules is welcoming the sun on a beautiful Thursday morning, the bright blue sky of Bangkok peeking in from the window behind her.
The Baltimore-based trans studies scholar is known for her work on the history of medical transition, specifically the history of how trans kids have attempted to access such forms of health care. In 2018, a time when US lawmakers were only just beginning to target gender-affirming care for minors—that is, puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery—she published her first book on the subject, Histories of the Transgender Child, a groundbreaking work that presaged the wave of health care bans that roughly two dozen states have since signed into law, not to mention President Trump’s various executive orders that have sought to further undermine access to such care at the national level.
Seven years later, the fight over access to these treatments has reached the Supreme Court with United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to a Tennessee ban on health care for transgender youth, the ruling for which is expected to be issued later this month. Gill-Peterson, along with several other experts in the field, coauthored an amicus brief for the court explaining how trans kids have existed long before contemporary medical science and that they’ve been transitioning, medically or otherwise, far longer than the “irreversible damages” crowd would claim. Whether or not the justices heed their expertise, the Supreme Court decision will have a major impact on the future of not only youth access to gender-affirming care in the US but trans American life writ large.
Beyond the legal brief, when she’s just speaking to me one-on-one, Gill-Peterson admits that she doesn’t personally love the term “gender-affirming care,” as she finds the neologism to be too euphemistic. She prefers instead to speak plainly about what’s actually at stake: hormones and surgery, not something abstract or intangible like affirmation or validation. She’s similarly specific when she explains why she’s in Thailand: She’s recovering from a “sex-change surgery,” a vaginoplasty to be exact, one that has neither “affirmed” her gender nor even “confirmed” it. Her linguistic tastes are not merely a matter of aesthetics but a choice that reflects her politics, which prioritize addressing and meeting trans people’s material needs, especially in this moment when we’re increasingly under attack.
“We don’t need any more disgusting ‘trans joy,’” Gill-Peterson says. “We don’t need any more ‘gender euphoria.’ Let’s just get rid of all that and spend our time delivering real things that matter to people, things like hormones and sex changes and surgeries.”
It’s fitting, I tell her, that a trans historian like herself would now be traveling around the world for a surgical procedure, given the rich history of transsexual medical tourism that dates back generations. Entertainer and World War II veteran Christine Jorgensen was quite famously cornered into becoming a public figure after the New York Daily News made tabloid fodder out of her early 1950s sojourn to Copenhagen; Janet Mock recounted her own journey to Bangkok in 2014’s best-selling Redefining Realness. “Every single woman that made her whole life about getting this surgery by any means necessary,” Gill-Peterson says, “those women are absolutely my heroes. I feel lucky in some sense, if only sentimentally, to be retracing their itineraries.”
Gill-Peterson’s experience in Bangkok has also proven instructive. An associate professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University since 2021 and the author of two books, most recently 2024’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny, she spent five years trying “relentlessly” to obtain this particular surgery before being told last fall that she’d have to wait at least another year. “Despite having a PhD for studying this stuff, I’ve repeatedly failed to obtain this surgery myself,” she says. Changing jobs, switching insurance plans, moving between states—something always held up the process, even when she had explicit legal protections against health care discrimination based on where she lived and was working for an employer that “would’ve paid for something like 95 percent of the cost.”
“I just couldn’t deal with the American system of ‘gender-affirming care,’ even when it was nominally working for me at its absolute, pinnacle best,” she continues. “It’s one of my immediate takeaways after having surgery in Bangkok. Having a good surgeon with a positive experience—like, wow! If only we put the resources behind it so it could be like this for everyone.”
Instead, the Canadian academic’s adoptive home has done the opposite, passing health care bans in just about one out of every two states that prohibit minors from medically transitioning through all but underground means. Meanwhile, lawmakers at the national level are taking steps to prevent Medicaid recipients of any age—a quarter-million of whom are trans, according to a 2022 report from the Williams Institute—from using their insurance to cover puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery, as they are currently permitted to do in much of the country. Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which would do precisely that, has already passed the House and, as of this writing, is on its way to the Republican-controlled Senate. Should it succeed there as well, all it would need to then become law would be a signature from the president.
Given the situation, Gill-Peterson yearns for a reality check among the “Love Is Love” platitude-spouters, should they ever hope to pose any sort of meaningful challenge.
“All of these push factors are impolite to acknowledge in progressive liberal circles,” Gill-Peterson says. “They’d rather plug their ears than admit that health care is a material need. It’s not a slogan. It’s not, like, a thing you support in your heart. It’s an urgent, lifesaving need,” one that’s never been totally secure, though Gill-Peterson is taking action to change that.
Having grown up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Gill-Peterson’s academic trajectory took her from the University of Ottawa to Rutgers University, where she received her PhD in American Studies in 2015. Later that year, she accepted a teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh, where she began work on what would later become Histories of the Transgender Child, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best transgender nonfiction book in 2019.
A response, in part, to the post–“Tipping Point” narrative that would frame transness as a novel phenomenon (“Trans people are in a constant state of being discovered,” as filmmaker and historian Morgan M. Page once wrote), Gill-Peterson’s book examined how youth have medically altered their sex as far back as the early 20th century, decades before most of the loudest anti-trans mouthpieces in Congress were even born. As lawmakers have banned trans health care for minors, even criminalized its provision in a handful of states, often on the grounds of its being “experimental,” as Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey claimed in 2023, the research undergirding Histories of the Transgender Child has only proven more vital, and its thesis more eerily prescient.
“While most academics aim to make small discursive interventions, Jules Gill-Peterson has paradigm-shifted the field of trans studies multiple times,” says Charlie Markbreiter, an academic and organizer with Writers Against the War on Gaza whose next book, Rapid Onset, will examine how trans people became a political scapegoat. Histories of the Transgender Child “destroyed the myth that trans kids were ‘just invented,’” he adds, noting that her scholarship is “historically grounded, accessible to nonacademic audiences, and useful to movement struggles. [She’s] easily the most important trans studies scholar working today. It’s not even close.”
Not long after publishing her first book, Gill-Peterson began dating Kadji Amin, author of 2017’s Disturbing Attachments and an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. “My thinking owes a lot to our relationship,” she says of her boyfriend, who accompanied her to Bangkok and has been caring for her during her recovery.
As Gill-Peterson has achieved recognition for her work, to a degree “unprecedented for a transsexual woman of color in the academy,” she says that she has also experienced harassment and bigotry, even from her colleagues. “Kadji’s unabashed insistence on the importance of loving and caring for me, which includes standing up for me in our profession and telling the truth about how transsexual women are treated by people who claim to be their allies, has been instrumental to me carrying on with my research and work as the political situation worsens in this country.”
Having gotten together at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the two found themselves alone and isolated at home like so many other new couples at the time. But instead of passing the hours by making sourdough starters or going full Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on each other and imploding by summer’s end, the pair developed a collaborative working relationship, one that helped them clarify their political aims and creative ambitions.
“We got to spend a lot of time together, working from home and contemplating the practical value of academic research and writing in crisis,” Gill-Peterson continues. “For us, the bottom line was that we had to learn how to tell urgent and basic truths that academics are loath to admit. We spent a lot of time exploring the condescending elitism, anti-transsexualism, and misogyny of middle-class transgender thought and politics, which we both had sensed internally for years but had been strongly discouraged from critiquing.”
These lines of critique are blisteringly evident in her second book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, which Verso published last year. A vital new contribution to a lineage of transfeminist scholarship that includes the work of Julia Serano and Viviane K. Namaste, among others, the text interrogates how seemingly progressive neoliberal politics make trans people into assimilable subjects only through the exclusion of transsexual women, particularly those who are poor, Black, brown, sex workers, or immigrants.
No moment encapsulates this dynamic to me as clearly as when Jennicet Gutiérrez, a longtime organizer for queer and trans immigrants’ rights, staged a protest at a White House Pride Month reception in 2015, two days before the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. Gutiérrez was there to demand that President Obama stop the abuse of trans people in Immigration and Customs detention centers and release all LGBTQ+ detainees. Attendees—themselves a mix of activists, journalists, and other leaders from within the community—shushed her as she spoke, cheered loudly when Obama upbraided Gutiérrez for interrupting him, and booed as she continued to speak, eventually breaking out into applause after she was escorted out.
Additionally, Gill-Peterson’s book charts how this dynamic of transsexual exclusion stems from centuries of Euro-American colonial violence, spanning centuries and continents—and an expansive bibliography—while remaining succinct and unthinkably readable.
“I’ve found Jules to have an essential perspective and one that challenges me and how I do this work of ‘trans activism,’” Gillian Branstetter says via email. Branstetter is a communications strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union, the legal nonprofit helping to represent the trans teenagers and their families in the Skrmetti case.
Gill-Peterson’s work has illustrated for Branstetter the narrowing effect that identity-first politics can have at a time when “we need solidarity across difference,” she says. “Not just because my day job is almost by definition identity-first, but also because, as Jules’ work shows, identity itself is something we are often forced to shape for ourselves from what violent systems have left for us.”
Over the years, Gill-Peterson’s work—which, in addition to both of her books, also includes her editorial duties at Trans Studies Quarterly and her cohosting duties on the Death Panel podcast—has shifted focus toward constructing trans histories that lie beyond the research of American medical institutions. Her next book, Transgender Liberalism, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, will further shift that focus, presenting a “history of class differences between trans people and the ways in which the state and, by extension, medical institutions have served to not only delineate but intensify those differences,” she says.
The project began as a history of DIY transition, medical or otherwise, but reoriented over the course of her research as she realized how divergent our histories of the subject are. “Trans women and trans men’s transition practices are basically completely separate until the last 40 or so years,” Gill-Peterson says, adding that the latter group has historically experienced upward mobility even without hormones while the former group has not.
One of Transgender Liberalism’s main arguments, she tells me, is that trans health care in the US was formed to specifically address one group of people: poor trans women, who, despite sometimes being fixtures of certain queer neighborhoods, had become largely locked out of the labor market by the middle of the 20th century, with their lives and livelihoods criminalized and policed.
“The entertainers, the sex workers, the girls on the stroll—they were important culturally but living in extreme poverty for the era, not experiencing the same rise in income and wealth that others, specifically white Americans, were experiencing after World War II,” Gill-Peterson says. “The gender clinic was created to coercively rehabilitate them,” or at least some of them, “into working women and get them back into the economy.”
This month, the Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, a landmark case examining the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. It’s possible that the court will strike it down on the grounds that it’s discriminatory on the basis of sex, thereby giving the ACLU the legal precedent it needs to challenge similar laws in more than 20 other states, or at least the ability to return to the lower court that upheld Tennessee’s ban in the first place.
Such victories are unlikely, however, given the bench’s conservative majority. As to what the worst-case scenario might look like, “the worst-case scenario would be that things stay the same,” as Branstetter told me in a recent interview for Dazed. For the trans kids and their families who live in those states that have restricted youth access to lifesaving health care, “the world has already ended.”
Still, as Gill-Peterson makes sure to note, the mere existence of a law that grants people “the right to change sex,” as the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu once termed it, does not in and of itself make it possible for a person to do so. Therefore, she says, fighting for the freedom to medically transition demands a more comprehensive strategy than focusing on one single court ruling. “It demands a bread-and-butter approach,” one that prioritizes economic security and adequate resources for all, she says.
“One of the big findings I’ve taken away from this research [for Transgender Liberalism] is just how much the cost of medical transition has skyrocketed since the 1960s” when “transsexual women faced an average cost of $3,500 total for psychiatric evaluation, ancillary care, and surgeries at a gender clinic,” which translates to about $35,000 today. By the 1990s, that amount had doubled. A trans man’s phalloplasty, on the other hand, nearly quadrupled in price over that same time frame, totaling just over $200,000 by century’s end, when adjusted for inflation, which is “out of reach on a practical level for most people,” says Gill-Peterson, stating the obvious.
In this sense, she continues—if you remove all of the various health care reforms that have greatly expanded coverage options for trans people in the US over the past two decades, as countless lawmakers are hell-bent on doing—it is empirically harder to medically transition now than it was in the 1960s. This, she believes, “is the real political crisis—the real panic when it comes to transition, not the moral panic that we’re told exists.” The American health care system hasn’t made it too easy to transition; it has made it too hard, and she has the data to prove it.
When Gill-Peterson was invited to coauthor an amicus brief for the Skrmetti case, she was ready. For years, she’d anticipated that the Supreme Court would rule on precisely this subject—trans kids’ access to health care—and, as not only one of the very few trans historians in the academy but a leading researcher on the history of children seeking medical transition, she knew she’d eventually get the call to share her expertise.
“Around 2019, I started keeping a separate file for evidence I’d found over the course of my research that demonstrated the longevity, the reality, and the banality of medical transition in this country,” she says. “All good historians are just kind of pack rats.” Tennessee’s law and the arguments in favor of it allege that the basic forms of what we call gender-affirming care—that is, blockers, hormones, and surgery—are “novel” and “experimental” and therefore too dangerous to be made accessible to minors. Gill-Peterson’s brief debunks those claims, detailing at length that “gender dysphoria and these treatments” are deeply historically rooted.
“I’m not a lawyer,” she continues. “I’m not a legal scholar. But I am an empiricist,” which essentially makes her a textual originalist’s worst nightmare, textual originalism being the right’s legal analytical framework of choice that has proven quite strategic in their war on civil rights and abortion access. “This is an important moment for historians to weigh in,” she adds. “The Skrmetti case frames this kind of care in an ahistorical, even anti-historical, kind of way.”
Like the legal experts I’ve interviewed in the past, Gill-Peterson didn’t express any great optimism as to the impending Supreme Court decision. Nevertheless, she is no defeatist. Every case spawns new opportunities in and out of the courtroom, she tells me. “Rather than viewing this as proof that the tide has risen too high and we’re about to be overwhelmed, we have to have clarity about the wide array of places where politics can be done and material change is possible,” from state and local elections to workplace organizing, from the building of mutual aid networks to things I can’t legally advocate in writing. Regardless of how Skrmetti shakes out, Gill-Peterson believes that what happens after the ruling matters more than the ruling itself.
“When the battle’s playing out on a hundred fronts at once, we have to remember that there’s no single court ruling, no existential moment, no single referendum on ‘transgender rights’ that’ll decide how this struggle will go,” she says. “There has to be a constant sense that we’re building momentum for those of us seeking wonderful things. Things like unrestricted medical transition, sex changes, surgery—”
She reaches offscreen to grab her drink.
“—and iced coffee in Thailand! The girls love it.”
This piece was published in partnership with Them.
