Molly Volker '26
On Thursday, February 20, the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department welcomed Professor Jules Gill-Peterson to give the 38th Annual Diane Weiss Memorial Lecture. Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She has authored two books, Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) and A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024).
Peterson opened the talk with a discussion about the recent removal of the term “transgender” from the Stonewall memorial website by the National Park Service. This is a move that has been widely talked about as an example of the Trump administration’s attack on transgender people in the United States, in contrast to the appearance of government support that the existence of the monument had supposedly lent to the trans community during prior Democratic administrations. Peterson pointed out that this perspective is misleading about what is actually going on–that monuments are not the most vital terrain of political struggle, and that federal support of the trans community has always been fraught and conditional territory.
The talk continued into a detailed history of government-supported transition, beginning during the era of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” Gill-Peterson narrated the 60’s era theory of the “white ghetto,” an attempt by the government and psychologists of the era to explain why queer white people at that time were living outside of societal norms and expectations. This framing led to a bargain between the welfare state and medicine, in which the state would support medical transition as a way of rewarding queer people for becoming economically independent and productive. Transition was treated as a process whose main goal was not bodily autonomy, but rather to “rehabilitate” disenfranchised people into societally accepted ways of life, primarily by enabling them to move into the labor force. In this way, gender clinics became the site of an early version of welfare reform, combining government attempts to integrate citizens into the labor force with medical transition.
Gill-Peterson explains how this project of what she refers to as “Great Society Transsexualism” has resulted in negative effects on the trans community, particularly in relation to the establishment of barriers to gender-affirmative care which were ultimately designed around assessing who had the potential to become a good worker and who did not. While seeming liberal, Gill-Peterson argued, this framing left trans people vulnerable to attacks from the right that frame trans people as a “strain on the taxpayer.” She encourages us to train our attention on the necessity of a politic that makes transition possible without subservience to the political economy. She also encourages us to focus our attention on the lived experience and struggle of the trans community, which is often rooted in class-based oppression, and avoid orienting efforts towards freedom and autonomy towards the acceptance of the state.
After the talk concluded, the room opened for questions, moderated by Professor Zora Duncan. Some questions that were discussed included: How do we disentangle histories of identity and welfare? How does the history of transition outside of the bargain combat notions of transition as reinforcing the welfare state? How do you negotiate the tension between wanting to resist liberal identity politics and the need to preserve, aggregate, and organize information around identities? In part, Gill-Peterson responded by suggesting that what trans people need is not so much a movement organized around trans needs, but instead a movement that strongly includes trans needs within an overall movement for economic justice.
Professor Gill-Peterson’s talk presented a comprehensive historical account of state-supported transition, providing context for events that are making headlines everyday during this current moment of political intensity, and placed these events in a historical timeline that allows us to understand how we got to this point.