ABSTRACT
Historian Jules Gill-Peterson is the author of the 2018 book Histories of the Transgender Child. In this article, based on archival research in the Medical Records Office of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Gill-Peterson criticizes the conventional historical narrative of when “transsexuality” first emerged as a discourse of surgical-hormonal-legal transformation that results in a culturally legible “change of sex.” Gill-Peterson focuses on the patient file of a black transmasculine person in the 1930s named “Billie” who does not desire a vaginectomy, or closure of their vagina, due to the negative consequences this could have on their marriage and the financial stability it provided. While this refusal of genital surgery might mark Billie as “non-transsexual,” Gill-Peterson develops a trans-of-color critique that reframes Billie’s life choices. Billie is a fugitive who escapes toward a freedom beyond the boundaries of transsexuality as it has been conventionally understood, in ways that showcase that discourse’s racial specificity.
