A Short History of Trans Misogyny

“Jules Gill-Peterson is one of the most original thinkers on gender of the past decade; now in this beautifully written and argued book, she makes her compelling vision accessible to everyone.”
—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

“This is a sharply argued work by a brilliant thinker. By placing current the familiar and current political attack on trans femininity in Europe and North America within a much broader global and historical context, this text provides us with a rigorous and scholarly understanding of the origins and rationale of such violence. It educated and challenged me and it will become a vital contribution to political thought and organising around gender.”
—Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue

“In Jules Gill-Peterson’s provocative and generative framing, trans misogyny is not a minoritizing term for describing the disparagement of femininity in trans women; it is a ubiquitous, infrastructural pressure that effects everyone to some degree, informing the hierarchy of lives deemed worth living. Details inside.”
—Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution

“A Short History of Trans Misogyny is a nuanced, wide-ranging, and instantly canonical account from one of our foremost historians. Rich and eloquent with archival detail, this is a trans history that honors the complexity the subject deserves, that exposes the violence of colonial and neocolonial forms of sexualization, and that describes spaces of refusal to this brutality, both within the past and as threads of resistance in our present political landscape. An urgent, propulsive, and profound book.””
—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

“Reading A Short History of Trans Misogyny, one can feel Gill-Peterson going to lengths to animate and honour the rich lives of the femmes she writes about through archival research.”
—Amelia Abraham, Gay Times

“[Gill-Peterson] gives us a much-needed account of the genesis of trans misogyny and its subsequent history.”
—McKenzie Wark, Nation

“Gill-Peterson’s analysis enables us to think both more concretely and more ambitiously. In order to effectively counter the current surge of anti-trans legislation, we will need to follow her lead.”
—Paisley Currah, Yale Review

“An interesting and necessary intervention…Gill-Peterson charts a historical course back through the past few centuries of Euro-American colonial violence to locate the birth of transmisogyny as we know it.”
—Harron Walker