Jules Gill-Peterson is an award-winning historian and the author of two books: Histories
of the Transgender Child (2018) and A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2025). She
has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Mellon
Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. From 2021-2024, she also
served as a general co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Gill-Peterson
was honored with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University
of Pittsburgh in 2020, in recognition of her pathbreaking work on the history of transgender
youth. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and it has been adapted
for radio, television, and documentary film. She currently teaches at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore. Her next book, Transgender Liberalism: The Making of a Middle
Class, will be published by Harvard University Press.
Gill-Peterson’s scholarship has played a pivotal role as transgender healthcare and
legal recognition have become the subject of intense political attack. She co-authored
two amicus briefs filed on behalf of US historians to the Supreme Court in signal
transgender rights cases: US v Skrmetti (2025) and West Virginia v B.P.J. (2026).
She has also advised and addressed clinicians in transgender healthcare around the
world. Gill-Peterson has been widely interviewed and profiled, from Wired magazine
to the New York Times, and she is the narrator of Framing Agnes (dir. Chase Joynt,
2021), an award-winning documentary film on transgender history that premiered at
the Sundance Film Festival.
“The Constitutional Right to Transition: Reconstruction and the Political History
of Transphobia.” Berkeley Graduate Lectures, n.d. Accessed August 11, 2026. https://gradlectures.berkeley.edu/lecture/the-constitutional-right-to-transition-reconstruction-and-the-political-history-of-transphobia/.
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