Jules Gill-Peterson

Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award; the editor of The Conversation on Gender Diversity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023); and a general coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her next book is A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso, 2024).

At Radcliffe, Gill-Peterson is working on her next book project, “Gender Underground: A Trans History of DIY,” which reimagines post-WWII American trans history through the lens of do-it-yourself (DIY) transition and mutual-aid practices. As a vernacular medical and scientific science, trans people’s endeavors to survive and flourish without the sanction of the state, law, or institutional medicine are an overlooked body of expertise and practice, urgent in an era where anti-trans and antiabortion projects have disassembled the right to privacy and bodily autonomy.

Gill-Peterson received her PhD from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has previously held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Kinsey Institute, and she was the inaugural Public Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She received a 2020 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh. Gill-Peterson has written for Alta Journal, CNN, Jewish Currents, The New Inquiry, and the New York Times and has been extensively interviewed on trans issues, culture, and politics worldwide. She narrates the award-winning documentary film Framing Agnes (2022).