A provocative new history of the elitist roots of contemporary transgender culture and politics.

It is often thought that transgender identity is a stable category that encompasses a culturally and politically unified group. In Transgender Liberalism, acclaimed scholar Jules Gill-Peterson upends such simplistic notions by showing that the transgender identity that emerged in the United States across the twentieth century, roughly from the New Deal era onward, was largely shaped by a middle-class elite who denigrated working-class practices of changing sex, especially those of transsexual women.

Drawing on the extensive archives of prominent figures and advocacy organizations, Gill-Peterson details how changing sex was domesticated over the course of the twentieth century by bourgeois orthodoxies from the New Deal to Great Society liberalism. In particular, the architects of transgender identity ensured its compatibility with liberal and neoliberal values that became prevalent in these periods, such as personal choice and responsibility, individual rather than collective flourishing, and individualist rather than structural approaches to opportunity. The guiding principle of this worldview was that the economic and social risks of transitioning should be privatized.

A history at once theoretically rich and vividly told, Transgender Liberalism leaves little doubt that transgender identity—alongside other identitarian frameworks—has displaced class consciousness and provided a bulwark against truly transformative mass politics.

Jules Gill-Peterson is Professor of History and Research Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria. She is the author of A Short History of Trans Misogyny and Histories of the Transgender Child, winner of the Lambda Literary Award.