Jules Gill-Peterson is speaking to me from the future. She’s 11 hours ahead of me when I reach her over Zoom. While I’m sniffling and congested on a rainy Wednesday evening on my side of the screen in Brooklyn, Jules is welcoming the sun on a beautiful Thursday morning, the bright blue sky of Bangkok peeking in from the window behind her.
The Baltimore-based trans studies scholar is known for her work on the history of medical transition, specifically the history of how trans kids have attempted to access such forms of health care. In 2018, a time when US lawmakers were only just beginning to target gender-affirming care for minors—that is, puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery—she published her first book on the subject, Histories of the Transgender Child, a groundbreaking work that presaged the wave of health care bans that roughly two dozen states have since signed into law, not to mention President Trump’s various executive orders that have sought to further undermine access to such care at the national level.
Seven years later, the fight over access to these treatments has reached the Supreme Court with United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to a Tennessee ban on health care for transgender youth, the ruling for which is expected to be issued later this month. Gill-Peterson, along with several other experts in the field, coauthored an amicus brief for the court explaining how trans kids have existed long before contemporary medical science and that they’ve been transitioning, medically or otherwise, far longer than the “irreversible damages” crowd would claim. Whether or not the justices heed their expertise, the Supreme Court decision will have a major impact on the future of not only youth access to gender-affirming care in the US but trans American life writ large.
Beyond the legal brief, when she’s just speaking to me one-on-one, Gill-Peterson admits that she doesn’t personally love the term “gender-affirming care,” as she finds the neologism to be too euphemistic. She prefers instead to speak plainly about what’s actually at stake: hormones and surgery, not something abstract or intangible like affirmation or validation. She’s similarly specific when she explains why she’s in Thailand: She’s recovering from a “sex-change surgery,” a vaginoplasty to be exact, one that has neither “affirmed” her gender nor even “confirmed” it. Her linguistic tastes are not merely a matter of aesthetics but a choice that reflects her politics, which prioritize addressing and meeting trans people’s material needs, especially in this moment when we’re increasingly under attack.
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“We don’t need any more disgusting ‘trans joy,’” Gill-Peterson says. “We don’t need any more ‘gender euphoria.’ Let’s just get rid of all that and spend our time delivering real things that matter to people, things like hormones and sex changes and surgeries.”
It’s fitting, I tell her, that a trans historian like herself would now be traveling around the world for a surgical procedure, given the rich history of transsexual medical tourism that dates back generations. Entertainer and World War II veteran Christine Jorgensen was quite famously cornered into becoming a public figure after the New York Daily News made tabloid fodder out of her early 1950s sojourn to Copenhagen; Janet Mock recounted her own journey to Bangkok in 2014’s best-selling Redefining Realness. “Every single woman that made her whole life about getting this surgery by any means necessary,” Gill-Peterson says, “those women are absolutely my heroes. I feel lucky in some sense, if only sentimentally, to be retracing their itineraries.”
Gill-Peterson’s experience in Bangkok has also proven instructive. An associate professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University since 2021 and the author of two books, most recently 2024’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny, she spent five years trying “relentlessly” to obtain this particular surgery before being told last fall that she’d have to wait at least another year. “Despite having a PhD for studying this stuff, I’ve repeatedly failed to obtain this surgery myself,” she says. Changing jobs, switching insurance plans, moving between states—something always held up the process, even when she had explicit legal protections against health care discrimination based on where she lived and was working for an employer that “would’ve paid for something like 95 percent of the cost.”