Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny makes the bold and sophisticated claim that trans misogyny has less or little to do with psychological hatred of an identity and everything to do with the historical and ongoing devaluation of trans femininity and those who are perceived as trans feminine. Building off literature in both trans scholarship as well as feminist work on misogyny, this work is a masterclass in critical, historical analysis that embraces the ambiguity, tensions, and frictions of the past to interrogate the current framing of trans politics. Gill-Peterson’s account traces the contours of trans misogynistic violence through the overlapping textures of state-mandated policing and material possibilities. The book’s decisive claim is captured by Gill-Peterson’s coy remark: “Trans misogyny functions less as anyone’s personal failure than something like the weather” (x). Gill-Peterson offers a lesson in historical critique as she challenges the resilience of the “trans panic defense,”Footnote ¹ a logic that suggests that the background, weather-like “killability” of trans feminized persons is common and sensical (5). Such appeals ignore the impersonal and interdependent nature of sociality, where “[i]n truth, everyone is implicated in and shaped by trans misogyny” (viii). She questions the legitimacy of psychological explanations as well as identity politics that would fashion trans women as natural victims/aggressors by uprooting the conditions that historically allow the weather to appear so predictably violent.

The book sheds unparalleled doubt on the proposition that there is (or ever was) a collective noun that curtails the global and historical multi-valent productions of trans femininity as excessive of and in many ways only proximate to actual trans women, or individuals who speak about themselves as such. In this way, she maintains that trans misogyny bears upon sociality as a whole and not merely those of whom are most self-evidently victimized or spectacularized by it. Guiding each chapter is a broader question: why and how have trans women and trans femininity been targets of mistreatment by straight men, non-trans women, and gays and lesbians? One is not a trans misogynist primarily out of hatred of trans women, although it can involve this too. Societal structures that feminize individuals into material precariousness are trans misogynistic, and there must be a way of coming to grips with this phenomenon as central to trans politics.

A Short History of Trans Misogyny will be of interest to feminist scholars and activists alike, as well as graduates and undergraduate students concerned with the proliferation of global anti-trans movements today. Additionally, this critical history provides a generative and indispensable resource for philosophical projects situated within the logics of (trans) misogyny and misogynoir offered by Kate Manne, Julia Serano, and Moya Bailey. Gill-Peterson is explicit that the empirical and historical work of such an analysis is just as crucial as the critical tonus is, and her insight into the complexities of thinking misogyny through such a trans-historical terrain offers a much-needed challenge to conceptions of misogyny that lack an empirical basis of its dehumanizing nature.

The book begins with an inquiry into the trans panic defense by addressing where and when something like trans panic first emerges, which Gill-Peterson locates within the archive of the Northwestern provinces of colonial India. Gill-Peterson claims that this colonial gaze made the hijras appear through a colonial aperture as trans feminine, whereas before colonial imposition, their status was preceded by an older tradition of ascetic variation, infertility, and initiation into girlhood (30-31). Through various modes of feminization by the British, hijras became associated with prostitution, sexual immorality, illegality, and importantly a challenge to colonial control. “Hard labor would not make them into men; rather, hijras were so feminine they were regarded as ungovernable.” (34). By criminalizing their public appearance, this colonial feminization destructed the hijras’ economic way of life, paving the way for the charged encounters alluded to in Jennie June’s 1895 run-in with a male aggressor and US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton’s murder of Jennifer Laude 120 years later. Gill-Peterson asks her reader to make no mistake: “The blending of state violence with interpersonal violence is a signature outcome of the global trans panic, a deadly merger that persists to this day” (48).

She goes on to suggest that these narratives, brought into proximity across archival distance, teach three key incites: 1) trans misogyny should be understood as inextricable from forms of state-sponsored violence; 2) there is state-sponsored rationality to perpetrators of said misogyny claiming trans panic as a result; and 3) trans misogynistic violence is therefore configured as a panic response that attaches to a form of common-sense—i.e., something others share. By offering several vignettes or faces to the history of the panic, Gill-Peterson’s project aims to undermine the commonsense logic and predictable retaliations. Interpersonal examples of trans panic become justified only within the nexus of historical state violence and imperialism.

Gill-Peterson explores the relationship between feminization and labor, which she understands as co-constitutive within the antebellum city of the industrial US. The second chapter of the book focuses on Mary Jones, a Black sex worker in New York City whose life and testimony were spectacularized when she was detained and tried for grand larceny in 1836.Footnote ² While scholars such as C. Riley Snorton have offered accounts Jones’s testimony, its gaps, and absences (including Jones’s understanding of herself, her gender, her status as a Black sex worker amid an urban landscape, and the following sensationalism of her contradictory gender in local newspapers), Gill-Peterson begins where Jones herself leaves off. To this, Jones’s testimony functions less as a picture of trans identity as a portal into to a life caught “between extreme unfreedom, the commandment to become a different kind of property in marriage, and the hollow promise of capitalist freedom to work for wages…” (71). Gill-Peterson goes on to comment on the novelty of Jones’s story, how the movement between two cities (New Orleans and NYC) would have required extreme effort and resilience during antebellum. She is interested in what speculation into the contradictions and transitive moments of figures such as Jones does, what kinds of return it offers for an account of trans misogyny in general.

Ultimately, the critical fabulationFootnote ³ helps reveal what kind of relations held between trans feminizations and sex work—how sex work offered a concrete route to secure material needs and embraced contradictions (of desire?). (81). In this framing, trans womanhood “emerged as a play for mobility,” be it social, physical, and material. Her analysis is supported by C. Riley Snorton’s work in Black on Both Sides and Hortense Spillers’s notion of the “ungendering”Footnote ⁴ to read Jones’s travel and gendered realities as a site of transitive “flight” or fugitivity. By underlying the plays for mobility, Gill-Peterson emphasizes the material conditionality of constraint and legibility that disrupts any understanding of Jones’s experience as subsumable under an umbrella category of “trans,” but instead a fabulation nested in struggle and survival that will continue into the 20^th century as confrontations between poverty, policing, and sex work intensify.

The book’s third chapter, “Queens of the Gay World” concerns the historical phenomena of street queens in 1960s and 1970s American urban areas, predominantly as they encountered a shifting gay culture. Here, Gill-Peterson wonders why trans femmes have long been a “central symbol of gay culture.” (101) This she considers from the perspective of the street queen, or the underclass of the gay world, citing Esther Newton’s Mother Camp. Peterson’s analysis sits in dialogue with Newton’s interviewees as well as with discourses that emerged following the 1970s, which saw a drastic shift in how street queens and trans femininity became perceived by mainstream gay culture, especially the struggles for gay liberation. Whereas previously, Gill-Peterson argues that queens living and negotiating the streets displayed immense risk and determination against the conditions of living so publicly. Unlike their drag queen counterparts, who viewed themselves as performers, the threats of constant policing and ostracism by gay peers positioned street queens as vulnerable to premature death. Yet, “they were regarded by many as the bravest and most combative in the gay world” (106).

In one of the book’s most beautifully written and vibrant sections, Gill-Peterson compares the political emblem of the street queen to that of the sovereign king’s two bodies. Like the monarch, the queen of the gay world had both a literal body, male and flawed, and a metaphysical body that “promises high femininity and womanhood” (118). Queens such as Miss Destiny, who embraced her earthly body as a signal of her fate that would transcend the given to become real womanhood, offer a different, more complex gender lesson. Here, Gill-Peterson wants to embrace the ambiguity and opacity, it would seem, of allowing trans femininity to appear richly excessive. For one, most street queens understood themselves through a plethora of denominators and many were “far too poor” to be considered transexuals in a material sense (108). Theirs was a trans femininity informed by “the total criminalization of their lives,” where the risk of openly confronting the police was a positional given rather than a risky choice as it was for others in the movement for Gay Power. She argues that despite contemporary mainstream reductions that cast figures such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson as the exemplary “trans women of color” who helped secure gay rights to marriage and pride, reducing the street queen to a function of fate obscures more than it reveals. Trans femininity of the 1970s existed in tension with identity politics and a clear-cut difference between sex and gender. And still, street queens such as Rivera and Johnson maintained this friction as one that ought to galvanize solidarity between liberatory struggles, not divide them.

In a brilliant exposition of trans femininity as political struggle through esthetic excess, Gill-Peterson returns the reader to the scene of figuration, in which visibility has become also hyper-proximity to a logic of circulation. She critiques the ways in which street queens have become beacons of martyrdom through hypervisibility. Citing the words of C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, she writes that the necropolitical logic that circulates “Black trans women and the trans woman of color literally needs the material violence it invokes and records” (129). The results speak for themselves when the trans feminine figure functions to act as a “preface” that inspires panic, policing, or academic extraction. She critically evaluates the ways in which Venus Xtravaganza became too visible as a beacon of “the wishful thinking of a naïve politics of performativity” (126), citing Judith Butler’s account of Xtravaganza’s death.

Gill-Peterson wonders what performative and political work is done, however, when stalwarts of feminist thinking like Butler and Hooks choose to refer to Xtravaganza by her first name. In Gender Trouble Butler emphasizes her first name by using it twice: “Now Venus, Venus Xtravaganza,” while hooks calls Xtravaganza “Venus” throughout her 1992 essay on Paris is Burning and reserves the honorific for the film’s director. For Gill-Peterson, these gestures reveal a desire to make Xtravaganza one among many—caught in an ocean of racial and gendered violence. “Deprived of her surname, the name of her ballroom house, Xtravaganza became just another Venus, an object lesson to the reader” (127) conceiving of her as one Venus among many.

Thus is Gill-Peterson critical of trans visibility as it appears in the “hagiography” of the trans feminine figure, something that she argues not only reifies the trans woman through tragedy but holds at a distance the material sites of their struggles and negotiations. Street queens like Rivera and Johnson did not exist in the privileged economic or social positions to wait for liberation to include them, and their work cannot be understood apart from the material conditions that they defied collectively (through STAR) and brought to the attention of the Gay Power movement even as it turned its attention away from the more radical positions of trans feminized gays and lesbians. Where “the art of appearance, the work of the queen, cannot be made real without concrete political struggle. If her gay subjects abandon her to the judgment of the cruel world, even the queen cannot rise above their sin” (124). It is this insistence, from a contradictory and ambiguous position of the historical queens, that situates Gill-Peterson’s critique formidably within a growing literature that is skeptical of visibility’s liberatory promiseFootnote ⁵ .

Gill-Peterson’s empirical focus teaches that trans misogyny, even its most popular variants today, is nothing new. They have been fought for centuries in varying formations. Although the now popular positions of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS) and alt-right politics aim to eradicate the possibilities for trans feminine life, Gill-Peterson exposes the circulatory logic of this “anti-trans pundit class” (139). She argues that trans-antagonisms now are unified by a “scarcity mindset” that is fearful of what kind of world it becomes if the demands of trans feminism are met. Namely, Gill-Peterson suggests that the fear of becoming too close to trans femininity, by even having to inhabit a world with trans feminized folks, is an effort to establish a boundary that is a mystified attempt at securing a border that never existed in the first place (142).

If one is familiar with the pilot episode of the HBO show Pose, it will be difficult for one not to have in mind that glorious opening scene while reading the book’s conclusion, which ends with a call for a trans politics of abundance. Preparing for an upcoming ball event, the House of Abundance headed by matriarch “Elektra Abundance” decide to walk as “The Royal House of Abundance.” To realize this image, the House decides to put to good use royal attire preserved in the New York Fashion and Design Museum. Stealing themselves away on the eve of the ball, hiding in various exhibits, the House waits until the museum closes to pillage the space of its collection. They proceed to don their winnings, sparing no delectable object as they rush to make their fruitful escape, just in time to serve royal “realness.” The parallel between the House name of “abundance” and the spoils of looting the imperially invested site of historical expropriation is marvelously deployed. The copious artifacts of extravagance and royalty, which clothe no living being while displayed in the museum, are more than bountiful, and there is certainly enough to go around.

If, as Gill-Peterson explicitly suggests, feminizing people has and continues to become a method of dehumanization, then abundance “might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false scarcity” (143). It is in this final chapter that Gill-Peterson’s account of trans misogyny seems to most clearly diverge from Kate Manne’s account in Down Girl. Manne defines misogyny through a logic of “down girl moves” intended to suppress and police women viewed as all too human with natural responsibilities and dispositions given their status as women (caregiver, meek, etc.). Gill-Peterson argues differently if not more ambiguously on this point. “Feminizing people, regardless of how they see themselves, is the pretext for dehumanizing them” (143). It would seem that trans misogyny does not require trans women be perceived as less than human, and this is not the point. Rather, they are taken to be too extra, too feminine, too close. This is why trans panic, specific to trans misogyny, is a fear of those who take pleasure in femininity rather than their more socially acceptable lot of gender dysphoria (146). Gill-Peterson’s response to the obvious question of how misogyny and trans misogyny are related, then, is not one that sees trans misogyny as simply one instance of a broader misogyny. Hers challenges the logic of appearances and how gendered citizenship emerges at the juncture between the human and not—in the transitive and contradictory spaces and temporalities where trans feminization operates.

Gill-Peterson dedicates her final pages to the politics of the travesti to emphasize resistance. The celebration of excessive femininity captured by the concept mujerísma shows how travesti activists have fought against surveillance and erasure without desiring inclusion or identity recognition. They have embraced the opposite of becoming more tolerable, more easily assimilated into the social gaze that has long challenged their existence. In the final analysis, Gill-Peterson understands the force of the demand to be nothing short of it all, a material transformation not content with abstract identity politics. Whatever exceeds and overflows the panic of a gaze ought to be what a trans feminist politics has in sight and in hand.