Gill-Peterson uses medical and psychotherapeutic records to describe specific children in the 1920s and '30s, such as a transgender girl using the alias Val.
According to Gill-Peterson, Steinach and Kammerer "mobilized the endocrine system’s now established developmental plasticity to bind sex to race.
As Gill-Peterson writes throughout the book, these medical professionals have "packaged profoundly normalizing rhetoric as scientific and progressive".
[11] She uses Donna Haraway’s concept of "situated knowledge," which rejects the supposed "objective universality" of medical establishment ideas about transness.
She recommended the book for its "insights that transgender children are not new, and binary sex and gender are...ideas reliant on a dehumanizing, racially coded conceptualization of the child.
[15] In 2019, the American academic and literary magazine The Rambling published a special issue about Histories of the Transgender Child.
[16] In the edition's introduction, trans author Rebekah Sheldon writes, "Gill-Peterson’s refusal of these adulterated pleasures, her conviction that the world is already adequate to itself and needs no missing language to mark the utopian horizon, may be her book’s most decisive break with something that was once called homosexual reading, and the one from which I find myself the most, if you’ll excuse me, left behind.