Gil-Peterson, a historian by training, comes to UVic from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland
Photo courtesy of Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson
After ten years as Chair in Transgender Studies, UVic Professor of Sociology Dr. Aaron Devor stepped down from the position. Dr Jules Gil-Peterson, an associate professor of History from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has been appointed to replace him.
The role of the Chair in Transgender Studies is to generate “solid reliable information to drive social change and improve the wellbeing of Trans people.” One of their projects includes overseeing the Transgender Archives, which has been collecting documents, rare publications, and memorabilia of persons and organizations associated with Trans activism since 2007 and is the largest archive of Trans history in the world.
They also host the Moving Trans History Forward conference every two years.
Devor was the inaugural chair, meaning Gil-Peterson is the second person to fill the role. Her term officially began as chair began on July 1
Gil-Peterson is a historian by training, specializing in Transgender, medical and political history. She is the author of two books, Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) and A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024), and is currently working on a book on the class divides that shape the ways that people approached transition.
Part of what interested Gil-Peterson about the position, she said, was “the opportunity to be able to take my wealth of experience, both as a researcher and as a scholar, also public facing historian, but also just my kind of extensive research in this field and kind of anchor it in something where it can be a lot more effective.”
Gil-Peterson explained that she wanted the chair position to lean into its mission of catalyzing and fostering the highest quality research possible. To Gil-Peterson, her larger goals for the chair are to support and open opportunities for people — on and off campus — to research in order to help people achieve their academic and research goals.
Peterson said she hopes people can “work towards building up a nice big stack of really good peer reviewed research that we have to use, concretely, to defend the things we know are good.”
In Histories of the Transgender Child, Gil-Peterson explored the history of transgender children. What ultimately got her started on the book was finding old medical articles from the 60s from clinic in California “where they talked about these teenagers who were taking estrogen to transition to female, getting approved for surgery as a minor at the appropriate age and so on. And I remember reading that being like, ‘huh? Wait a minute, what?’” explained Gil-Peterson.
When it comes to medical advancement, Gil-Peterson explained, we should remember that major surgeries are fairly recent developments — often within living memory. Organ transplants, for example, were only consistently successful from the 1950s onwards, with one early example in the 1930s being Lili Ilse Elvenes, a transgender woman who underwent a uterus transplant.
“Things we would call breakthroughs, of course they’re recent,” said Gil-Peterson. “That’s normally considered a good thing. But part of the kind of brilliant strategy of anti-Transgender politics has been to sort of turn that into a disadvantage, rhetorically.”
“‘Well, this isn’t very old, how do we know it’s good? How do we know it’s been tested?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, isn’t that kind of the point that medicine gets better? It’s new?’”
Gil-Peterson explained that when historians approach history with a slow sober perspective, “[they] can play a role in helping us, not just have those facts, like ‘by the way this is how old this.’”
She questioned why, between sex change surgeries and heart transplants — both of which have been around for similar lengths of time — one is a concern, and the other one isn’t?
“Clearly it’s a moral or a political judgement … I think these are important public concerns that historians like myself should play a role in, and have a responsibility to think about how to frame those things for everyone.”
Gil-Peterson said that the chair has the responsibility “to make the most of this time, to do something really concrete, really valuable and something we can all feel proud and good about, and that we can use in defense of the people we care about, and the institutions that we know are doing good work.
“I feel incredibly optimistic and really excited to do that work, because I think, there’s nowhere else in the world, to be honest, where you have something like UVic, something like Victoria, the island, B.C., and these kinds of resources in place to let people work on these things together.”
