Amid attacks on transgender health care that cast the field  — and transgender people — as relatively new, an upcoming book details a long history that spans generations and continents. 

“A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States,” by some of the most respected experts in transgender health care, tracks that story. The 794-page volume due out February 1 from SUNY Press is the first of its kind, a deeply researched, serious look at transgender health and wellness across the ages. It’s edited by Carolyn Wolf-Gould, Dallas Denny, Jamison Green and Kyan Lynch and brings together the writing of more than 40 authors. The book took a decade to compile, according to the editors. 

It comes out as transgender health care faces one of its most perilous threats: a presidential administration that has signaled it will bar transgender people from accessing gender-affirming care. 

“We hope that it’s used to recognize diversity, which is now being shut down,” Green told The 19th. “Transgender people are real. And secondly, this is not a sexual perversion.”

While the book focuses on transgender medical advances in the United States, it starts by tracing transgender communities globally across early civilizations, illustrating that transgender and gender-diverse people have flourished in every part of the world. The book argues that in many cultures, transgender people were celebrated and revered, until those cultures came into contact with Western influence.

While medical transition has often been painted as a new phenomenon, the authors cite examples of early gender-affirming surgeries, cross-dressing in ancient times and ceremonial participation of gender-nonconforming people.

“There are a number of references to early time and that people have been trying to take care of themselves and their gender with nonmedical ways, or medical ways,” Wolf-Gould said.

The book goes on to explain that as research developed around sexuality, transgender people were central to writing their own stories. 

“Histories of how trans individuals sought to live authentic lives in the twentieth century have generally been told through the lens of the work, writing and private musing of medical experts,” the book notes.

But authors note that it was transgender people who sought out researchers like the famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey and asked him to study them, not the other way around. In short, transgender people drove their own stories, the book explains. They were not “discovered” by cisgender male doctors. 

“[Transgender medicine] kind of started out as White cisgender people looking at trans people and telling them who they should be and what they needed to do, but over the last several decades, that has really reversed and changed, and now it is being directed from within,” Wolf-Gould told The 19th. 

The new history, which centralizes transgender people, comes at a time of unprecedented attacks at the state and federal levels against trans rights. Many of those attacks rest on the myth that transgender identity is somehow new and changeable. While every major medical association has endorsed transgender health care, “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States” offers a deeper road map for transgender people and their care providers.

It also shows how even before current medical technologies that allowed medical transition — hormones, puberty blockers, surgical techniques — transgender people found ways to thrive as their authentic selves. That information could prove deeply impactful as states and the federal government aim to limit that health care. 

“We’re easy targets, because we’re probably a smaller minority than some other minorities, and easy to victimize,” Denny said. “And that’s exactly what’s happening, and that’s why maybe our book will turn out to be especially relevant. We certainly didn’t set out for it to happen. I was kind of hoping we would be out in front of that by a couple of years.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of pages in the book and misspelled Kyan Lynch's first name.