UC Berkeley Hitchcock Lecture with Jules Gill-Peterson

Join us for a Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lecture featuring Jules Gill-Peterson, Associate Professor and Diversity Champion at Johns Hopkins University. Gill-Peterson will be speaking on The Constitutional Right to Transition: Reconstruction and the Political History of Transphobia.

This lecture chronicles the remarkable life of Frances Thompson, who was born male and into slavery in Maryland in the 1830s. She was one of a handful of women who transitioned sex while enslaved, and she fled to Memphis after escaping bondage during the Civil War. In 1866, she was violently assaulted during the infamous Memphis Riots, and her testimony to Congress proved pivotal to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Ten years later, she was arrested for crossdressing and outed to the nation, allowing reactionaries to spin an aggrieved tale of deception with which they mercilessly prosecuted the end of Reconstruction.

Based on new research into Thompson’s life, and other black women like her, this talk will argue the right to transition is plainly part of the history and tradition of the Fourteenth Amendment—and that the Supreme Court’s perspective on this issue is utterly wrong. It will also suggest that the historical origins of political transphobia in American life concern the unfinished struggles of Reconstruction.

This in-person event will be held at the Eugene Jarvis Auditorium, Grimes Engineering Center on the UC Berkeley Campus, and will follow evolving public health guidelines.

For updates about this lecture and upcoming lecture series events, please visit the Berkeley Graduate Lectures website.

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