This contribution explores the reality of trans children’s lives, the social contexts in which they evolve, their games and their emotions; but also trans children’s struggles, the strategies and spaces of autonomy they deploy to cope with the multiple violences they experience.

For this talk, Ruby Faure draws on some twenty auto-biographical accounts of trans childhoods from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Germany, England, France and the USA. Documenting and politicizing Western trans childhoods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries enables us to make several shifts in relation to the debates we are currently engaged in in France. Firstly, by rejecting the question of the “newness” of these forms of life, and affirming their multiple realities against repeated denials. Then, by questioning the exclusive medical framing of transitions and trans history, to highlight not only the social practices of transition, but also individual and collective epistemic practices of body signification. Finally, by imagining – from the experience of childhood – the emergence of a political critique aimed at dismantling cisheteronormative adult society, its binary architecture and its unequal distribution of life chances.