Changing Gender

About this book

From the groundbreaking trans scholar Susan Stryker, a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself. With the far right weaponizing the rhetoric of anti-gender ideology and increasingly targeting the lives of transgender people, one question becomes ever more urgent and contested: What are we even talking about when we talk about gender? Where did the concept itself come from, and where might it go? In Changing Gender, the leading trans scholar Susan Stryker invites readers to join her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. She traces the concept's roots in grammar and shows how it has been transformed into a battleground in the culture wars. From the origins of "Yankee Doodle" to acid trips in Joshua Tree National Park, from nineteenth-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracy theorists, Stryker finds surprising places to tap into the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves in stories drawn from her lifetime as a pathbreaking historian, filmmaker, activist, and founding figure of transgender studies. Poignant and deeply researched, lyrical and authoritative, Changing Gender exposes the limiting assumptions about gender that span the political spectrum and imagines what life might look like if some of those limitations were lifted. Ultimately, Stryker argues, to change gender is to change what it means to be human--and to change reality itself.