Sally Hines

Susan Stryker’s book Changing Gender, offers an urgent call to reconsider the meaning of “gender” – a call that arrives in extremely troubling times, a call that lands as a punch and brings a much-needed breath of fresh air to the “gender wars.”  

I write as a cis woman, as a gender studies professor, and as a feminist who has, over the last half decade, watched in despair as gender critical movements have manufactured a moral crisis around trans: A moral crisis that has curtailed the rights and recognition, and the health and well-being, of trans people, especially trans women.  A crisis that has taken the protection of human rights in the UK back decades. A crisis that has negated the crucial history of an intersectional feminism rooted in the work of social justice. Though a minority, gender critical activists are extremely well resourced and firmly networked in media and policy circles. Their hyperbolic discourse is tabloid-ready and a perfect fit for the fear and fascination of content production that fuels social media. Crucially, the “back to nature” social conservatism of gender critical ideology segues seamlessly into that of the right and far-right. The destructive impacts of gender critical thought and practice cannot be overstated.  

I am certainly not alone in my sadness and fury, and the opposition of most UK feminists to gender-critical politics is the silver lining in these turbulent moments. In her analysis of the meanings and practices of “gender,” Stryker’s book gives us the blueprint for a feminism that works to celebrate gender diversity and to collectively defend against the onslaught of transphobia perpetrated in our name.  

As always, Stryker tells a wonderful story. Moving seamlessly between the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary, the theoretical and the grounded, we are given an analysis of the myriad tellings and retellings of “gender,” of what the concept has done and, importantly, could – if we let it – do.  

This is Susan in top form, a tour de force from a seminal voice in gender and trans studies. Stryker cuts through the noise to provide an inspirational consideration of gender–as a concept, a politics, an experience, and a practice. What gender means, for whom, and what it might mean in the future are key questions of and for our time, and Stryker shows, yet again, great warmth, humor, creativity, and rigor in exploring these question. A transformative book.  

Red Washburn

It is March 2024, Women’s History Month. I invite Susan Stryker to give the keynote for the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at my institution, the City University of New York. I hate mornings, but I get up early to make her dark roast in my Brooklyn home and enjoy stimulating conversations about gender, archives, academia, justice, advocacy, language, culture, family, and identity, among other topics, in my kitchen as the sun pours in more and birds chirp on. We continue these chats after breakfast, in the car, after her lecture on the roots of gender in the Anthropocene, at dinner with my colleagues, students, and staff, and at the celebratory dinner I prepared for her and her friends over a fire in my yard; the deeper the conversation and the louder the laughter, the higher the flame seemed to rise. It was then I had the opportunity to learn more about Stryker’s current book as a work in progress. During and after the gift of time and discourse with Stryker, I reflected much on the grammar of gender in new and exciting ways as well as ruminated on my own nonbinary issue of WSQ (in which Stryker’s work appears), my own forthcoming nonbinary-literature manuscript project, and the archives I cofounded, the NYC Trans Archives. I am thrilled for Stryker and overjoyed to see this book in the world during this calamitous moment.  

I was an intellectual delight to read Stryker’s new book. Like all her important work – and mostly notably Transgender History, When Monsters Speak (edited by McKenzie Wark), The Transgender Studies Reader, and her work as cofounder of TSQ with my esteemed colleague Paisley Currah – this book is brilliant. It comes during a political moment when more critical discussion about gender—as it structures and affects epistemology, classification, constructionism, grammar, culture, theory, autobiography, identity, and current events—is needed to counter the alarming mainstream narrative. Stryker takes readers on a fun ride through intellectual genealogies of gender, drawing on grammarian Dennis Baron, including shifts in gender pronouns after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the early 1375 use of singular “they,” and the 1858 coinage of the genderless “thon”; sexologists like Magnus Hirschfield, archiving and advocating for trans people at The Institute for Sexual Science in Germany; John Money and his psychological and surgical practices, especially for intersex people; philosophies of gender, ranging from the three classifications of nouns—masculine, feminine, and neuter—discussed by Greek philosopher Protagoras to theories of gender performativity by contemporary philosopher Judith Butler; novelists like Leslie Feinberg, whose Stone Butch Blues is a working-class trans classic, and Jordy Rosenberg, whose Confessions of the Fox is stunning, a work of historical fiction about intersecting trans masculine experience across time; autobiographers like Joseph Israel Lobdell, Christine Jorgensen, and Lili Elbe, some of the earliest or most noted celebrities of trans experience in writing; and many interdisciplinary allusions to important cultural work about social change, including novels by Octavia Butler, photography by Nan Goldin, zines by the Gutter Dykes, magazines like Lesbian Connection; and exclusion from lesbian spaces like the Saints bar in Boston and other women’s communities. Using autotheory, Stryker also offers very moving insights into her own life: her family, including her mother, father, partner, kids, friends, and colleagues, among others; her work, including her dissertation on Mormonism and her films about trans activism; her taste in music and art; her experiences with psychedelics and the kink scene; her time on holiday, including in nature and in community; and her own journey with trauma and healing. Her candor is vulnerable, confessional, raw, refreshing, and inspiring. Overall, her book is beautiful, stimulating, and timely.   

Stryker writes, “History is not the past—it is the action of telling a story in the present. History is not a fact; it is a promise—the promise that the future will be as different from the current moment as the current moment has become from all the moments that have come before.… It’s time to make history, by changing gender, to change the world.” I second her call here, especially to explore the relationship between life and language during this bleak time in which trans people struggle to use bathrooms, see doctors, get work, play sports, study, travel, breathe, be, and live. The language we use is significant in how we express ourselves and our reality as well as treat each other with respect and dignity. History is now. The culture wars are now. Change is now. The time is now. As this book travels in the world, may we all recognize that “changing gender” is a basic form of human rights for trans people, who deserve the right to what Judith Butler calls “a livable life” as well as allies and all people who have a stake in questioning repressive gender norms. Tomorrow is not promised for anybody, so kindness and happiness must be a life value for all, including trans people. Stryker invites us to come with; let’s go! 

Riki Wilchins

Despite its nearly 400 pages, Susan Stryker’s Changing Gender is less like your typical academic book and more like slipping into a warm bath to listen to a good friend with lots of marvelous stories to tell.  

And tell them she does: those you thought you knew and those you’d never heard before. Who knew the nineteenth-century version of gender that Orson Fowler developed for phrenological purposes fully anticipated the twentieth-century version bequeathed us by John Money and Judith Butler? Or that Renée Richards was publicly outed by Tucker Carlson’s father? Or that “Yankee Doodle Dandy” was British soldiers’ ribald mocking of the upstart colonialists’ masculinity, and the feather he stuck in his hat and called “macaroni” was … well, never mind.  

Throughout are woven many stories of gender’s emergence in Stryker’s own personal life, along with pocket histories of its emergence in such disparate fields as anthropology, cybernetics, feminism, phrenology, sexology, and finally agnotology—the study of the deliberate production of ignorance, which grew out of the study of Big Tobacco but is now applied to the endless flood of “alternative facts” produced by The Anti-Trans Disinformation Complex. 

I particularly liked that Stryker—a longtime champion of understanding trans through theories of monstrosity—fully rejects what has become known as transnormativity and pulls no punches on how truly destabilizing trans bodies and identities are to our understandings of meaning, bodies, and identity.  

What she wants from all this is for us to move on from trying to decide what gender is and start focusing on what it does: on how it operates like a grammar or syntax for how we comprehend bodies and their sexes. This recalls theorist Judith Butler, who famously observed that gender was not the social expression of sex but rather that sex had been gender all along. Like disinformation scholar TJ Billard’s call for “better ways of making meaning,” Susan wants us to “tell a better story” by “inventing a new grammar and syntax for the reassembly of a world in need of transformation.” Exactly how we do this is left to another day.  

Like the life-long historian she is, Susan seems constitutionally if endearingly incapable of introducing a concept without its deeply researched backstory. And if the astonishing erudition that results from this occasionally leaves you feeling a bit adrift, wondering if you really need the Treaty of Westphalia or the advent of the Anthropocene, perhaps that’s just the price of admission on this particular, often intellectually exciting, ride. She repeatedly points out that this book has been gestating for a long time, and you get the distinct impression she has decided to leave it all on the court.  

And she does. I would have liked some analysis of how the gendering of bodies is inextricably connected with how we eroticize and engage them sexually. But this elision is common across trans studies, which still largely avoids—for some good historical reasons as well as many obvious political ones—engaging with the idea that gender is not just who we are but also what gets us hot, not to mention what gets us off. Desire anchors not just sex but gender.  

Similarly, while Changing Gender does explores the religious roots of antigender ideology, there is little on white Christian nationalism specifically, although among the left’s great failings is its refusal to acknowledge that what looks like a political war between Republicans and Democrats over trans rights is really a religious crusade waged by revanchist white evangelicals to impose their Biblical values on the rest of America. By which I mean genderqueers, women, and anyone nonwhite. You can’t fight what you won’t name.   

Unfortunately, feminism and the liberal left generally remain deeply ambivalent about trans people—our strange identities, bodies, and medical procedures. When researcher Chloe Souchere and I looked at public statements by eighteen of the largest progressive political groups, 100 percent spoke out in support of abortion and gay marriage, but that plummeted to just 44 percent for gender-affirming care.  

Changing Gender is a call to arms timed for this historical moment, when the left generally and feminism particularly are in dire need of a critical reengagement with gender—especially if they are to get off the sidelines and finally play a more robust role in the near-daily assault on thousands of vulnerable trans kids by their own state and federal governments.  

That clock is still ticking. As Susan warns us, “It’s not too late, but it’s definitely time to go.” 

Susan Stryker

Changing Gender is an experiment in both form and content: an attempt to take an eclectic, transgenre, autotheoretical style of writing honed in academic and subcultural venues into a trade publication aimed at a general audience. Its ambitions are both literary and analytical. The plot wanders and weaves—deliberately. Written in a first-person voice that directly addresses the reader, the authorial perspective is that of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, who observes while ambulating through the capitalist spectacle of the city; of the Situationists’ dériveur, who critically intervenes in that spectacular space, of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “schizophrenic on a stroll,” who cuts transversally through the social fabric to de- and reterritorialize the world as she moves. All of that critical underpinning is relegated to a bibliographical essay rather than the text itself, but it’s the method behind my madness. 

As my colleagues who’ve commented here all note, Changing Gender is a book filled with personal stories and historical vignettes; minilectures on topics of relevance; astringent pills of critical theory coated with just enough sugar to help the medicine go down; hot takes on the antitrans animus of the contemporary political climate; other takes on the hot contemporary geophysical climate that propose an end to the Enlightenment figure of Man, through changing the social system we’ve dubbed gender, to transform the Anthropos of the Anthropocene and orient us toward another future.  

I deeply appreciate their assessment that the book offers a fun ride as well as some useful interventions for these troubled times, though one that’s perhaps a tad longue durée in its historical framing. But if the neoreactionary techno-feudalists of Silicon Valley’s Nerd Reich who want to plant their seed in the stars envision a new christofascist post-Medieval that unseats and supplants secular Eurocentric modernity, why should I be any less ambitious in tracing the centuries-long roots of our present crises to the emergence of ideologies of embodiment rooted in the transatlantic slave trade, the global expansion of extractive capitalism, or the rise of settler-colonial nation-states? That’s the world that gestated the gender concept, and the world in which transness—a socio-somatic movement across socio-politically imposed boundaries, launched from an unchosen embodied starting place—becomes a strategy and practice of freedom, a jailbreak within a carceral biocentric regime dead set on convincing us that our bodies are natural skinprisons rather sensuous living loci of connection with all that is.  

None of my colleagues comment, however, on the wayward throughline along which the shards and set pieces of Changing Gender’s content is strung. It’s as a simple as the book’s presentation is kaleidoscopic. The book is not a history of people who have “changed gender,” not an account of transgender identity or social movements or sexuality, not a memoir recounting the peregrinations of my own embodied being-in-the-world—though it contains fragments of all those things to illustrate the central concern. Changing Gender is at root a revisionist intellectual history of the word gender itself, in English. It is about the concepts and assumptions we attach to it, what that word has come to mean and do, how it has changed over time, is changing now, needs to change further still, and what we might do with it if we try.  

In Changing Gender, I renarrate the hegemonic story that gender was once a strictly grammatical concept having to do the classification of nouns and pronouns that came, in the mid-twentieth century, to refer to “the social construction of sex.” I show, rather, that gender has had a centuries-long history of slippery association with sex and that the semantic and semiotic goals of grammatical gender are still at play in the cultural processes of sorting people into social categories. I recount a virtually unknown chapter in gender’s history—the extensive early nineteenth-century use of that very term in the debunked vernacular science of phrenology, where, just as today, it was used in discussions of the relationship between sexed body and psychological identities and social roles. I situate the mid-twentieth-century history of gender, usually understood as a social-scientific concept coined by medical researcher John Money and subsequently taken up by feminists, in the broader history of cybernetic theory from which Money’s ideas emerged. I show how those ideas were conscripted into Cold War geopolitics, thereby seeding a grain of truth in today’s reactionary conspiracy theories about “gender ideology” being imposed upon “traditional” (i.e., Christian) values and societies by secular (or Jewish) global elites. I document as well the unlikely relationship between mid-twentieth-century gender theory and the then-new science of psychedelics, both of which were grounded in understandings of human personality as fluid and pharmacologically reshapeable.  

The purpose of recovering and recounting this history, however, is not simply to enjoy a novel encounter with an unexpected past. It is to gather new tools and techniques needed to shatter a present moment that is spiraling ever more rapidly toward a deepening catastrophe. To change gender, not at the level of individual corporeality but rather the social system that imparts meaning to our bodies and their differences, offers a pathway toward changing a world in deep need of transformation. Changing Gender addressed the present—particularly the imbrication of antigender discourse with a range of reactionary political and religious projects—but it is not a how-to manual filled with proscriptions and prescriptions. It is a solicitation for coconspirators in the experimental, anarchic, trial-and-error project of building other futures together.