Changing Gender

Gender is one of the most heavily contested subjects today, as far-right movements push antigender ideology and the lives of transgender people are increasingly targeted. In Changing Gender, Susan Stryker, a leading trans scholar and the author of Transgender History, asks what we actually mean when we talk about gender, where the concept came from, and where it could go next. The book is part inquiry, part personal journey, and it moves across genres. Stryker takes readers along on her lifelong effort to understand what gender means and what it does. She follows the concept back to its roots in grammar and shows how it became a battleground in the culture wars. Her route runs from the origins of 'Yankee Doodle' to acid trips in Joshua Tree National Park, and from nineteenth-century phrenology to present-day anti-trans conspiracy theorists, with each stop revealing something about the history, oddities and creative potential of the idea. Throughout, she draws on her own life as a historian, filmmaker, activist and founding figure of transgender studies. The writing is deeply researched and lyrical, and it looks critically at limiting assumptions about gender held across the political spectrum. It also imagines how life might look if some of those limits were removed. Stryker's central argument is that changing gender means changing what it means to be human, and changing reality itself.