Jesmyn Ward - On Witness and Respair

From the groundbreaking trans scholar Susan Stryker, a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself.

That gender is a hotly contested topic becomes ever clearer as antigender ideology continues to be mobilized by the far right and transgender people's lives are increasingly targeted. But what are we 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 ride along on her lifelong quest to uncover what gender means and does. She traces the gender concept's roots in grammar and tells the story of how it transformed into a battleground of 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 tune in to the origins, idiosyncrasies, and generative possibilities of the gender concept. Along the way, she weaves 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 is a book for our fraught time, exposing limiting assumptions about gender across the political spectrum and imagining 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.