“Changing Gender” — A Book by Susan Stryker on the Concept of Gender, Trans History, and Society

On August 25, 2026, the American publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of Macmillan Publishers) released in English the book Changing Gender. Its author is the American scholar, historian, filmmaker, and founding figure of transgender studies Susan Stryker.

Susan Stryker is professor emerita at the University of Arizona, a visiting fellow at Stanford University, and an Emmy Award winner for the documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005), which chronicled the historic 1966 uprising of trans women and drag queens in San Francisco. Stryker stood at the foundation of academic trans studies: she authored the seminal monograph Transgender History, co-edited the two-volume anthology The Transgender Studies Reader, and co-founded the peer-reviewed journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her 1994 manifesto “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” became a classic of queer theory and laid the groundwork for autotheory, affirming the dignity of trans embodiment against medicalized and societal pathologization.

Stryker’s new work is a hybrid autotheoretical inquiry blending intellectual history, cultural theory, linguistics, and memoir. The impetus for the book was the dramatic escalation of culture wars and coordinated legislative assaults against transgender rights across the United States during the first half of the 2020s. Observing how right-wing politicians turned attacks on “gender ideology” into a central instrument of political mobilization, Stryker poses a fundamental question: what do we actually mean when we talk about “gender,” where did the concept originate, and why does bodily transition provoke such fierce resistance from defenders of the normative social order?

Stryker traces the genealogy of the concept, showing how it migrated across disciplines. Originating as a grammatical category in linguistics, the term “gender” was adopted in the mid-twentieth century by medicine, sexology, psychology, and sociology to distinguish biological sex from socially learned roles, subsequently becoming a cornerstone of feminist critique. The book explores unexpected cultural layers: from an analysis of the eighteenth-century satirical tune “Yankee Doodle,” which mocked deviations from normative masculinity in colonial America, to nineteenth-century phrenological theories attempting to tether human social function to cranial anatomy. Drawing on archival research, Stryker also revisits the 1970s, examining psychologist Deborah Heller Feinbloom’s Transvestites and Transsexuals: Mixed Views and early moments when trans women were excluded from feminist spaces in Boston.

A significant portion of the book is anchored in the author’s direct personal observations. Stryker recounts her time at Stanford University in the spring of 2023, juxtaposing conversations with students at the campus LGBTQ+ center QSpot with her firsthand attendance at a lecture by far-right commentator Matt Walsh. Examining the mechanisms behind anti-trans moral panics, she links contemporary political rhetoric to the microtargeting strategies of Cambridge Analytica and the insights of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, which analyzed the fear of permeable bodies within proto-fascist Freikorps culture in Weimar Germany. Stryker argues that trans people serve as a convenient scapegoat for reactionary politics, bearing the brunt of societal anxiety during a period of profound epistemological crisis.

The monograph ultimately leads readers to recognize that changing gender extends far beyond individual transition or personal self-expression. For Stryker, rethinking gender entails transforming our understanding of humanity and the parameters of reality itself. Refusing to view gender as a rigid binary enclosure, the book articulates the creative potential of trans embodiment, opening new horizons for bodily autonomy, equality, and collective solidarity in the contemporary world.