Susan Stryker w/ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, CHANGING GENDER

Professor, theorist, writer, and author of Transgender History, Susan Stryker discusses her new book Changing Gender, a provocative, genre-bending call to reconsider the story we tell about gender itself. She'll be joined by local writer and editor Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.

That gender is a hotly contested topic becomes ever clearer as anti-gender 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.

Susan Stryker’s historical research, theoretical writings, media-making, activism, and academic field-building activities have helped shape the conversation on trans issues since the early 1990s. Stryker retired from the University of Arizona in 2020 and currently holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University's Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is the author of many academic and general audience works, including Transgender History. She lives in San Francisco.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, and the editor of six anthologies. Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “a remarkably grounded look at what it means to be fully alive.” Her next book, Social Distancing, will be published in March 2027, and her next anthology, ACT UP Beyond New York: Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the AIDS Crisis, will be out in Fall 2027.