Description:

Join us for a conversation with renowned gender theorist Susan Stryker: 

Changing Gender: Trans History in the Present 

In this lecture, transgender historian and theorist Susan Stryker will present work drawn from her autotheoretical history of the gender concept, Changing Gender (forthcoming August 2026 from Farrar Straus Giroux). She charts previously unexplored genealogy that relinks the contemporary concept to its roots in grammar, then traces its development through early nineteenth-century phrenology and its relationship cybernetic theory in the post-WWII years, highlighting the contributions of trans people to the term’s elaboration in the 1960s, among other lesser-known dimensions of the concept’s history. In doing so, she suggests how this new understanding of gender might reframe contemporary controversies.

About Susan Stryker

Susan Stryker holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and is Professor Emerita of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Arizona, where she directed the Institute for LGBT Studies for many years. She is also former Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. Dr. Stryker earned her Ph.D. in United States History at UC Berkeley in 1992. She is the author or editor of numerous articles, books and anthologies, including Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution. A collection of previously published short works, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader, was published by Duke University Press in 2024. Her new book, Changing Gender, on the intellectual history of the gender concept, is due out in 2026. She is also an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker for Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria.

This talk is part of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's annual series, Kaplan Conversations in the Critical Humanities.