Join Susan Stryker and Jack Halberstam at the Bureau for the launch of Susan’s provocative, genre-bending new book, CHANGING GENDER.

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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.

After the event there will be time for Susan (and Jack) to sign copies of their respective books, which will be available for purchase at the Bureau.

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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.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press) among others. Halberstam’s new book is Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto, which will be published by MIT Press in August 2026. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.