2026 IGSF Public Lecture with Susan Stryker

On Changing Gender: A New History of the Concept

For this public lecture, the IGSF welcomes leading trans studies scholar Susan Stryker. In this lecture, drawn from her recently published book Changing Gender (2026), Stryker offers a revisionist history of the concept of gender. Rather than locating its origins in the psychomedical and social-scientific work of John Money in the 1950s, Stryker traces a longer history in which gender never lost its connection to grammar—a history that traverses such seemingly disparate subjects as nineteenth-century phrenology, mid-twentieth-century cybernetic theory, and psychedelic science during the Cold War.

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