On Changing Gender: A New History of the Concept

For this public lecture, the IGSF welcomes leading trans 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.

Susan Stryker holds a distinguished visiting appointment at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is an Emmy Award–winning filmmaker for Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria; co-editor of the multivolume Transgender Studies Reader; and author of Transgender History. Her work is collected in the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader, edited by McKenzie Wark.