Trans theorist and activist Susan Stryker has long understood the radical possibilities of undoing simplistic narratives and redefining binary terms. Her seminal 1994 essay identifying with Frankenstein’s monster rejected reductive, stigmatising definitions and instead explored the monster as a figure of power, of possibility, of self-definition.
In Changing Gender, Stryker is still interested in how we create new forms of existence, but her tool is something seemingly much, much duller: grammar. She acknowledges the dryness of the framework – then immediately takes the reader on a journey that is not just intellectually stunning, but thrillingly alive.
Stryker begins starkly, noting how trans people in the United States are currently the victims of relentless, co-ordinated attacks, from bathroom panics and attacks on healthcare to the fixation on “gender ideology” – a phrase she describes as essentially vacuous, useful primarily for signalling hostility to gender itself.
But Changing Gender is determined to break open language itself and explore imaginative horizons far beyond the limited worldview of the transphobic. Moving through linguistics, anthropology, medicine, technology and trans history, she returns repeatedly to the idea of grammar: a largely invisible system through which we categorise things, establish relationships between them, and make the world intelligible.
Grammar is how we come to understand reality – and gender, she argues, operates similarly, encoding assumptions about which bodies, identities and relationships are possible, desirable, even thinkable. Change our understanding of language, change our understanding of gender, and we change what realities are possible.
This idea could be punishingly dense and intellectual, but Stryker makes it exhilarating. She is funny, irreverent and energetic, moving from analyses of Judith Butler and John Money to descriptions of nights drinking with academic friends and her emotional experience with psychedelics, noting how these substances – like language – encourage neuroplasticity, helping humans to perceive the world differently.
Her language itself is exciting and convention-breaking. Every time Stryker codas political analysis with poetry, layers awe on top of academia, marries the cerebral with the sacred, she cracks open new possibilities of understanding, and encourages us to see how grammar, of all things, could be revolutionary – something we can break open and reconfigure to imagine another way for the world to be.
It’s that feeling of possibility that gives Changing Gender its extraordinary sense of energy, hope and emotional force.
Stryker ends with an invitation that becomes a call to action, writing: “It’s time to breathe. To rise. To reassemble. To transform. Come with me? It’s never too late to live, however close to death we all might be. It’s not too late, but it’s definitely time to go.”
My bags are packed.
Roe McDermott is an Irish Times columnist