Reading Andrea Long Chu feels a bit like being on the fault line of an earthquake—the ground is undeniably shifting. Her essay “On Liking Women” last year in n+1 kicked off what some have called the second wave of trans studies, challenging the born-this-way ethos of traditional trans identity narratives. Chu offers a daring alternative: What if gender is not a matter of “who one is, but of what one wants?” She suggests that “transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire.”

FEMALES by Andrea Long Chu Verso, 112pp., $12.95

She has since made a name for herself skewering books by Transparent’s Jill Soloway (“self-importance alone could never guarantee writing this atrocious”) and Bret Easton Ellis (a “deeply needless book”), but the mysterious demands of desire remain her most resonant and provocative theme. As she wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times about her desire for a vaginoplasty: “This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.”

I recently met with her in Washington Square Park to chat about her first book Females, which springs from an unsurprisingly audacious conceit: “Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition.” For Chu, “femaleness” is the urge to be a vessel for another’s desire. Gender in this conception is defined not only by the self, but also by the other—it is the expression of what someone else wants.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.



I first came to you, like probably most people, through your n+1 essay. What do you think about that essay now and how has your life changed after publishing it?