Susan Stryker, one of the foundational figures in the discipline of trans history and founding editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the most prominent journal in trans studies, recently released her newest book, Changing Gender. On an international tour to promote the book, she recently passed through Ontario. I was lucky enough to hear her speak at both the Critical Feminist Histories (CFH) conference in Kingston on the first weekend of October and her public book launch at Glad Day Lit in Toronto soon after. Hearing her speak in person at this moment, amid escalating anti-trans politics and tensions at the Canada-US border, felt especially meaningful. 

Changing Gender asks us to critically historicize our relationship with a question that feels prodded to death in trans studies circles: what do we mean when we say “gender”? Stryker points out that the word itself, despite having been used in the English language for centuries, has only commonly been applied to human bodies since the 1950s. Before then, “gender” was predominantly only referenced in grammatical structure. Rather than treating the word as a timeless description of identity, Stryker historicizes the term, traces its roots in grammar, and follows the term’s semiotic transformation into the political and social categories we know today. This ultimately serves as an invitation to reconsider our relationships between language and the categories through which we make ourselves legible.  

This question feels particularly timely for those of us working in trans history. Many scholars are currently excited about what some of us at the CFH conference were calling the “transsexual material turn”: a renewed attention within trans history to the material realities of trans life, including hormones and surgeries, and the structural economic conditions that shape trans lives. This turn offers a way to move beyond the emphasis on identity and discourse, and (hopefully) engages more directly with class politics. 

This shift, however, is not without its tensions. During the Q&A session following Stryker’s keynote in Kingston, some audience members raised concerns about whose experiences might become central in a renewed attention to materiality. If this turn is championed predominantly by binary trans folks with a particular access to institutional power, what happens to considerations of non-binary experiences and those whose transitions do not interact with the state medical system? Could a movement toward materiality inadvertently narrow the field in a way that undoes some of the space that the last decade has worked hard to create?  

For me, Changing Gender offers a useful way into this conversation, not necessarily by resolving any tensions but by asking us to reconsider the relationship between the material and the linguistic. 

I was really struck by a portion of the talk in Kingston where Stryker set aside time to give our room full of historians a thirty-minute grammar lesson. She explained how, grammatically, nouns become objects based on cultural beliefs about the nature of the object. Some languages do this more explicitly than others (French, for example, has noun/pronoun gender categories with specific linguistic markers), but English too has markers that differentiate gender in object. 

Think about the difference between “cigar” and “cigarette.” The grammatical gender here doesn’t mean that a cigarette is inherently feminine, but that ideas about gender can shape the words we use to describe things, right down to the ink on the page. Stryker draws an embodied parallel in the ways we, like ink, also change shape depending on the genders assigned to our bodies. I had never made that connection before. The point was beautiful in its simplicity, and Stryker returns to it throughout the book: gender is a category that was not always applied to human bodies in the ways we understand it today, yet it has become deeply intertwined with how we understand ourselves. 

I’ve been left thinking about ink on paper. But having spent the last year working with this oral history collaboratory—as a written-word blogger, ironically—I have also been wondering about orality. Much of Changing Gender is about the written word. Yet, despite the many ways language remains fluid, writing fixes language into a relatively stable archival record that can be preserved. It makes words durable and available to all our usual academic methods of surveillance and classification. 

Recording someone’s voice creates a record, too, but as anyone who’s worked a transcription job will tell you, speech is full of moments that resist the apparent certainty of written translation: pauses, hesitations, contradictions, laughter, and the moments when someone is reaching for a word only to decide that another one fits better (how relevant this is to the tensions discussed in this book!). 

I find this gap really interesting. The sparse written records left behind by past trans people can never fully convey the conversations we’ve had, again and again, about who we are and how we differ from one another. Written text often preserves the label, but what happens to that sound of reaching for the word before deciding another works better? How do we tell a history of the way that gender fits in our mouths rather than as ink on our pages? 

Admittedly, I haven’t finished Changing Gender. In the portions I’ve read, though, I haven’t encountered much discussion of the mouth, orality, or speech. (Interestingly, Stryker does briefly note how “the difference between a noun and its grammatical [gendered] classification remains unnamed when speaking.”) This isn’t a criticism of the book’s scope; it’s doing remarkable and historiographically important work of its own. What it has done, though, is open a different question: what might a history of gender look like if we paid attention to the spoken, ephemeral, relational ways we make ourselves known? 

I find it a reflex to keep conclusions on my identity textually redacted. I say dyke when it’s funny, transsexual when I need to make a point, transgender in interviews with broader audiences, and any number of other identifiers along the way. My transness is the amalgamation of the material choices I make day in and day out, and who I am is a composite of those choices—all of the mixed labels included.  

Honestly, I suspect more of us do this than we might initially admit. Behind closed doors, in queer spaces disjointed from the ever-cloying reach of neoliberal identity politics, we routinely play with identity labels and deploy them ironically and affectionately, often satirically. We know words can be useful without needing to be static or definitive, that a label can be both meaningful and a joke, that sometimes the most accurate way to describe ourselves is a tongue-in-cheek refusal of the seriousness of the categories imposed upon us. Much of this happens orally and ephemerally, in the ordinary conversations through which queer communities make and remake ourselves. 

Stryker’s Changing Gender reminds us that the words we use to understand ourselves have histories, and that those histories matter. I want to extend that invitation to the conversations that leave no tidy record: the jokes, the hesitations, the contradictions, and the slippages in the many ways we tell our own stories. If the material turn asks us to attend more closely to the realities of trans bodies, perhaps we must also attend to the messy, embodied, and fleeting ways those realities are spoken into being.  

Our histories live in our ink, but they also live in our mouths. And how can we preserve that, really?

Ally Krueger-Kischak (any/all) is a writer and researcher from Wilmot Township, Ontario focusing on rural solidarity, trans rural histories and futurities, and working-class/"hick" environmental resistance. They joined the Collaboratory in October 2025 as a Research Assistant for the Drag Kings Oral History Project and continue as Resident Blogger. They hold an MA in History with a Collaborative Specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto.