Andrea Long Chu is an American writer who writes on gender, including her own gender transition. One of her pieces of writing was praised as "launching the 'second wave' of trans studies."
Early life
Chu gave an account of her early life when she was interviewed in 2018 by Michelle Esther O'Brien for the New York CityTrans Oral History Project. She was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her father was finishing a medical residency at the University of North Carolina and her mother was in graduate school. A few years later, Chu moved with her family to Asheville, North Carolina. Although she described Asheville as a "very hippy dippy kind of place," Chu said that she was "raised pretty Christian" and described herself as "very goody two shoes." She attended a small Christian school. Her family belonged to a conservative Presbyterian church. Chu described her childhood as "saturated" with Christianity. Chu went to Duke University for college, attending from 2010 through 2014. For three years she was a theatre major and graduated with a degree in literature. During college she did "lots of theatre." Chu is currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at New York University.
Career
In 2018 Chu published "On Liking Women" in N+1 magazine, an essay in which she considered her own gender transition, discussed her fascination for Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, and explored how her attitudes about her gender transition evolved in relation to feminist writings she had read. In the essay, Chu wrote, "The truth is I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them." Chu has also published in academic journals, writing about Hegel's remarks on Africa in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and about the impossibility of feminism in differences, a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Chu also wrote an opinion piece published in The New York Times, "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy." In that piece, written a few days before Chu underwent sex reassignment surgery, she discussed her gender dysphoria, her experiences with hormone therapy, and questioned the widespread belief that gender transitioning will make a trans person feel better. "There are no good outcomes in transition," she wrote. "There are only people, begging to be taken seriously." Chu wrote about her experiences as a teaching assistant for Avital Ronell at New York University, stating that based on those experiences she believed the accusations of sexual harassment leveled at Ronell by graduate student Nimrod Reitman. Chu's first book, Females, was published in 2019. Essayist and poet Kay Gabriel writes for the London Review of Books, " Chu makes a claim about what she calls an ontological, or an existential, condition. Being female, in her account, is a subject position outside and against politics." Chu's ontological approach to theories of gender/sexuality pulls from a variety of cultural and philosophical references such as Valerie Solanas's musings on Candy Darling, The Matrix, Lacanian psychoanalysis and castration anxiety, sissy porn, and the comedic bits.
Reception
Transgender writer and professor Sandy Stone praised "On Liking Women" for "launching ‘the second wave’ of trans studies." Mareile Pfannebecker, in the London School of Economics' Long Read Review, wrote of Chu's "admirable boldness," noting how effectively she "makes the case that the gender experience of trans women like her rests not on identity but on desire." Amia Srinivasan criticized "On Liking Women," writing in the London Review of Books that Chu's essay "threatens to bolster the argument made by anti-trans feminists: that trans women equate, and conflate, womanhood with the trappings of traditional femininity, thereby strengthening the hand of patriarchy." Chu responded to Srinivasan's criticisms in a dialogue with Anastasia Berg that was published in The Point. The New York Times published two reader letters, dissenting from Chu's essay "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy." The letters were published under the title "Feeling Better After Gender Transition." Kai Cheng Thom, writing in Slate, offered a detailed criticism of "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy." Conceding that Chu is "often brilliant," Thom criticized Chu's New York Times essay as potentially damaging to the cause of trans acceptance, by confirming "unfortunate stereotypes of how people talk and write about trans people." Thom went on to say:
n her piece, she uses sensational language that feeds the lurid interest in trans people’s bodies at the expense of our rights and privacy. And in arguing for her right to transition no matter her uncertainty at the outcome, she largely ignores what we do know about the outcomes of transition for most people. With an audience the size of the New York Times’, that could do real damage.
"My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy" also drew attention from conservative publications such as The American Conservative, in which commentator Rod Dreher highlighted Chu's essay as "an icon of our radically disordered culture."
Personal life
In her November 2018 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History Project, Chu said that she was in a relationship with a "wonderful cis woman" who was very helpful in preparing for Chu's sex reassignment surgery. Discussing the relationship, Chu stated, "eterosexuality is so much better when there aren't any men in the equation."
