Photo credit: Rachel Crowl

Paisley Currah is a Professor of Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and of Political Science, Women’s & Gender Studies, and English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 2024-25, he will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Currah has written widely on transgender issues, including on topics such as discrimination, sex reclassification, and the transgender rights movement. From 2014-2019, he co-edited the leading journal in transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Currah’s 2022 book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, was selected as a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ Prose Awards in the Government and Politics category and received the best book award from the Politics and Sexuality Section of the American Political Science Association. (A paperback with a new forward will be released September 3, 2024. You can pre-order now.) His new book project situates the current wave of anti-trans legislation within a longer history of the regulation of gender. He is also working on an edited volume, with Blas Radi, on transgender people and the state in the Americas.

Currah’s popular work has appeared in The Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, Nature, and The Yale Review.

Currah has advocated for transgender rights at all levels of government. He was a founding board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute, served on the founding board of directors of Global Action for Trans Equality, and sat on the advisory board of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT Program.

Currah co-edited, with Shannon Minter and Richard Juang, Transgender Rights, the first book on the movement for transgender rights, which won the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Currah received an MA and PhD in Government from Cornell University and a BA in Political Studies from Queen's University at Kingston, Canada.