Paisley Currah is Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work explores how governments use sex classifications as tools of governance—shaping law, institutions, and everyday life—and why disputes over those classifications now sit at the crossroads of feminism, transgender rights, and democratic politics.

He is the author of Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (NYU Press), winner of the Best Book Award from the Sexuality and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association and a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award in Government and Politics. His essays and public scholarship have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, n+1, The Boston Review, Nature, and The Yale Review.

He is currently at work on a new book, Fiat Sex. Drawing on conflicts over birth certificates, parenthood, reproduction, identity documents, and sex discrimination law, the book examines how sex becomes a legal category and why a long-standing tool of state power has become a defining battleground of contemporary politics.

Currah is the founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press) and has served as an expert witness and amicus contributor in federal litigation involving transgender rights. In 2024–25, he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.