Paisley Currah is Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work examines 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). 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, The Afterlife of Sex, which examines how sex distinctions in law, rendered largely vestigial by the feminist legal revolution, are being revived by conservative lawmakers. Tracing connections among bathroom bans, abortion restrictions, transition care bans, and social insurance programs, the book argues that anti-trans politics not only reanimate older sex hierarchies but has also become a tool of democratic backsliding and social control.

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.