Writing
Books
Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2022). A paperback with a new foreword was released on September 3, 2024. For a 30% discount, use discount code NYUAU30 here. The 2024 Foreward, Preface, and Introduction are online here.
“What Sex Does,” an adapted excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book (with new material on the Supreme Court and abortion), New York Review of Books, May 27, 2022.
“To Challenge Trans Injustices, We Must First Understand Why They Exist,” an excerpt from the book’s preface, Rewire News Group, May 31, 2022.
Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge, edited by Monica J. Casper and Paisley Currah (New York: Palgrave 2011).
Transgender Rights, edited by Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006).
Selected articles, and shorter pieces
Paisley Currah, “Gender Wars,” The Yale Review, Spring 2024.
Paisley Currah, Jennifer L. Levi, and Shannon Minter, “Inside the Legal Fight for Trans Rights,” Boston Review, March 6, 2024.
Paisley Currah, “To set transgender policy, look to the evidence,” Nature, September 27, 2022.
Paisley Currah, “The Work that Sex Does,” in Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History, edited by Margot Canaday, Nancy F. Cott, and Robert O. Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Paisley Currah, “How a Conservative Justice Just Saved LGBT Rights,” Boston Review, June 19, 2020.
Paisley Currah with Aeyal Gross and Joseph Fischel, “Social Justice for Gender and Sexual Minorities,” Queer Legal Studies 6, no. 1 (2019).
Paisley Currah, “Transgender Rights Without a Theory of Gender?” Tulsa Law Review 52 (2017).
Alice M. Miller, Dianne Otto, Violeta Neubauer, Charlotte Bunch, Geetanjali Misra, Paisley Currah, Alda Facio, Scott Long, “Why the UN Needs a Broader Concept of Gender,” Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale University, June 2016.
Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen, “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011).
Paisley Currah and Lisa Jean Moore, “‘We Won’t Know Who You Are’: Contesting Sex Designations in NYC Birth Certificates,” Hypatia 24, no. 3 (2009).
Paisley Currah, “Gender Pluralisms Under the Transgender Umbrella,” in Transgender Rights, edited by Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang and Shannon Price Minter (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006); reprinted in Essays on Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, edited by Suzanne Goldberg (London: Ashgate Press, 2013).
Paisley Currah, "The Transgender Rights Imaginary,” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, Vol. 4 (2003) and reprinted in Gender and Equality Law, edited by Julie Goldscheid (London: Ashgate Press, 2013); Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations, edited by Martha Albertson Fineman, Jack E. Jackson and Adam P. Romero (London: Ashgate Press, 2009).
Journals
Founding co-editor, with Susan Stryker, of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, a journal published by Duke University Press.
“Trans-,"" edited by Paisley Currah, Lisa Jean Moore, and Susan Stryker, special double issue of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 3-4 (2008).
“The State We’re In: Locations of Coercion and Resistance in Trans Policy, Parts and II,” edited by Paisley Currah and Dean Spade, special issues of Sexuality Research and Social Policy 4, no. 4 (2007) and 5, no. 1 (2008).
From the Archives
Paisley Currah, “The Aimee Stephens Case: On the problem with describing a trans woman as an “insufficiently masculine” biological male,” blog post, October 15, 2019.
Paisley Currah, “Feminism, Gender Pluralism, and Gender Neutrality: Maybe it’s time to bring back the binary,” blog post, April 26, 2016.
Paisley Currah, “Keeping North Carolina Safe for Business,” blog post, April 13, 2016.
Paisley Currah, “The new transgender panic: ‘Men’ in women’s bathrooms,” blog post, March 31, 2016.
Paisley Currah, “How not to stop the transrace / transgender comparision,” blog post, June 18, 2015.
Paisley Currah, “Disappearing Women,” blog post, March 13, 2015.
Conference Proceedings, Transgender Politics, Social Change, and Justice Conference, edited by Paisley Currah, Gael Gundin Guevara, and Richard M. Juang (New York: Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2007). Sixty-six pages of proceedings–talks, essays, some translated into Spanish–from the 2005 Transgender Politics, Social Change, and Justice Conference, hosted by what was then called CLAGS at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Contributors include Simon Aronoff, Paty Betancourt, Kylar Broadus, Mauro Cabral, Ned del Callejo, Eli Clare, Max Cohen, Loree Cook-Daniels, Maria Belén Correa, Betsy Driver, Joshua Holiday, Richard M. Juang, Alexander Lee, Nathan Levitt, Samuel Lurie, Dee Perez, Marisa Richmond, Dean Spade, and Spanish translations by Gael Gundin Guevara.
Paisley Currah and Dean Spade, “Birth Certificate Sex Designation: An Overview of the Issues,” (leave-behind memo to NYC Bureau of Vital Statistics, 2003 from the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and the Sylvia Rivera Legal Resource Program).
Paisley Currah and Shannon Minter, “Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists and Policymakers” (New York: Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 2000).
