Episode Details

This podcast was recorded about a week before its subject, Andrea Long Chu, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, so it doesn't come up in the conversation with Blake Smith, but it's interesting to keep in mind as he and I analyze Chu and try to understand the particular role she plays in the broader intellectual and journalistic ecosystem.

Our story begins in early 2018, when the hipster intellectual magazine N+1 published a long essay titled “On Liking Women.” The essay, which went rather viral, was about the author’s transition to being a woman, her fascination with the 1967 radical tract the SCUM Manifesto, the dynamics of sissy porn, and her complicated feelings about wanting to be a woman, wanting women, and the universal fear of being feminized.

Its author, Andrea Long Chu, was at the time a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and in all respects unfamous. The essay would change that, rather dramatically.

In the way that Ta-Nehisi Coates was, for a time, the black intellectual, and Wesley Yang was the Asian intellectual, Chu became, and perhaps remains, the trans intellectual of the moment. Later that year she wrote another splashy piece,“My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” for the New York Times. Her 2019 book, Females, got an immense amount of attention. In 2021 she was hired as a staff critic for New York magazine, and in that role has written a series of buzzed about reviews. She’s not famous, exactly, but she’s almost as close to it as journalists get it. She is now friends, for instance, with the genuinely famous Emily Ratajkowski, whom she profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and who later interviewed Chu for her own podcast, High Low with Emrata.

As she says to Ratajkowski, some of this success was a matter of timing. There was a space waiting to be filled. Trans issues had gotten big in the culture, and while there were a lot of good trans memoirs out there, and an increasing number of trans people making a name for themselves in the “influencer” space, there was neither an intellectual nor a magazine feature writer who had yet made a name for him or herself reliably and stylishly explaining the trans thing to the world. 

Chu has been able to step into this space so successfully because she is a stylish writer, because she has a command of the relevant theory, and also because she has that thing that so many it boys and girls of journalism have had: she’s a tease. She comes close and dances away. She reveals and withholds, issues grand pronouncements, and then implies that she’s just kidding … maybe.

Here she is at the end of her breakout essay,

I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish th