| Andrea Long Chu | |
| Birth Place: | Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Period: | 2018–present |
| Subject: | Literary criticism; trans rights |
| Language: | English |
Andrea Long Chu (born 1992) is an American writer and critic. Chu has written for such publications as n+1 and The New York Times, and various academic journals including Differences, Women & Performance, and Transgender Studies Quarterly.[1] Chu's first book, Females, was published in 2019 by Verso Books and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In 2021, she joined the staff at New York magazine as a book critic.
Chu received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2023 for "book reviews that scrutinize authors as well as their works, using multiple cultural lenses to explore some of society's most fraught topics."[2] She is a transgender woman.
Chu was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1992. Her father was finishing a medical residency at the University of North Carolina and her mother was in graduate school at the time of her birth. Her father is of Chinese descent.[3] A few years later, Chu moved with her family to Asheville, North Carolina. Although she described Asheville as a "very hippy dippy kind of place," Chu said that she was "raised pretty Christian." She attended a small Christian school. Her family belonged to a conservative Presbyterian church. Chu described her childhood as "saturated" with Christianity.
Chu graduated with a B.A. in Literature from Duke University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from New York University.[4]
Chu is the book critic for New York magazine and has previously written for The New Yorker, Bookforum and n+1.[5] To date, she has written critical reviews of books by Hanya Yanagihara, Maggie Nelson, Octavia E. Butler, Ottessa Moshfegh, and The Velveteen Rabbit.[6] [7] Chu has also contributed op-eds to The New York Times, including "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy." In 2021, Chu published a full-length profile on writer and model Emily Ratajkowski for The New York Times Magazine and has maintained a friendship with her since.[8]
In 2018, Chu published "On Liking Women" in n+1 magazine. The essay considers Chu's own gender transition, with Chu writing: "I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them." It discusses Chu's fascination with Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto and contrasts her attitude about her gender transition with previous iterations of feminist thought.
Writer Sandy Stone praised Chu's essay for "launching 'the second wave' of trans studies." Noah Zazanis, in The New Inquiry, expressed ambivalence about "On Liking Women" from a transmasculine perspective, writing: "If turning your back on manhood is an ultimately feminist act, what are we to make of the decision to become a man?"[9] Amia Srinivasan noted in the London Review of Books that the essay "threatens to bolster the argument made by anti-trans feminists: that trans women equate, and conflate, womanhood with the trappings of traditional femininity, thereby strengthening the hand of patriarchy". Chu responded to Srinivasan's comments in a dialogue with Anastasia Berg that was published in The Point.
Chu's first book Females was published in 2019 by Verso Books. The book was selected as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, poet Kay Gabriel wrote that in Females, "Chu makes a claim about what she calls an ontological, or an existential, condition. Being female, in her account, is a subject position outside and against politics."[10]
Chu wrote the March 2024 cover story "Freedom of Sex" for New York magazine. In the essay, Chu argues that "in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history... For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom."[11] [12]
Fellow New York writer Jonathan Chait disagreed with Chu's rights-based argument while praising the essay's "honesty" for acknowledging the different sides of the debate.[13] The Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis criticized Chu's "full-throttle libertarianism," calling it "about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs."[14]
In a 2018 interview, Chu said that she was in a relationship with a "wonderful cis woman" who was very helpful in preparing for Chu's sex reassignment surgery. Discussing the relationship, Chu stated, "[h]eterosexuality is so much better when there aren't any men in the equation."