Andrea Long Chu

Chu's first book, Females, was published in 2019. Essayist and poet Kay Gabriel writes for the London Review of Books, " 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." Chu's ontological approach to theories of gender/sexuality pulls from a variety of cultural and philosophical references such as Valerie Solanas's musings on Candy Darling, The Matrix, Lacanian psychoanalysis and castration anxiety, sissy porn, and the comedic bits.

[I]n her piece, she uses sensational language that feeds the lurid interest in trans people’s bodies at the expense of our rights and privacy. And in arguing for her right to transition no matter her uncertainty at the outcome, she largely ignores what we do know about the outcomes of transition for most people. With an audience the size of the New York Times’, that could do real damage.

Chu gave an account of her early life when she was interviewed in 2018 by Michelle Esther O'Brien for the New York City Trans Oral History Project.

In 2018 Chu published "On Liking Women" in N+1 magazine, an essay in which she considered her own gender transition, discussed her fascination for Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, and explored how her attitudes about her gender transition evolved in relation to feminist writings she had read. In the essay, Chu wrote, "The truth is I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them."

Chu has also published in academic journals, writing about Hegel's remarks on Africa in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (2018) and about the impossibility of feminism in differences, a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2019).

Transgender writer and professor Sandy Stone praised "On Liking Women" for "launching ‘the second wave’ of trans studies." Mareile Pfannebecker, in the London School of Economics' Long Read Review, wrote of Chu's "admirable boldness," noting how effectively she "makes the case that the gender experience of trans women like her rests not on identity but on desire."

In her November 2018 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History Project, 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."

Chu went to Duke University for college, attending from 2010 through 2014. For three years she was a theatre major and graduated with a degree in literature. During college she did "lots of theatre."

Andrea Long Chu (born 1992) is an American writer who writes on gender, including her own gender transition. One of her pieces of writing was praised as "launching the 'second wave' of trans studies."