Andrea Long Chu

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. 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." She is a transgender woman.

Early life and education

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. 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.

Career Chu is the book critic for New York magazine and has previously written for The New Yorker, Bookforum and n+1. To date, she has written critical reviews of books by Hanya Yanagihara, Maggie Nelson, Octavia E. Butler, Ottessa Moshfegh, and The Velveteen Rabbit. 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.

"On Liking Women" 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?". 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.

Females Chu's first book Females was published in 2019 by Verso Books. Chu took Valerie Solanas (radical feminist author who famously shot Andy Warhol) as the motivation for writing this book. Frieze described it as "a work of memoir (sort of), a provocation, gender theory(ish), film and art criticism all rolled into one." As such, Chu's definition of femaleness does not refer to gender or biological sex.

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. 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."

Also in the essay, Chu coined the term TARL, or trans-agnostic reactionary liberal, to describe a third faction of the "anti-trans bloc in America today" in addition to the religious right and TERFs. She identified The New York Times as the "leading voice" for this newer strain of thought.

Personal life

In a 2018 interview, Chu said that she was in a relationship with a cis woman who was helpful in preparing for Chu's sex reassignment surgery.

Writing Books Authority: Essays (2025) Females (2019)

Essays