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 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.

Chu is the book critic for New York magazine and has previously written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bookforum and n+1.

In 2018 Chu published "On Liking Women" in n+1 magazine, an essay in which she considered her own gender transition, discussed her fascination with Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, and contrasted her attitudes about her gender transition with previous iterations of feminist thought.

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 contributed op-eds to The New York Times including, "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy."

Writer Sandy Stone praised Chu's 2018 essay, "On Liking Women," and stated that the essay "launched 'the second wave' of trans studies."

Mareile Pfannebecker, for 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."

Amia Srinivasan noted in the London Review of Books that Chu's essay, "On Liking Women", "as Chu is well aware, 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.

Noah Zazanis, writing for The New Inquiry, expresses ambivalence about "On Liking Women," saying that "the connections Chu draws between transfeminine transition and political lesbianism themselves parallel a narrative frequently used to condemn transmasculine desire" but that, "There’s some comfort in Chu’s reminder that gender renders us all through each other’s eyes."

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.

Chu published her first book, Females in 2019 by Verso Books.

The book was selected as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction.

In a piece for the LA Review of Books, poet Kay Gabriel said about 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."

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.

Later that year, Chu was named a staff book critic for New York.

To date, she has written critical reviews of books by Hanya Yanagihara, Maggie Nelson, Octavia Butler, Ottessa Moshfegh, and The Velveteen Rabbit.

In an interview for 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."