This day-long workshop engages with Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press) by Joanna Wuest, Fund for Reunion-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies.

The manuscript demonstrates how the natural sciences and the mental health professions have been central to the fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights, and how bioessentialism became a principal epistemology of the neoliberal era. Born This Way is at once a celebratory and a cautionary tale, one which delineates a minority rights movement’s impressive victories, its powerful and persuasive allies, and the inherent limitations of identity-based social movements and biopolitical citizenship claims in the face of resurgent right-wing assaults.