Charles Taylor Book Award Honorable Mention 2025: Joanna Wuest, for Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement

Born This Way invites readers to unpack what has become a widespread social “fact”: the belief that sexual and gender identities are biologically innate. Through careful historical analysis, Wuest reveals how this framework emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as LGBTQ+ activists turned to mental health professionals to challenge the pathologization of homosexuality, forging a path that intertwined identity claims with emerging scientific authority. Demonstrating how the scientization of sexuality can be a double-edged sword—enabling acceptance and alliance while also opening the door to politically dangerous forms of essentialism and scapegoating—  Born This Way bridges the politics of identity and political economy, laying bare the ideological stakes of claiming biology as destiny.

Selection Committee:

Osman Balkan, University of Pennsylvania

Rebecca Ploof, Leiden University

Jessica Soedirgo, University of Amsterdam