Rainbow crosswalk vandalism isn’t just an isolated local event, but a national problem

This is a joint blog post by Landon Getz and Alex Bond, appearing today on both their blogs. If you’re interested in reprinting it, get in touch.

From Grand Falls-Windsor, NL to Burnaby, BC, Pride is celebrated in Canada across the summer months. Towns and cities across the country raise the rainbow flag and celebrate with parades, concerts, and parties. Increasingly, many are following the lead of Sydney, Australia, which painted a giant rainbow crosswalk in 2013 to mark Sydney Mardi Gras. Local councils describe these as great ways to signal the welcoming and inclusive nature of the town, and celebrating its diversity.

New rainbow crosswalk painted white overnight in Gibsons on Sunshine Coast BC Canada. https://t.co/2rDEsqz1zu pic.twitter.com/LEA5yzSeYB

— Duane Burnett (@DuaneBurnett) July 13, 2019

 

Sadly, not everyone shares that view. Because also from Grand Falls-Windsor to Burnaby, there have been more than 40 incidents of deliberate vandalism of rainbow- or trans-flag-coloured crosswalks since 2015, with new vandalism occuring on an almost weekly basis. The damage ranges from tire burn-out marks, to paint, to actually trying to dig it up from the road. Further, this damage is often covered by local media, including an interview with someone from the LGBTQ2S+ community describing how disappointed they are, and someone from city council expressing surprise that someone in their town could do such a thing and vowing to have it repaired. That’s usually where the story ends.

The reality is that defacing rainbow crosswalks is quite obviously a nation-wide problem. Vandalism has been reported in 7 provinces (none that we could find in PEI, Quebec, or Manitoba), in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, and small towns like Eastern Passage, NS and Coldstream, BC. In some places, there’s repeated vandalism following repairs, including a record six times in one summer in Miramichi, NB.The effects are more than a bit of soiled pavement.

These events portray a repeated and deliberate attempt to show LGBTQ2S+ people that they are still not welcome, at least not openly, in these communities. Although city councils are aiming to show LGBTQ+ folks that they are welcome and supported, vandalism of these crosswalks shows that members of these communities, nationwide, do not always agree. And although it is a minority, it’s a sizeable one, with 1 in 4 Canadians opposed to same-sex marriage 14 years after it became the law of the land.

This is further reflected in the repeated criticisms of rainbow crosswalks in commentaries from religious groups, so-called “concerned” citizens, and others. This opposition sometimes takes the form of direct frustration with LGBTQ2S+ people and their “sins”, and sometimes takes a shot at the use of taxpayer dollars for “ideological” symbols, even though many rainbow crosswalks are paid for by private organizations.

Vandalism and vocal criticism tell and show LGBTQ2S+ folks that they still need to be careful where and when they embrace and openly share their identities, and that they still need to “code switch”, changing the way they behave or talk based on who else is around. This burden, of constantly being aware and choosing when to express oneself, is a tiresome effort and one that is not always available to the more visible among the LGBTQ2S+ community.

In media stories covering these acts of vandalism, they are portrayed as being one-off, isolated, local incidents. In reality, though, it’s a much bigger, nation-wide problem. However, acknowledging that the surrounding community has Queer-supportive folk, and ensuring visible allyship in many forms (including rainbow crosswalks) can go a long way in pushing back against these acts of vandalism. Collectively, the message vandalism to these symbols sends is that we still have a long way to go,and a lot of work to do, before LGBTQ2S+ folk are not just tolerated, not just accepted, but included in Canadian society.

Lessons for the academy from non-academic research: on management

Tags

alternative academic careers, grad students, management

I’ve never technically worked for a university. Two postdocs in government research centres, a stint at an NGO, and now at a museum mean the structures, pressures, and opportunities I’ve had in my professional research career of the last decade have been different to those of my academic (university-based) colleagues. It’s a useful comparison because, at least research-wise, we share many of the same goals. And whereas my friends at universities have teaching & admin, I have curation & admin (or more often, admin and more admin).

One area where I think universities can take a lesson from non-academic research environments is in management. As a rule, researchers make terrible managers, and managers make terrible researchers (exceptions do apply, of course), but when I compare the management I do/receive with that of academic colleagues, it strikes me as an easy win for universities.

By management, I mean the formal reporting, oversight, and support system in place for workers. This includes graduate students. Everything from taking leave to annual reviews and career progression to setting work plans and hiring in academia (as I’ve experienced it) could take something from outside and be improved.

 

Recruitment

Here, I’m mainly talking about graduate student recruitment. Often, it’s up to just the supervisor to deal with recruitment, resulting in a veritable mishmash of processes. Of course, the university will have a formal application/admissions procedure, but the steps before there (or in some cases where students are allocated after admission) is a bit of a mess. A few things to think about:

• are adverts written in a way that minimizes gender bias?
• what essential (required) and desirable (optional) criteria are there for the role? Are these assessed by the application, CV, or interview?
• who else is short-listing applicants for an interview?
• who else is sitting on the interview panel?
• what set questions are being asked of every candidate?
• how are criteria being scored & evaluated?

Daily management

Academics are used to a pretty loose reign and that flexibility is one of the incentives. The same goes for grad school. But there should be expectations of a standard set number of hours worked per week on an agreed schedule (allowing flexibility where possible) that takes into account other university-related tasks, such as courses, TAing, and professional development. I often say that students/staff I manage should work 36-40 hours/week, but I don’t have strong feelings on when those hours occur. Equally, there’s an expectation that once that agreed schedule is in place, deviations should be agreed or at least communicated (e.g., days working from home).

The same applies to annual leave. Staff and students do (should!) get a certain number of days off as annual leave, which should be taken with the approval of the manager. My take has always been that it’s up to each individual to manage their own time, and I will approve leave so long as there is leave remaining. But the key thing is that everyone knows how much annual leave there is, and when it’s occurring (which is particularly important when folks work remotely, and it’s not possible to easily tell on a given day whether they were working or on leave).

Annual reviews & work plans

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed is in how annual work plans are set, agreed, and evaluated. At the museum, I spent about 2-3 hours with each person I manage setting out their plan for the coming year (they put the first draft together themselves). We then go over it, look at how realistic is, what resources they might need, balance it with other commitments, and then monitor it about half-way through the year. At the RSPB, we allocated defined percentages of time for specific projects; we don’t do that at the museum in part because we had more externally-funded work at RSPB, and at the museum many projects run together and separating time isn’t terribly efficient or useful. The key, though, is that both the staff member and manager agree on the plan, and when progress isn’t being made, it’s reevaluated and actions put in place to allow the person to succeed.

At the end of the year, we again sit down and look over the work plan, see where the successes and challenges were, and use that to inform our plan for the year ahead. This can be easier for permanent staff, where HR structures are in place to support them, and their managers, when goals aren’t met. For short-term/contract staff and graduate students, this is harder because the length of the period of employment is set by external funding.

And the same principles apply when doing one’s OWN review/work plan. Many academics are left to their own devices, except for a short chat with a head of department once a year. A friend of mine at a university has less than half an hour a year with their nominal boss. This is woefully inadequate and results in a plethora of requests for activities throughout the year, often at short notice. Granted, it’s also trickier in universities where one can be beholden to several functional managers — one person assigns teaching roles, another has more interest in the research & admin side, and they don’t always (ever?) talk to each other when setting annual workloads.

 

Now, I’m not advocating for micromanagement (which seldom works, and takes a LOT of time), but I think the pendulum needs to swing back somewhat in university environments. Structures to support managers, both in their own work and in managing the work of others, just aren’t there and this causes a great deal of frustration, anger, and chaos. The flexibility, freedom, and independence is why many pursue careers in academia, but in many places (certainly not all, but most that I’ve encountered/heard of) there needs to be better and appropriate support.

Few in research get any training in effective management; heck, I’ve picked it up along the way. But a combination of being sensible, compassionate, and understanding combined with structures to support both my staff and I have resulted in, I like to think, most successes, and dealt with any bumps along the road in an appropriate way. There’s always room for improvement in any organization, granted, but I’ve found it to be one of the areas where academia lags behind non-academic science institutions significantly (for a variety of reasons).

Two’s company. Three’s a crowd. Breaking away from the ‘limited choice’ between emails or conference calls.

This is a guest post from Ed Morris, an ecologist practitioner for a large protected areas network in Canada.

 

I work for a large organization. I’m a public servant and an applied scientist. We have a main office, but many of us work in regional offices that are each separated by several hundred kilometres. Face to face meetings are increasingly rare, and you won’t see us attending conferences. So how do we stay in contact with one another? Mostly through email and conference calls. We’re addicted to Outlook.

It’s too easy to compose an email, add attachments and just keep adding names to the distribution list. Everyone does this, causing our in-boxes to balloon. Then the senders of emails are often disappointed with low response rates, and those few responses that do arrive are sometimes hastily thrown together at the eleventh hour. That’s not the outcome anyone wants.

As for conference calls, it’s easy to snoop into peoples’ calendars and schedule them into meetings. We’ve dropped the formality of using Robert’s Rules of Order. Yet, too few of us have the self-awareness to be a good participant, and fewer still have the skills to be a good moderator. We can all think of people who speak long and often, and others that never speak. Big booming voices that sit next to the phone, and quiet voices that sit beyond the microphones’ range. We’ve experienced people who have difficulty staying on topic. We’ve experienced people who derail the discussion with their alternate takes. Full disclosure: I am sometimes one of those people too.

I was about to make major revisions to a landscape ecology model, but wanted to discuss it with certain peers first. I loathed the prospect of writing a long-winded email, as it is a complicated subject. I also loathed scheduling a conference call with this particular combination of personalities. Neither communications tool was going to give a satisfactory outcome.

What did I do? After some thought I booked individual person-to-person phone calls. This decision will be obvious to some of you, but it was a lightbulb moment for me. It felt weird to break away from the ‘limited choice’ of email or a conference call. This is the unintentional corporate culture we’ve created.  

Those calls were fabulous. I set my phone to hands-free, and recorded them with a voice recorder. I posed questions, and did my best to be quiet while my peers spoke uninterrupted. Personality traits that would have been disruptive in a conference call never surfaced. We explored subjects in a way that we never could in a conference call. At one point I wondered if I should go to the trouble of editing the recordings into a podcast-like summary. Maybe. In any case, I have the information I need to proceed, and I know that my peers are more likely to endorse the final product.

Think about breaking away from the false, limited choice between email or conference call. A series of person-to-person phone calls can take more time, but it will be productive time. It is also more personal, which contributes to making you and your peers form a team in practice, not just in name. Maybe that too will help the next time you find yourselves in yet another conference call.

 

Wanderlust

There’s lots of discussion in scientific fields that involve travel about the relative merits of going somewhere far away for field work, a conference, or seminar. This post is not about those things.

As a kid growing up in eastern Canada, I remember the first time I went to British Columbia (for a lawn bowling tournament. Yes, you read that right). I remember touching the Pacific Ocean for the first time. I recall my first international trip, to Jamaica in 2003, and landing at the airport in Kingston. I remember my first flight to Australia in 2009, with a long layover in Melbourne (and a very nice chap who complimented me on my watch while I was too clueless and jetlagged to realize he has likely hitting on me).

In my professional life, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some incredibly amazing places, some where few others have been, and places where I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was the first person to step in a particular spot. It’s awe-inspiring.

A Google Map of the places I’ve done field work, and from where I’ve analysed data

In the field, we always brought an atlas, and could spend hours (HOURS!) just browsing its pages, imagining the landscape, the people, and cultures, the foods, the weather, and more. So over the last several months, I’ve been starting another map, one of places, for one reason or another, I’d quite like to see some day. Some I have almost zero chance of visiting, others are quite likely. Some are for professional reasons, others are more personal, and a couple are a mix of both. And with today being the autumnal equinox, with the days getting progressively shorter, the dark evenings are an opportunity to daydream, to wonder, and to flip through the pages of an atlas.

A Google Map of some places I’d quite like to see some day

 

So here’s to that sense of wanderlust that takes so many of us to the field, and to exploring our world.

The unreconciled dimensions

Tags

field work, LGBTQ, rural

I grew up in Atlantic Canada, a region comprising the provinces of Newfoundland & Labrador (9+ years), Nova Scotia (4+ years), Prince Edward Island (sadly never lived there), and New Brunswick (15+ years). It’s the sort of area where within about 5 minutes you can easily find a common connection (you both went to school with Jack’s cousin’s brother), where doors are still kept unlocked, and if you’re lost you just knock on the nearest door, and they set you right (after a cup of Red Rose tea and a Dare maple leaf cookie).

I spent uncountable nights camping in fields, forests, beaches, mountains, and rivers and was totally at home. I’ve hiked every marked trail in Fundy National Park (including two complete “Fundy Circuit” treks, a connected loop of 45 km of trail, including about half a dozen river crossings traversing the park). It’s where I did my very first field work, at the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory back in 2004. Where I discovered my love of the outdoors, working at Cape Enrage from 2002-2004. And where, despite not living “back home” for almost a decade, I still feel drawn.

I cut my teeth as a field biologist, working 3+ month field seasons for 9 years between 2005-2015, in some pretty remote places (check out a map here), some of which were me and one other person with no resupply for 11 weeks. I loved it. I had amazing techs and collaborators in the field, and I’d hire each and every one of them again if I could. We weathered massive gales, volcanic eruptions, semi-aquatic beach landings, and even one 3-day stranding. We lost generators and batteries halfway through the season, tents were destroyed, water in short supply, and challenges seemingly insurmountable. But we always made it through. I loved it.

What links my time in the field with growing up (and living) in Atlantic Canada is remoteness. They’re both places where there are few people, where it’s easy to get away or be alone, and teeming with nature. They’re also both not the most queer-friendly.

Here, dear reader, is the reconciliation I have yet to achieve: my love of ruralness/remoteness and my queerness.

And that pains me.

So it was with a stomach-clenching feeling that I read about the intentional vandalism of a rainbow crosswalk outside Riverview High School earlier this summer. That was my high school. The place where, for four years, I successfully(?) hid who I was out of fear while savouring my first introduction to science and research.

I’ve also had two field work instances where I’ve felt either unsafe or purposefully excluded because I was out (though lots of others where I’ve felt isolated).

– –

Being a queer scientist has been, for me, a series of reconciliations. I still remember when I was told that my out-of-semester research component of my honours thesis (4 weeks counting migrating seabirds in southern New Brunswick) would be *paid*. Until then I had no idea one could be paid to do science. I mean, I obviously knew several professional scientists at the university and the local Canadian Wildlife Service office, but that *I* could be paid to do science was revolutionary. I still remember telling a good friend and mentor, and he simply smiled.

And of course, the process of coming out is one giant reconciliation, of two lives lived in parallel, neither of which was entirely satisfactory. And at the time I first came out (September 2005), the advice included “have some cash, and a place to stay if things go badly”, and was only a few short years after Mathew Shepard’s murder.

Then for several years I thought I had squared every circle, and was wonderfully out and wonderfully science-ing. But it took meeting a visiting speaker in 2010 for the other shoe to drop: I could be a queer scientist. It seems silly to say, but I’d had no concept of what that meant, how to do it, or why one would even want to. But over lunch, it was like a wall came down (the product, dear reader, is a growing corpus of posts on this increasingly queer blog).

So it’s in this vein that I share with you the latest challenge I find myself facing: my love of rural places, the very places where I find it more challenging to be open and out.

Atlantic Canada has a reputation for being relatively conservative (particularly outside of major centres), strongly religious, and where “the men are men, and the women are too”. Of Canadian regions, it had the lowest support for same-sex marriage in a 2019 poll (PDF). Yes, there are wonderfully accepting pockets, and of course it will have a different level of acceptance than where we currently live, half an hour from central London on a fast train. I just wish it was slightly less awkward for queer folk.

This reconciliation was brought to the fore when I watched the 2017 British film God’s Own Country which, without spoiling, features the struggles of a young Yorkshire farmer, and the two lives he seems forced to lead. I do highly recommended it. Though not parallel, there were definitely glimmers of similarity between myself and Johnny Saxby (though, thankfully, not the drinking to excess), both looking to merge who we are with where we are (or indeed where we might want to be).

– –

On the field work side, it was particularly wonderful to see the British Antarctic Survey’s team at King Edward Point raising the rainbow flag on LGBT STEM Day. And it reminded me how much I ended up code-switching in the field, even through I’m still out, and that’s generally known among my fellow field workers. But I’ve never brought a rainbow flag to the field, though that will change on my next field trip.

And perhaps, eventually, we’ll end up back in Atlantic Canada, queer, happy, and rural.

2019 goals

Tags

goals, year in review

I’ve done an end-of-year “By the Numbers” post for the last 6 years, but last year was the first time I did a looking-forward post on goals for the year ahead. How’d it go?

Well, one of the long-languishing projects got submitted in December. The other remains largely untouched

Research kickstarted: tick!

Grant application: err, no. Sigh.

First main supervisor PhD student: Yep! And there’s still a week to apply if anyone’s interested!

Museum digitisation: Oh yeah. Lots of fundraising around this one, but it’s paid off. Hopefully more on this soon.

Natural history paper: not quite.

Genetic barcoding: uh, sorta?

Photography: that’s a hard “no”, sadly.

L&F posts: made 17, which is far more than I thought.

 

So what about 2019?

Get that languishing project off that was missed in 2018 off my desk. I mean honestly, it’s been forever. With a paper submitted in December, this is now my “oldest” active project. Sorry, postdoc supervisors & collaborators… it’s coming, I promise!

Same goes for that grant application. But at least there was some logistical progress (and the granting agency ditched deadlines!).

Build a local group of friends – it always (n = 4) takes me about 2 years to build a group of outside-work friends. A mix of not having kids, not living where I work, and moderate introversion. So far so good for 2019.

Provide better mentorship – I think “mentor” is a title best applied by others to someone who provides mentorship. But ultimately who mentors the mentors? Thoughts on this one gratefully received!

Make STEM (or at least my little corner of it) a better place for queer folk. Part of that is keeping up the same battles, but part of it is also looking to gear up for what’s next on the horizon. There’s some exciting stuff already planned for 2019, but I know I already operate in a very queer-friendly online bubble. Thoughts? Let me know what I might be able to help with.

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and safe 2019 everyone!

Cultural memory and being queer in STEM

Tags

Coming Out Day, LGBTQ, Matthew Shepard

Everyone has those “remember where you were when you heard X” moments in their life. One of the prominent ones in my life was 20 years ago today. I was sitting in my bedroom eating dinner and watching TV. It was October 7th, 1998 and I was 15. 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die, which he did 5 days later.

And if you want to watch the iconic news broadcast from October 12th in full, it’s here.

My own journey to figure out who (or what) I was was still nascent and confusing. It would still be another 7 years before I came out, but the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming was, for many (myself included), a watershed moment in queerness.

If one looked to mark gay/queer culture in North America by epoch, the 80s and early 90s were dominated by HIV. The late 90s and early 2000s, I contend, were dominated by greater connections made thanks to the internet, and to physical violence. We even had a term for it – gay bashing. Interestingly, this rise (and subsequent fall) can be seen in Google’s ngram viewer:

Shepard’s beating was the basis for the season-ending plot arc on the US version of Queer as Folk in 2001 at a time when the show was starting to become a staple of cable TV, and which I would sneakily watch in my shared dorm room at university when my roommate was elsewhere (the older among you will recall this was before youtube or catch-up or even the ability to watch videos on the internet at all!).

The story, and the reaction of the residents of Laramie was turned into the play The Laramie Project, which was put on at the campus theatre in about 2004, I think. I daren’t audition for fear it would let someone peek in the closet (despite playing a gay character that died of AIDS the previous year, but that’s a story for another post). The play featured interviews done by the playwriting collective with residents of the town, and explicitly did not show Matthew’s murder. I’ve also never seen footage of the actual fence to which he was tied and beaten to death, but in my mind, I have had the same still image associated with the event for the last 20 years.

And it might be convenient to consign these horrific events to the past, but they still occur regularly around the world. Maybe because they are now perceived as being more common, or because they no longer shock or resonate as they once did, they no longer receive either the media attention or national outcry they did 20 years ago. But let us not be complacent – there is still a great deal of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment out there.

In the UK, a newspaper columnist decried the “state transgender agenda“. And half of LGBTQ+-identifying 14 year olds reported self-harming. Some places still refuse to fly the Pride flag.

In Australia, 25 people were charged with hate-speech offences for comments made during the 2017 marriage equality postal vote. And no doubt the queer community is still grappling with the repercussions of putting its rights up for public debate.

In Canada, a video went viral of a man spitting on a rainbow crosswalk, which brought to story of an assault eerily reminiscent of Shepard’s and only two years later into the spotlight (and in the city where I did my PhD only 7 years later, and in places I knew well). And the closing line from Veronica Dymond in the CBC story above sums things up quite well:

Every person in the LGBTQ community has that moment, when they realized they weren’t safe in their communities. So many people have worked hard to make this country a safer place for us, and I’m grateful. But that doesn’t erase the memories, and the struggle is ongoing.

The history of violence against queer folk permeates the culture we share. And that cultural memory can’t be dismissed, or necessarily understood by outsiders.

But cultural memory changes and evolves as those who experienced it become more removed, and those who didn’t try to understand it without having been there. This excellent thread on HIV/AIDS is an example of just that. So is the book How to Survive a Plague.

Now, dear reader, you are no doubt wondering what this has to do with science? Queer folk are less likely to pursue careers in science, and once in science, they don’t always find it to be a welcoming place (though this is getting better!). But many queers in STEM  also carry that cultural memory of the constant loss of friends or just simply queer compatriots we never knew, but might have in different circumstances. Or indeed have experienced it directly themselves (if you want to get an idea of the UK situation, check out the BBC Two 2017 documentary “Is It Safe To Be Gay In the UK?“; though not currently available on the BBC site, it might be found elsewhere). And many of us “tone down” our queerness in science and in public for fear of repercussions. Asking ourselves, is it safe, while looking over our shoulder at who else might be around. It’s the little things. Where ideas like queering our science seem revolutionary, iconoclastic, and risqué.

Lately, there’s not been a week go by where I haven’t been contacted by an early-career queer scientist who just wanted to chat with someone who had a set of shared experiences. I sure as heck don’t have all the answers, and I still struggle myself from time to time (to paraphrase a Star Trek episode title, who mentors the mentors?). One shouldn’t be expected separate one’s queerness from one’s science, even when that queerness comes with a legacy of hurt. Science is people, and people include emotion.

This October 12th, which incidentally is also International Coming Out Day, I’ll work to make my science a little bit more queer, I’ll come out (for the 4776th day in a row), and I’ll reflect on both how far we’ve come in the last 20 years, and how far we have yet to go in science and in society.

 

Reflections on 13 years as an out scientist

Tags

LGBTQ, mentoring, pastoral care

As I was cooking dinner tonight, it dawned upon me that 13 years ago I made a decision that would would have a profound impact on my personal and professional life: I came out. Or, more accurately, I came out for the first time. I wrote a bit about it earlier this summer:

On September 15th, 2005 after getting home from the lab, I realised I had to tell someone, so I called up one of my closest friends and came out for the first time. The genre of “coming out stories” was quite popular at the time (well, at least for me), so I had read/watched nearly every one I could find on the internet. The ones that went well, the ones that ended poorly. It was not uncommon for advice on coming out to include things like “keep a stash of cash for a couple of days” and “make sure you arrange with a friend beforehand to spend the night, or a couple of nights, if you need to”. Thankfully, I was financially independent and living on my own, but that’s the kind of pervasive environment that existed (or at least that I perceived).

She was, perhaps predictably, fine. Mum was the next day, and was fine in the end, though perhaps a bit surprised. Dad was the day after, and was fine, too. In fact, all the family — grandparents, sister, aunts, uncles — were totally fine once they got over the initial surprise. I was so incredibly lucky. I know others for whom it was not fine.

In our household, there are really only a few key annual events: my & my husband’s birthdays, our anniversary, and our “coming-out-iversary”. Mine is Sept 15th. He beat me by about 6 months.

On the face of it, 13 years doesn’t necessarily seem like that long a time. But in reality it’s just (barely) over a third of my life, and certainly half of my adult life. It spans nearly my entire scientific career (which I peg as starting with my honours thesis on 15 April 2004 in a freezing bird observatory next to a nuclear power plant, at about 5am). And a lot has changed since 2005.

When I canvassed for things that LGBQ+ scientists wish their straight colleagues knew, the idea that “coming out” isn’t a one-off event came up several times. There’s probably not a week that goes by where I haven’t come out to someone. Sometimes it’s subtle (a rainbow lanyard), other times it’s more blatant (a talk about being an out gay scientist).

And after 13 years (at least 7 of which I’ve been much more public in my professional life), I’ve come to a realization — I’m now one of the established gays. To draw a professional analogy, I’ve moved beyond being an Early Career Gay, and have Gay Tenure/a Gay Permanent Contract. This post by Meg Duffy on Dynamic Ecology looks at some of the less obvious, more subtle markers of career progression, and in a sense I’ve passed something similar in my professional gayness.

Some of the markers of this transition have happened particularly in the last 2 years: I’ve had staff or trainees come out to me and ask for advice, I’ve had colleagues ask me if/how/when they should come out to their students, and I’m now asked to give seminars on being an out gay/queer scientist to professional audiences. But it’s the first of these that will be the focus of this post.

—

Professionally, I’ve had the fortune to work in four nurturing, collegial research groups between my undergrad and postdoc. I learned heaps, both about science, and about HOW to science. Experimental design, paper reviewing, data analysis, permit applications, structuring an outline… I had a good number of the tools needed to become a good scientist.

What I lacked 13 years ago (and to a certain extent, still lack today) is the mentorship to navigate being a gay scientist. And what I’ve noticed in the last two years is I’m increasingly finding myself in the mentor role both in terms of science, but also in terms of being a gay scientist. And it’s one of the most fulfilling things I think I’ll experience, seeing mentees progress and achieve both professionally and personally. I literally beam with pride at their successes and wins.

Science, and academic science in particular, has a habit of segregating the personal and professional. I have a bit of experience with that kind of dual existence, and I can tell you it’s not that healthy. As an undergrad, I couldn’t imagine doing science as a job and saw the science side of my life on the opposite shore of an ocean from the rest of my life. In the closet, to use an analogy, I saw my fundamental niche from inside the closet of my realised niche. Now, the Venn diagram of all of these aspects of my life are well balanced.

When we say that “representation matters”, we don’t just mean the one-way idolization or looking up to a role model, though that’s certainly an important part. It’s more of a dialogue. Straight allies, no matter how wonderful they are, don’t have the same shared experiences. And there simply aren’t enough LGBTQ+ mentors in science (as evidenced by the frequent queries I get from LGBTQ+ folk just looking to talk to someone at a later career stage).

So I guess I’m now, 13 years later, coming out as a mentor (though I feel uncomfortable applying that label to myself. Like “ally” it’s a term that’s bestowed by someone else, and can be transient). If you’re stuck, need to chat, or whatever, drop me a DM on twitter, or an email. Like so many things, I’m offering because I wish someone had offered to me 13 years ago, and I think it’s an important part of science (or indeed research more generally) that’s often neglected.

What LGBTQ+ folk in STEM want to communicate to straight colleagues: unedited responses

Tags

LGBTQ, QueerAndA

Last week, I put a call out for things that LGBTQ+ folk in STEM wished their straight friends & colleagues could instantly understand. I had previously put together a list of “required reading/viewing“, and was drawing up my own list for a future talk on the hidden diversity in science.

The dozen responses I had were all incredibly useful, and things that I had thought about (though perhaps not articulated as well as the respondents). It was all completely anonymous, and I’m sure behind each answer is a story, or stories, to tell.

The answers are below, unedited apart from typos. So without further ado, straight colleagues: take note:

I’d love people to know more about bi and pansexuality. Because I’m in a heterosexual marriage, colleagues often assume I’m straight. Sexuality doesn’t always have visible cues (not everyone is out as queer or trans, etc.). Bi/pan identities are real, they’re not “fads” or experimentation.

 

That power differentials can make coming out much higher stakes. Yes, I’m aware that my PI has friends that are lesbians. But if my telling her I’m queer affects her comfort with or behavior toward me, that is something I can’t undo. The way some straight women behave toward queer women mirrors the toxic behavior of certain men toward women in the workplace (e.g., leaving them out of professional & social opportunities because they refuse to be alone with them). [I am 100% certain this also occurs for gay cis men & trans/nonbinary folks too, but I’m speaking about my own experience.]

 

There are two things that non LGBTQ+ people may not be aware of. The first is that because of assumptions of heteronormativity, LGBTQ+ do not come out only once; rather, they come out over and over again, often at unexpected times. The second is that it is easy to falsely conclude that STEM is always friendly to LGBTQ+ people. In reality, there are still many people and organizations that are very much not friendly to LGBTQ+ people, they are not necessarily outspoken about it. Taken together, these things can create a difficult environment for LGBTQ+ people by creating the conditions in which coming out happens frequently and with uncertainty about the consequences.

 

It is exhausting to have to keep coming out. I was out to my boss and my labmates at my last job, but I’m not yet to the ones at my new job. And it just annoys me because it is yet another thing other people don’t have to worry about dealing with. As someone who is presumed straight, if I don’t have a partner to mention, it can be really hard to find a way to come out at work (because of the inference that talking about sexual orientation = talking about sex life). I wish it could be a non-issue, but it grates on me when people just assume I’m straight.

 

Don’t assume your coworkers are straight. Lots of outwardly straight-seeming people are queer. Try your best to create a welcoming work culture not focused on heteronormativity so that your queer coworkers feel comfortable being themselves.
Every time I travel- for fieldwork, conferences, even just visiting another university- there’s an extra level of calculations I have to do. How safe is this place for me as a queer person? How much of the truth will I have to hide when meeting and working with local collaborators? How much of my gender expression- generally very non-gender-conforming- will I need to change? Recently I went for the first portion of fieldwork for my PhD. I found there were questions about navigating working in a country I’d never been to before that I couldn’t ask my advisor- since as a straight cis guy, he hadn’t ever had to consider the concerns a queer female-assumed person would have.

 

Another issue is the extra layer of uncertainty about planning for my future. That’s already a big concern just being a 20-something in grad school- but as a queer grad student in one of the most unfriendly states in the US to be queer, there’s an extra level of anxiety. Navigating a relationship in grad school is hard enough without having to worry about whether your state is going to legislate your rights away a bit more this week.

 

Coming out doesn’t just happen once in your life, it is a continual process throughout your life, always calculating how open you can be everytime you meet someone
There can be a constant low level anxiety that your work won’t be taken as seriously, or will be perceived as biased if you (heaven forbid!) address anything vaguely lgbtq2+ in your work.

 

As a cis-bisexual woman partnered with a cis-heterosexual man, colleagues often assume I’m straight. As a result I wind up hearing a lot of homophobic comments. As a result I really don’t feel safe coming out when it’s relevant to conversation. Vicious cycle.

 

I think invisibility is a problem: other groups (women, people of colour, those with clear physical differences) don’t have to explain why they’re different from the community that excludes them. We first have to come out, to explain why we feel excluded, as it might be much less obvious and then fight the battle. There are so many heteronormative assumptions to overcome before we even have an identity that we can sign up to. Also, we face problems that many others don’t (no countries execute women simply for being women, whereas quite a few still execute a man for being gay), which makes even broaching the problem harder.

 

As a trans person, I have to mentally prepare myself for every new person I meet, whether they’re a potential colleague, professor, mentor, etc. Being the first transgender person someone has ever met can be exhausting if they aren’t willing to do any research themselves. In addition, bracing myself to be misgendered and/or dead-named in front of my peers during at least the first week of every semester is continually exhausting. I notice that it takes a lot of time and energy away from my work as a student because when I go to work in a small lab where I’ve never been misgendered and I know everyone respects me, I’m less anxious and much more productive.

 

Working in the tropics, for example in Brazil, in very remote places where faith and church is deeply rooted in people’s minds and daily lives, I want straight people to understand the difference of working conditions. As a white lesbian (although gender conform) working in these places is not only a great adventure – it also means having to hide a very important part of me and to be very careful. I’m willing to make this sacrifice, but I just hope things change, even in these places, someday. Being afraid because of who you are should not be part of work experience …

 

Divorcing your ‘out’ true self from ‘closeted’ self when undertaking fieldwork in countries not that friendly to gay people. Levels of anxiety are always high, right from applying for visas (will they check your social media presence), to (and especially this) interacting on a social basis. The balance between being true to yourself and not wanting to risk the science, or letting down your team is quite stressful.

What do LGBTQ+ folk in STEM want to communicate to our straight colleagues?

Tags

LGBTQ, QueerAndA

Whenever I’m asked to give a research seminar, I always include a little queer content. Most of the time, this is a shout out at the end when I show my last slide with contact info, website, and Twitter handle, where I give a shout out to LGBTQ+ STEM, which I help run.

But lately I’ve started developing a different kind of seminar, aimed at telling the story of my journey as a gay/queer man in ornithology, and more broadly about some of the challenges, difficulties, issues, and other things that LGBTQ+ folk in STEM experience, think about, and consider, and how that relates to their science. I’ve been doing queer ed since 2006, and to be honest, I was surprised that some of the questions I got earlier this summer in the LGBTQ&A were nearly identical to the questions I had running the campus Safe Space program 12 years ago.

Now, I’m just one person with one perspective (and a white male perspective at that). So I thought it would be useful to canvas a broader cross-section of the LGBTQ+ STEM community.

If you’re LGBTQ+ and in STEM, what do you wish you could communicate to your straight colleagues?

Earlier this summer, I put together a list of things I wish I could instantly transplant into my straight friends & colleagues’ minds that would give them a bit of a perspective on where I come from. As you’ll see, they’re not all science-specific, because being a scientist is only one facet that doesn’t act in isolation from the others.

So if you had the opportunity to convey something to your straight friends & colleagues about being LGBTQ+ in STEM, what would it be? Drop your answer (anonymously) in this Google Form, and I’ll work them into my talk on “hidden diversity” in STEM, and post a summary here.

Looking forward to what you all have to say!