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Coming out at work: transgender scientists share their stories
Before coming out as transgender at work, Lisa procured the ultimate academic protection: tenure. A geochemist in her thirties, she found a faculty job at a university in the southwest of the United States. It was 2002, and she knew of many transgender people who had lost their jobs after transitioning. At the time, media depictions cast transgender people largely as freaks, the butt of jokes or hate-crime victims. With job security assured, she told her colleagues she was transitioning — but she did not anticipate their reaction. “The department chair wanted to have a meeting with all the students and announce it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Do we have to do this?’”
They did. Lisa (not her real name) nodded along as the chair declared her newly public identity to some 50 people — undergrads, graduate students, faculty members and staff. “I guess he thought it was important that everyone know, and [the situation] was not that unusual,” says Lisa, who is now 60 and a professor at a university in Massachusetts. “‘Some people are trans; some people are French Canadian,’ that kind of thing. ‘Our colleague is looking a little different. What’s going on is completely normal. We all know about this, and we completely support her.’”
Still, the spotlight was a bit much for her. “But it was very nice to see I was being supported,” she says. “I didn’t expect that.”
At the time, stories of transgender scientists, let alone workplaces that were supportive of them, were rare. But if you know where to look, the names of transgender researchers are scattered throughout the scientific record. The British botanist Elke MacKenzie, known for her studies of Antarctic lichen, came out as trans around 1971, at the age of 60. Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer engineer, was fired in 1968 from IBM after she transitioned. (IBM publicly apologized in 2020.) And in the early 2000s, the neuroscientist Ben Barres overheard a colleague praising Barres’s work over his sister’s, not realizing the ‘sister’ was Barres before his transition.
“There’s this mainstream belief that trans people are constantly brand new, and the issues that affect us are also constantly brand new,” says historian Mar Hicks, who researches transgender history at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. “That’s just not true.”
They did. Lisa (not her real name) nodded along as the chair declared her newly public identity to some 50 people — undergrads, graduate students, faculty members and staff. “I guess he thought it was important that everyone know, and [the situation] was not that unusual,” says Lisa, who is now 60 and a professor at a university in Massachusetts. “‘Some people are trans; some people are French Canadian,’ that kind of thing. ‘Our colleague is looking a little different. What’s going on is completely normal. We all know about this, and we completely support her.’”
Still, the spotlight was a bit much for her. “But it was very nice to see I was being supported,” she says. “I didn’t expect that.”
At the time, stories of transgender scientists, let alone workplaces that were supportive of them, were rare. But if you know where to look, the names of transgender researchers are scattered throughout the scientific record. The British botanist Elke MacKenzie, known for her studies of Antarctic lichen, came out as trans around 1971, at the age of 60. Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer engineer, was fired in 1968 from IBM after she transitioned. (IBM publicly apologized in 2020.) And in the early 2000s, the neuroscientist Ben Barres overheard a colleague praising Barres’s work over his sister’s, not realizing the ‘sister’ was Barres before his transition.
“There’s this mainstream belief that trans people are constantly brand new, and the issues that affect us are also constantly brand new,” says historian Mar Hicks, who researches transgender history at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. “That’s just not true.”
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01908-y
