Evolution’s Rainbow: Joan RoughGarden Explores Queer Sex in Animals

A few days ago a small cardboard box arrived, leaning precariously out of my mailbox. Now, this is somewhat of a common occurrence, because I have no sense of self-control when it comes to buying books. But this was no ordinary book — it was Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow, which several of you commenters have mentioned before. Well, I finally got it, and I am so glad you all told me about it!

Roughgarden is a professor of biology at Stanford University, and author of several other books on the intersection of evolutionary biology and social mores. A transgender woman, she discusses how she kept her job at Stanford during her transition but had to relinquish many administrative duties; she used her newfound free time to research the diversity of gender and sex across species and cultures. She wrote Evolution’s Rainbow both as a catalogue of diversity across the natural world in sex, gender, and sexuality, and also as an “indictment” of all academic fields for suppressing or ignoring the diversity that we see.

This is an incredible book. It’s a brick, yes, clocking in at 407 word-filled pages, but its text is accessible, well-written, and insightful. Every page or two elicited a ‘holy cow that’s so awesome!’ from me, and all of you — biologists and non-biologists and poets alike — you all should read it. In the meantime, while you wait for your own copy to arrive, I’ll try to summarize what I took away from the book — with the important caveat that I am no evolutionary biologist, or even a life scientist in general.

Her premise, as I see it, is that there are hundreds (or more) of species that don’t exhibit behaviors consistent with Darwinian sexual selection theory, suggesting that it is not the universal truth we take it to be. Further, our current insistence on sexual selection theory leads to incorrect conclusions as well as dangerous societal implications, which I’ll discuss more in a bit.

A little bit of background: Sexual selection theory states that the basic building blocks or templates for a species are male and female, and that each sex has built-in traits —the male is the assertive, passionate one, and the female is shyer and coyer. Males compete for the attention of females, and the female generally chooses the most successful-looking males to mate with, thus ensuring strong and successful offspring. Roughgarden writes:

“This theory [sexual selection theory] that social life boils down to a selection for showy traits is both inaccurate in its universalist claims and inadequate to address the diversity of bodies, gender expression, and sexuality that actually occurs in nature. Furthermore, the theory has been corrupted by evolutionary psychologists and others to naturalize injustice and deny freedom of expression.”

In a section entitled “Sexual Selection Corrupted,” Roughgarden argues that the problem with this general theory of reproduction, apart from the possibility that it is over-generalized and incorrect, is that it leads both to a disparaging of any member of a species that is not the “alpha-male” type, and that it naturalizes male aggression and domination of females. In modern times, a corrupted take on sexual selection has long been “used to perpetuate ethically dubious gender stereotypes that demean women and anyone else who doesn’t identify as a gender-normative heterosexual male.” I’m sure you’ve all heard of evolutionary psychology, and how it attempts to normalize aggressive and promiscuous sexual behavior in males, while consigning women to passivity and a lack of sexual assertiveness themselves. In its worst manifestations, evolutionary psychology asserts that rape is an evolutionarily inherited behavior by males: historically males who couldn’t find a mate in other ways could also reproduce through rape, and thus “rape genes” were passed from one generation to the next. It leads to the dubious conclusion that “all men are therefore potential rapists, although they do not necessarily act on this potential.”

Instead, Roughgarden advocates “social selection theory,” which emphasizes species-wide teamwork, not sex-based competition. In this theory, animals evolve traits that lead to inclusion in groups that can more effectively provide food, safety, and resources to successfully raise offspring. And all along the way, as she argues her point, she offers as evidence a wide array of diverse animal sexual behaviors to show that, contrary to common belief, sexual behavior does not adhere to any one norm.

This includes homosexual behavior in animals. She lists hundreds of species that engage in some level of homoerotic or homosexual behavior, from reindeer to African elephants to marmots and vampire bats. Almost all male bighorn sheep, for instance, engage in “homosexual courtship and copulation”; she lists their progression from nuzzling, to genital licking, to anal sex. This section was fun to read on its own merits, the book is peppered with delights of sentences like this: “No genital-genital contact has been reported among female vampire bats, but male vampire bats hang belly to belly licking one another, both with an erect penis.” But it also addressed some evolutionary implications of homosexuality. Under the Darwinian sexual-selection model, same-sex sexuality should not be evolutionarily successful because it does not in itself lead to more reproduction. The fact that we see it today must be explained away as an anomalous genetic mutation or social invention.

But under Roughgarden’s social-selection model, same-sex sexuality has a range of other functions, all of which do become evolutionarily advantageous within a cooperative species: to secure a position within a social group or to ease camaraderie and teamwork between species members. Male bottlenose dolphins, for instance, often pair-bond as adolescents, and maintain a constant and life-long relationships as monogamous sexual partners and companions. And female red squirrels occasionally form life-long bonds, jointly raising a litter of young and having sex. In both of these cases, the teamwork between two individuals within a species leads to a longer life span and better reproductive outlook for offspring, no matter whose offspring it is. Roughgarden spends a significant amount of time discussing sexual behavior in bonobos, for whom strategic sex with any partner can facilitate sharing of food and resources, reconciliation, bond and coalition forming, all of which are important in a species that relies heavily on community.

I’m still hung up on Part 1 of Evolution’s Rainbow — I’ve been reading aloud and quoting it to friends all week with seemingly inexhaustible sentences beginning with, “Well, did you know…” But the second and third parts promise to be just as interesting, in different ways. The middle third of Roughgarden’s book is dedicated to exploring, in similar ways, the biology of human sex, sexuality, and gender development. She discusses the difference between diversity and disease, and the disservice that the medical and other communities have done to genetic diversity by harming or stigmatizing anyone who doesn’t conform to an undefined and amorphous sense of “normal”. And in Part 3, she expands her biologist’s lens to include social sciences of gender and sexuality variations across cultures and history. She particularly spends time looking at diversity and equality from a Biblical standpoint, because she recognizes that there are some people for whom the Bible and church teachings are the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes morally right and wrong —no matter what scientific conclusions we come to.

I have been basically glued to the pages of this book since I received it, even to the detriment of writing this article about it. But in articulating all this to you, I think what feels so valuable about it to me is the way it discusses gender and sexuality variance from a standpoint of biological variance – a different angle than we usually get to see. Though I work in a totally different field of the natural sciences, I know that my worldview is to a large extent shaped around this identity of “scientist,” and my academic training has led me to particularly appreciate argument based on scientific reasoning. Much of the argument I see in the world about queer issues is on a more philosophical or religious basis, or – my favorite – opinion couched in pseudoscience. It is this pseudoscience that she most effectively takes down in this book, by providing a well-researched, well backed-up scientific rejoinder. What I’m saying is that she speaks my language, and I love it.

It’s a book big enough and detailed enough that there’s no way to mention every insight — but for those of you who have read Evolution’s Rainbow, what else did you feel particularly drawn to? What were your favorite parts? What have I left out that shouldn’t be missed?

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Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

Queered Science: Historic Women Pioneers

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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The New York Times recently profiled a new exhibit showcasing 32 pioneering women scientists – including Florence Nightingale and Sofia Kovalevskaya, among others. It’s been three years in the making by three science historians — one woman, two men — and is now on exhibit until this weekend. Obviously I wish I could go see it — too bad I don’t live anywhere near New York, nor can I fly there. But reading about it is almost as good. The New York Times writes, “The exhibition celebrates their accomplishments, and makes it plain that they are all the more extraordinary given the deeply entrenched biases they had to overcome.”

I remember reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in my early days as a feminist —at a time when I was trying to explain, to myself, and to others — how it was that, if women were equal to men, why we didn’t see more of them acting in history. I had my own vague ideas about why — or notions, really, or feelings — but I couldn’t articulate them adequately. And then she explained it with quotes like this:

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”

And then I was like, yes, those were the words I was looking for! It has nothing to do with the innate characteristics of women (because that idea is a fallacy if ever there was one) but rather the way people who are identified as “feminine” by society are treated, or not treated: the stories they are told about themselves.

All that philosophizing aside, de Beauvoir explains in detail the ways — at least up to her time, in the mid-1900s — that women of equal intelligence were kept away and turned down from institutions of higher learning.

And the women highlighted in this exhibit are some of the few who transcended, for whatever reason, those gender-related societal constraints on their intellect.

I personally love thinking about historic figures in science — envisioning what the cultural melee might have been around them at that time, envisioning how I would have acted in their situation. For instance, Hertha Ayrton, an electrical engineer and a suffragist, sent back her 1911 census form with these words scrawled across the paper: “How can I answer all these questions if I have not the intelligence to choose between two candidates for parliament? I will not supply these particulars until I have my rights as a citizen. Votes for Women.” Basically, I’m a badass, let me vote already. If you were in her shoes, what would you have done? Of course, she had already been denied membership in the Royal Society of London, and wasn’t even allowed to read her own work at one of their meetings. She changed her name as a teenager from Phoebe to Hertha, the name of a goddess. So maybe she’d grown a thick skin by then.

Or what about Mary Jacobi, born in 1842: she left a disappointing women’s college in New York for Paris, hoping to be allowed to study medicine. They apparently grudgingly allowed her to participate, but she had to enter the classroom by a separate door and sit alone near the professor. That must have been awkward, to say the least — I can imagine the feeling of all your classmates’ eyes staring at you behind your back, wondering what you’re doing here, feeling always unwelcome, but sticking it out anyway. What kind of emotional fortitude must she have had, in addition to her intellect?

Dr. Jacobi eventually went on to win a prize from Harvard in 1876 where she proved scientifically that, in contrast to popular belief, women’s intelligence was not impaired when they’re on their period. Next time someone tells you your legitimate anger is “just PMS,” (hopefully never?) thank Dr. Jacobi in part that you can prove them wrong.

It’s often almost impossible to definitively identify queer figures in history, especially queer women. Sexual or romantic attachments between women were often easily overlooked by those writing history. “Romantic friendships” were common between women, and could mean many different things. And you could argue that definitions of sexual orientation are a modern and socially constructed concept – so maybe the point is null and void anyway.

But, nevertheless, you might like to know about two of the scientists featured in the exhibition, Florence Nightingale and Sofia Kovalevskaya, who are also featured on NOGLSTP’s list of queer scientists of historical note. Nightingale never married, and strongly rejected offers of marriage more than once. She often referred to herself in the masculine, as “a man of business” or “a man of action,” but kept up intimate emotional relationships with women her entire life.

Kovalevskaya’s marriage was well known to be a marriage of convenience; she needed written permission from either her father or a husband to study abroad, so she wrote up a “fictitious marriage” contract with a young paleontology student, and they both moved to Germany. But after her husband committed suicide, she lived the rest of her life in a “romantic friendship” with the actress and playwright Anne-Charlotte Edgren-Leffler.

The exhibit is up right now at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th St, New York) and if you have time in the next few days, go see it! And then please come back and tell me how it was!

Queered Science: Dr. Juniper Digs Derby and Dragonflies

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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Hi everyone, for this week’s profile we have one of your very own: Dr. Juniper Simonis, Autostraddler, roller derby player, and population ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. They just emerged from graduate school and got a job they enjoy in the field they studied, and have some good advice for other science-minded queers who are navigating the paths of grad school and research and careers and life goals and all of those angst-inducing choices.

Juniper also writes extensively about being trans* in academia, and has a lot to say about being out at work as a scientist. They hate “coming out” as a process on its own, but say that:

“As a visible trans* and gender non-conforming person, I kind of end up being out without coming out at all…I mean, it’s pretty obvious when people see my name and see me use a restroom or meet me in person that I’m queer. I try to really make that not be an issue at work, which I realize I can do because of a lot of other privileges that I have, but it’s a position that I’m hoping to use to make the general cultural dynamic be one where queerness isn’t an issue at work unless it should be…I mean, my queerness doesn’t directly affect my research or my ability to perform it, so to me, it shouldn’t be an issue.”

A self-proclaimed “total nerd” in high school, Juniper has always loved math and science, and also spent time hiking and camping with her parents as a kid, so the stage was set early for an interest in ecology. They graduated undergrad from the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign with a degree in Integrative Biology.

But things were really cemented for them when Juniper did an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) internship in Michigan. Now, if you’re interested in science, and you’re an undergrad, you should definitely know about these. Basically, the National Science Foundation funds undergrads every summer to work with researchers at major universities on their research projects. And this is no making-coffee-and-copies kind of internship. The REU program makes a point of really involving their interns in the research process, so by the end of the summer you really accomplished something for whatever research project you were with, and interns often come out with a really solid idea of what they want to study and how to continue that work in grad school or as a career. For instance, Juniper ended up publishing two papers from their work that one summer – a big leg up in the research world.

I also was an REU intern for a summer a few years ago, and I spent the summer thinking about what sea ice conditions in the Arctic probably looked like about a hundred years ago. And – like I said – that experience really formed for me a sense of what I wanted to study (and actually, even the fact that I wanted to continue in research at all). If you’re interested, look them up; I think deadlines are in a few months, more or less, so you still have time to apply!

Anyway, Juniper did an REU in Michigan for a summer, with a project “looking at host-parasite interactions in a freshwater crustacean.”

“It was a pretty awesome project in general, but I also happened to be working with a post-doc who was very quantitative-minded and was developing mathematical models to describe the system and its behavior, but he was using data to construct and evaluate those models…it just really clicked for me then, that doing mathematical biology was something I was really interested in, and probably well suited for, given my personal history and education. But I didn’t want to just do the mathy side of things (be a strict theoretical ecologist), because I like the biology side as well, and I realized through this experience that it was possible to ‘sit in the middle’ and work with data and models.”

Juniper is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Lincoln Park Zoo, where they work on using the data they have on threatened/endangered species to “manage them so they have as viable populations as possible in the long term.” For example, they’ve developing a population viability analysis (PVA) model for an endangered species of dragonfly native to the Chicago area.

“In reality, this means I stare at my computer most of the day, but I also get to look out of my office window at hyenas!” But they definitely didn’t always expect to be here. Coming to the Zoo was a really conscious choice to get out of academia; when they went to grad school, at Cornell, Juniper assumed they wanted to be a professor and academic as a career. I mean, why wouldn’t you? They were good at science, loved the process of getting to “ask and answer” research questions that really interested them, and they’d found a niche that really worked with their interests. But by the end of her Ph.D., they realized they needed a job that had some more strict external limitations.

“I was working ~70 hours a week just to keep on top of the class, [a graduate-level biostatistics class she created and taught] but every time I sat down to write lecture notes my brain would be on a grant proposal. My work suffered and I was miserable. Even during the few hours a day I was not working, my brain was thinking about work. At a time when I could have really used some personal space, my personal life suffered and I was miserable for it. Suffice it to say that my personality type and work habits don’t work well in an academic environment, and I figured that out first hand.”

Happily, their decision to get out of academia was completely supported by their advisors and academic mentors; while sometimes deciding to leave the academic world can be seen as something of a cop-out, none of their peers or mentors took it that way, and neither did they. Obviously Juniper could cut it in the academic world, but they had decided to opt for something different. And that was fine. “Now, I work 35 hours a week and get shamed for staying late. And I get to occupy all of my time with other things. Like derby and queers.”

They say the most important thing about their job search was just talking with people – anyone who was in a career something like what they wanted. “Introduce yourself to people at meetings, send random e-mails, ask your advisor if they know anyone doing what you’re interested in…whatever you need to do, find the people that are working in the field that you’re interested in, and talk to them!” After their position here, they could, of course, return to academia if they want, but that’s a pretty far ways into the future. For now, they’re just happy where they are.

As for being queer in the sciences, Juniper says they take a relevance-based, limited approach to coming out: “I only bring up my transness in situations where I feel like it’s directly relevant.” They point out that being trans* doesn’t in any way affect their views on “spatial food-web dynamics in rock pools,” or any of the other topics they work on, and so they see no real reason to explicitly come out in the work place. They’re also happy to report that both in their old Ph.D. department and here at the Zoo, they felt supported by their mentors, advisors, and peers. Being open and out at work isn’t any harder than just being out in life in general.

Which is awesome. This is where we’d like to see all work places get, eventually: a place where being queer is neither an issue of extra importance or focus, nor something hidden and silent and nonexistent. Where people just are who they are and that’s that, now let’s go back to talking about spatial food-web dynamics already.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by Juniper are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of her employer.

Queered Science: Sexism Is For Everybody!

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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Hello all you science queers! I’ve found you an awesome talking point for your next social setting where you want to sound smart and informed (so…always?) A few weeks ago on Oct 3, The New York Times published a long article about women in science by Eileen Pollack.

Pollack has spent the last few years traveling across the country to different universities and talking to women and professors about the persistent dearth of women in science; she herself graduated with honors in physics from Yale, but didn’t pursue a graduate degree. “At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs.” Of course, she’s now a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, so her career path didn’t turn out that badly. But she always wondered in the back of her mind what would have happened, or how things would have turned out, if she’d continued on to a physics grad degree. Because even with all her success, she felt like a failure. “I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.”

Now, you may remember an article from this series a few weeks ago about Dr. Ben Barres, who was catalyzed to speak out about misogyny in the sciences after Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard University, said some really sexist things about innate differences in aptitude along gender lines. Well, Summer’s comments also made Pollack angry, and her indignation started her quest to learn more about the barriers that women come up against in the sciences. Funny, how the most abrasive and offensive instances of bigotry often springs a leak in the dam (a leak in the dyke, aahhh!) and starts groundswell of activism and lead to longer-lasting, change-making movements. So thanks, I guess, Dr. Summers.

In many ways Pollack’s article was important and timely. Discrimination in the sciences is an issue that direly needs more publicity and honest discussion, so I don’t want to discount her well-researched and articulate piece. But in many ways, from a queer-feminist perspective, it was a total disappointment. She missed a critical opportunity to widen the discourse when she said flatly, in her one and only mention of the queer population: “The lesbian scientists I talked to…reported differing reactions to the gender dynamic of the classroom and the lab, but voiced many of the same concerns as the straight women.” Other than this single mention of “lesbian” women alone, she does not include or provide room for any alternative gender or sexual identities.

Much of her language reveals a disappointingly essentialist view of gender that all of our lovely queer biologist and geneticist readers would quickly eschew. Also, she spends paragraphs talking about girls not doing science because of fears that boys won’t want to date them. She discusses shows like The Big Bang Theory, in which the scientist girl is depicted as geeky and undateable – and what girl would want to consign herself to that?

Ugh. Obviously not all women want to date boys, and in a world of far greater concerns, is this really a question deserving of that much attention? What about the constant head-chatter of internalized homophobia and sexism as we walk through classes with no one who looks like us, day in and day out? Or the overt discriminatory remarks of classmates or, at times, professors? If you asked some of our earlier profiles, like Dr. Donna Riley or Rochelle Diamond, I doubt they’d say that wondering who would date them was even on the list of their worries. Diamond was fired after a co-worker sabotaged her work, and assumed for years it was simply reflective of her own lack of ability. Riley experienced written anti-gay micro-aggressions on the clothing of her classmates, and has repeatedly been insulted by other faculty solely on the basis of her bisexuality. Even you guys, in your comments on these articles, have some real and intense stories of sexuality-related discrimination and harassment. So in limiting her scope of attention to only heterosexual, cis-gendered women, Pollack unwittingly marginalizes a large segment of the very population whose marginalization she’s trying to highlight.

That large problem aside, many of her points are important and valid, and you should still know about them. For instance, she writes: “I was dismayed to find that the cultural and psychological factors that I experienced in the ’70s not only persist but also seem all the more pernicious in a society in which women are told that nothing is preventing them from succeeding in any field. If anything, the pressures to be conventionally feminine seem even more intense now than when I was young.” This is a problem that this series has highlighted: that there are still huge barriers to people of any minority status succeeding in the field — but they’re hidden, invisible, tucked away in professors’ and peers’ preconceptions and latent biases. We’re told there’s nothing holding us back, so if we don’t succeed it’s our own damn fault. And this, I believe, leads to the exact problem she described earlier: just as women are told there should be nothing standing in their way to success, the general silence around queer struggles leads the casual observer to believe that there is nothing standing in the way of their success.

And yet, there are huge obstacles. Dr. Meg Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, wrote in an essay published in The Washington Post that women leave science academia in droves not because they are incapable, but because of the “slow drumbeat of being under appreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success.” But there is no single event that you can name and get righteously angry about. And, frankly, if you’re a smart woman or queer, and you know you can do better and be happier elsewhere in the work force, why would you stay?

Happily many of you have stories of being pleasantly surprised at feeling none of this; in our open threads I have been increasingly happy to hear those stories, that you feel nothing but acceptance and support from your advisors and peers, about your sexuality or gender or whatever. But some of you, also, have mentioned the exact kind of feelings of isolation or exclusion that Dr. Urry discusses. And this is the overriding strength of Pollack’s article: it discusses the persistent strength of latent biases, and that in and of itself is constructive and important. She is currently working on a book about women in science, and I hope that she will include more knowledge and understanding of all womens’ experiences, not just the cis-gendered heterosexual ones.

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Author’s Note: After I published this piece, I contacted Ms. Pollack herself to ask about the dearth of attention paid to queer women scientists in her article. I appreciated her quick and polite response, and she explained to me that the article was only a small portion of a book with a much larger scope. Sections in which she did discuss issues of queer scientists were cut out by the Times at the last minute in the interest of brevity, and she herself was also “horrified” that the final product ended up being so heterocentric. We have discussed other queer scientists to potentially mention or reference in future writing on the topic, and all in all, it’s been a great communication! At the end of this article I write that I hope in her forthcoming book she includes a greater diversity of women’s experiences, and she has already done just that.

Queered Science: NOGLSTP’s Rochelle Diamond Forged A Path For All of Us

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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Rochelle Diamond works at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) as the applications specialist and lab manager of the Flow Cytometry/Cell Sorting Facility. She is also the chair of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals, (NOGLSTP) which we’ve mentioned before as an important step young queer scientists can take to get connected to others.

We talked on the phone the other day and I asked if I could ask her some personal questions along with the professional ones – she laughed and said absolutely, she’s an open book. Which is a good thing, because if any of you have ever experienced homophobia in the workplace or queer-related adversity in your personal life and moved on (ahem, way too many of us) then you need to know her life story. She grew up and forged a career for herself in the sciences – first as a closeted lesbian, then as an out activist, in a time when LGBT rights were in their nascent stages.

She likes to joke that she had a real coming-out — as a 16-year-old debutante in Phoenix, Arizona, where she grew up.

She was always the black sheep of the family; the youngest child, she couldn’t be swayed from her tomboy ways. Her parents tried putting her in charm school, but she proceeded to fail out: “I didn’t want anything to do with it – they gave my father his money back.” Instead, she was much more interested in science. “My brother would bring home his microscope and we’d go jump the fence to grab some pond water and look at it together.”

In her senior year of college, she got married to her best friend, a man just returning from Vietnam. He had Krohn’s disease and needed health insurance; she had health insurance and good connections in the medical field. Besides, her mother was soon to die, and she wanted to reassure her. “I wanted her to know I’d be ok. Of course,” she laughs, “she still wasn’t pleased because he was Jewish.” But at least this unruly tomboy daughter was respectably married.

Diamond’s husband was aware that she loved women, and for the most part, he didn’t mind. They were married for 10 years until Diamond fell in love with her first serious girlfriend; they realized their marriage wasn’t working and they divorced. And they remain friends today, “He calls for medical advice sometimes, and if he ever needed anything, of course I’d be there,” Diamond says. In 1974 she graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a dual bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology.

Diamond says she basically always knew she wasn’t straight, but she waited until both her parents were deceased and she was well-established in adult life to come out to her family; she was fairly sure that revelation wouldn’t go well. And it didn’t, really. “I was 26 or something, when I finally decided to tell my brother. I told him in the car while we were on the freeway — I thought he was going to crash.” Over time, the younger brother and his family grew to accept, if not approve of, her sexuality. Her older brother never has, though. When her younger brother told him, his first instinct was to institutionalize Diamond. “My [younger] brother called me up and said, ‘Make sure you don’t put your address in the phone book’,” just in case her older brother decided to go looking for her.

Diamond got interested in activism from experiences of homophobia of her own. While she was out to some family and close friends, she was definitely not out professionally. But while working at the City of Hope Research Institute a few years later — in the same lab with her husband — a co-worker found out that she was having an affair with another woman in the department, and began to sabotage her work slowly but surely. She was let go soon after because she wasn’t making any progress. The worst part of that is that she didn’t know at that point why her work was going so badly — it just was, so she accepted the decision and assumed the failure had to do with her personally.

“Then my ex-husband called one day, though, and he’d had lunch with some people, and Jim [the co-worker] had a few too many margaritas and told everyone how he’d basically run me out of the department.” That was the first she knew of intrigue. “I thought, oh, you know, I wasn’t an engineer, maybe that explained it…so when I learned I got really, really angry.” And so while she began a new job working at UCLA, she also started going to lesbian and gay scientist meetings in Los Angeles. “I never want to think that anyone else will get fired for their sexual orientation like I was,” Diamond says.

This happened in 1981, and there was no legal recourse for such a situation. Now, you might be thinking it’s a good thing we’re in 2013 now and things like that can’t happen anymore! But you would actually be wrong. The Employment Nondiscrimination Act still has no mention of sexual orientation or gender identity, even though such a clause gets brought up every year, so there is still no national-level protection against LGBT-related discrimination.

After a year of “craziness” at UCLA, Diamond submitted her resume to a new position as a lab manager for a new, very young woman researcher, Dr. Ellen Rothenberg. They talked for five hours in her interview, and Diamond came out explicitly then and there: “I am a lesbian and an activist, and if this is gonna be a problem, we should stop right now.” She was unwilling to go through another situation like she had at City of Hope. But Rothenberg shrugged and said that was not a problem; her last lab manager was gay and he was great, so she didn’t see why it should matter.

And from the way Diamond tells it, her work life has been nothing but unicorns and rainbows ever since. They just got a paper published in Science, and another in Blood. “We’re finally starting to solve some problems.”

Diamond has also been happily married for over 30 years to another chemist, Barbara Belmont, the President of American Research and Testing, Inc.

Belmont was just made a fellow of American Chemical Society for her work on diversity in chemistry. They met in the Los Angeles queer scientist activist world, first as friends involved with other people, but eventually fell in love. Funny how that happens, huh? And they are both in positions where they can be very out and very active without fear of negative repercussions. “I’m kind of more of a flaming lesbian than Barbara, I guess – but both of us, we’re just who we are,” says Diamond.

But they’re both very committed to filling the pipeline with other queer scientists. “We’re out here trying to get other people to come out and not be afraid and push visibility, because that’s what’s going to change the climate.”

They say, “It’s important to understand that if you do come out you will know where a good place to work is and is not. And if you feel uncomfortable after coming out then you shouldn’t be in that place. The point is to be yourself as much as possible. You want to feel safe in your own skin.”

And this is where NOGLSTP comes in. Its mission is to empower lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals in the STEM professions, and to educate their surrounding communities about LGBTQ issues. They also manage the popular Queer Scientists of Historical Note list, and run a popular mentoring program where young students or scientists can talk to an older role model. They give out two $5,000 scholarships every year and facilitate communication through the queer science community. They just collaborated with over 20 other STEM professional organizations to apply for a grant for developing a National Research Mentoring Network, that would include LGBTQ students in a larger and more intensive mentoring program. And they coordinate a gay scientist conference every other year called Out to Innovate; the next will be in 2014 in Atlanta, so if you’re interested you can start planning to go now!

Queered Science: Jeremy Yoder, Allison Mattheis and Surveying Queers in STEM

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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One of the main drives behind this series, as you might have already figured out, is to introduce smart science queers to all the other smart science queers who exist. Now, you might be thinking, shouldn’t there already be some statistics about us — some kind of survey or self-reporting count? The Internet exists, it couldn’t be that hard, right?

And if you were thinking that, you would be right, we could indeed self-report and count ourselves, and that has just been done by two smart science queers named Jeremy Yoder and Allison Mattheis. They just finished gathering data in a nationwide survey of sexual diversity in science, technology, engineering and math professions, called Queer in Stem. This is the first study of its kind, and the first research focused on scientists above the undergrad level.

Jeremy is an evolutionary ecologist doing his postdoc research on natural selection on the genetic code of a Mediterranean wildflower at the University of Minnesota. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Idaho. He’s gay, and out “in pretty much every context you can name. I grew up in a religious background, and I came out relatively late in life, only after I’d started my Ph.D.—starting grad school was when I actually started to meet and make friends who were gay. So my experience in science has really been that it was a place where I was free to be myself.”

Allison is an educational researcher, and just finished her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. She says, “I’m queer and anyone who spends any time with me will probably find out pretty quickly (people often read me as straight, however, because I’m a cisgender woman). I get that ‘what, you’re gay?!’ kind of reaction a lot which is annoying. As a middle-class white woman who works on issues of intersectional identities and social justice, I try to use that experience to remind myself not to make assumptions about other people, and also recognize the privilege(s) I have and use it to speak up.”

The two met and became friends when Allison hitched a ride to work with Jeremy’s carpool one day. Jeremy had been wondering about issues of LGBTQ equality and inclusion – he did some preliminary hunting on Google Scholar and couldn’t find any studies looking at people past the undergrad stage. (You might remember our article on Dr. Erin Cech and her study on LGB undergrad engineering students’ experiences — and her study was the first of its kind as well). Allison had done some work on queer issues previously, on “discrimination in school settings, transnational queer migration, and identity development.” So Jeremy asked Allison what she thought about the idea of a survey of a nation-wide sample of queer scientists – as a social scientist, did she think results like that would be publishable? “I responded, ‘are you asking me to teach you about doing research with human subjects? Sure!'”

They just published the preliminary results of the Queer Stem survey and answered some questions for me about what they have seen so far.

What have you learned from your results so far?

We’re only just starting to crunch the numbers, but what we’ve seen right off the bat is, there are actually quite a lot of queer people working in STEM fields. Over 1,400 people participated in the online survey, from every major region of the U.S., and even quite a few from overseas. We have representation from every major STEM field, and participants of all ages and career stages. And we have good representation of folks identifying outside the gender binary—11% of participants identified as trans* and almost 16% identified as genderqueer.

We’ve also begun preliminary analysis of the open responses and interview data (in addition to the survey over 140 people responded by email to ten open-ended questions and we interviewed 60 people individually). The quantitative and qualitative data both suggest that there are some very specific things that can make a big difference to people’s experiences, for good or bad — like whether there’s formal institutional support for LGBTQ people, or whether people are able to identify mentors or role models with similar experiences.

What are the most interesting leads/threads you’ve noticed either in the analysis of your data or in carrying out the study itself?

Jeremy: Across STEM disciplines, we saw people are mostly very out in their personal lives, but less out to colleagues or students. Interestingly, the factors that seem to predict how out people are in professional contexts aren’t the size of the school where they work, or whether they work at a private or public institution, or even the part of the country or the size of the town where they live; what makes a difference is whether they rate their workplace as safe and welcoming, and whether their employer provides benefits and support for queer folks.

Allison: I’ve begun identifying particular issues that seem relevant to most of the participants and those that are more specific to particular people’s experiences. For example, whether or not respondents report having regular interaction with a supportive queer community outside of their professional work is an external factor that impacts both personal and work life. Individual characteristics like gender identity, a racial or ethnic minority, age, and religion are significant for some participants and less so for others.

How have your peers/advisors/etc. in academia responded to this study?

Jeremy: My boss has been very supportive, and interested in what we’re seeing. That’s been my experience in talking to straight colleagues across the board, really. And, in fact, I’ve been asked to present results from the survey as part of a seminar and discussion series on diversity in biology that’s been organized by the College of Biological Sciences at my university.

Allison: The response has been great and people are very interested in learning more about our findings, both in my field and beyond— I’m that person that tends to meet you at a party and then talk your ear off about research.

Where do you hope to go from here?

Jeremy: We’re hoping that we, or someone, will be able to do a follow-up version of the online survey in the next couple years. That would let us start to estimate how many queer-identified folks are actually out there working in STEM, and how representative our sample is. There are also all sorts of new questions we’d like to ask, or questions we’d like to ask in a different way, now that we’re starting to look at the survey results in depth.

Allison: We have had many people (both respondents and other researchers) write and tell us how excited they are that we’re doing this study and that has been really great. In my new position as faculty, I’m also looking forward to being able to mentor graduate students with interests in these issues, and to hopefully involve students in our ongoing analysis and writing. [Allison just accepted a position at California State University, Los Angeles in the division of Applied and Advanced Studies in Education, so if you’re anywhere near there, watch for new work from her!]

What do you hope for in the future of academia and social justice?

Accessible to people of all identities, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds. Science works best when it’s informed by a wide diversity of perspectives. We also hope that queer research and advocacy efforts will be enhanced by greater recognition of how many LGBTQ individuals are out there doing innovative and valuable work in STEM fields!

Queered Science Interview: Dr. Donna Riley and Engineering Social Justice

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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Dr. Donna Riley is a founding faculty member and associate professor at the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College, the first engineering program at a US women’s college. In 2005, she received an award from the National Science Foundation for her work on implementing and assessing critical and feminist pedagogies in engineering classrooms. She holds a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2008 she published Engineering and Social Justice (Morgan and Claypool, 2008), and in 2010 was awarded the NOGLSTP Educator of the Year award for her work on combining social justice work and science pedagogy. She is out both personally and professionally as bisexual, and speaks as articulately about biphobia to the queer community as she does about homophobia to the heteronormative world.

Her work on feminist and critical pedagogy is what originally piqued my interest; we’ve talked before in this column about the tendency of STEM fields to exclude discussion of social justice issues, but Dr. Riley mixes together Paulo Freire, thermodynamics and bell hooks into one happy stew of learning of all kinds.

This year she is not teaching at Smith; instead, she’s actually in Washington serving a one-year stint as Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in the division of Engineering Education and Centers. Even so, she was excited to participate in this series and answered a number of questions for me. They’re so complete, as is, that I’ve left most of them intact for your reading and devouring pleasure. Enjoy!

You got an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, and a graduate degree in engineering and public policy. How did it feel to be a woman and a member of the queer community in those settings?

I could write a separate volume about my experiences of sexism at Princeton and CMU, and they are many and horrific. So I will just leave that alone and focus here on anti-queer stuff….

In the early ’90s at Princeton, there were only a handful of students who were out as LGB people, and there was one staff member we knew who was just coming out on campus as transgender. Lots of us were scientists and engineers, actually, though I didn’t put my professional identity together with my sexual orientation very consciously. I mostly just wanted to find other queer people. Within the sciences and engineering among our peers and faculty, we were mostly just met with silence. We knew to compartmentalize, and we knew when and where it was safe to be out – and that was definitely not in the engineering building.

Were there any instances in which you felt discrimination, overt or otherwise?

The most overt anti-gay acts in the engineering classroom that I experienced happened on Gay Jeans Day. Our campus had one of these days where to raise awareness about what it is like to be LGB (we hadn’t added the T yet), we asked people who supported LGB people to wear jeans. We advertised this in every mailbox, every signpost, everywhere so no one was clueless about what day it was. And people who normally wore jeans would wear suits, or khakis, a nice dress, anything to show they weren’t gay and didn’t approve. Some of the fundamentalist Christians would make t-shirts that said “love the sinner hate the sin” and wear those with either jeans or slacks, depending on how they interpreted things. I remember sitting in my ChemE classroom waiting for the professor to walk in, most of my classmates in khakis, some with micro-aggressions scribbled on their shirts, adrenaline shooting through my veins, as each year there was typically a conversation where the men would express something homophobic like “No way! Wouldn’t be caught dead wearing jeans,” or whatever. And our professor would stroll in, not wearing jeans either, possibly actually oblivious, or possibly comfortably homophobic. There was utter silence from them on any and all social issues. In science and engineering culture this is called “being objective.” But this was a day that you couldn’t be neutral, and every one of the faculty picked the anti-gay side.

Outside of the classroom I experienced two major incidents of homophobic harassment. The first was at a party my first year, where a guy pressed me up against a wall and ordered me to “suck his dick to prove to him I wasn’t a dyke.” His language. I got away from him and got myself home. It didn’t help that I was not yet entirely out to myself at that point. My senior year, the night Bill Clinton was elected, I was walking with two gay friends back to our dorms, jubilant, when a group of ROTC guys came up and yelled “NO MORE GAY RIGHTS” at us. It was a little weird, kind of a non sequitur, though it was clear they were drunk and pissed that Clinton had been elected. As we were looking at each other apprehensively, trying to figure out what we would do if they attacked us, they thankfully moved on, and we let out a collective sigh of relief and went home. We wrote a letter in the school newspaper documenting and protesting the way we were treated.

Within the LGBT community I have experienced biphobia in every campus community I have been a part of. In undergrad I was publicly called a “player to be named later” by a lesbian and in grad school publicly called a “poseur” by a gay man. Later at Smith a lesbian professor referred pejoratively to a colleague in Mathematics as a “bisexual atheist” when the conversation was about the professor’s objections to having a Dean of Religious Life at Smith. I still don’t know what her bisexuality had to do with anything, except to communicate its unacceptability.

Many scientists describe the difficulty of deciding to come out, knowing the heteronormative culture of the scientific community. What helped you make the decision to come out, and what kind of responses did you get from colleagues?

In college and grad school I was very out on campus as an activist, so my peers knew because it was widely public, but it rarely came up in classes for any kind of reaction from them. In grad school my dissertation advisers and other faculty with whom I had a closer relationship knew my partner was a woman and I am fairly certain we attended departmental events together. My advisers each recognized my partner in the same way they would recognize a student’s significant opposite sex relationship and that really helped me feel welcome.

I came out in my academic writing explicitly in 2003 because I knew that situating myself relative to relations of power in engineering, in academia, and in society as a whole was essential to the project of introducing critical pedagogies in my engineering classes. I was already out to a lot of students. Others assumed I was queer because of my use of gender neutral pronouns, and some picked up on a rainbow ribbon I posted in my office.

I choose again and again to come out and be out. For me it is a matter of both personal integrity and political commitment. I have to be who I am, and I have to work so others can be who they are. This is risky, and it comes at a cost, but I believe the costs of being closeted are much greater, both personally and politically.

You describe your work as liberative pedagogy. What does this mean in practical terms, in the classroom and in interactions with students?

I actually treat this as an open question in my classrooms – I present some ideas from the family of critical or liberative pedagogies – feminist, anti-racist, queer, post-colonial/decolonizing, and others – and ask what it would mean for students to find a classroom liberating – from what? To what? Students are active participants in their own education; I am trying to do away with what Freire called the “banking system” of education, still so common in the sciences and engineering, where professors are assumed to hold the knowledge, make “deposits” in students’ minds, then ask them to regurgitate knowledge on tests. I am instead trying to have students bring what they already know from the authority of their experience, share knowledge among the class, and translate theory into action for change in some way. Together we question the silences in our field around race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and other forms of identity, and ask what we are learning about diversity when it cannot be discussed in professional science and engineering settings.

You’re a founding faculty member at the engineering school at Smith, the first women’s college to have an engineering degree. What was that process like?

It has been a huge thrill and the fulfillment of a life’s dream to get to teach engineering at Smith. I wanted to leverage the liberal arts context in my own work, and it was probably the only place in the country I could have gotten away with testing out critical pedagogies in engineering classrooms, and integrating ideas from gender studies, sociology, and ethics in my engineering work.

At the same time, the persistent and pernicious trans-phobia of Smith as an institution has been a huge disappointment to me. Smith that simultaneously is not welcoming to trans* people really pours bleach on the rainbow of having an engineering program at a women’s college. We have had trans* and genderqueer students in engineering, but the rhetoric around being a women’s engineering program against the backdrop of Smith’s very public transphobia becomes very retrograde, and misses a tremendous opportunity to move the conversation forward.

While overt sexism and homophobia are less common than historically, they still play out in ways that are subtle and, therefore, insidious and hard to combat. How do you see this happening in the sciences, and how do you deal with it?

One of the biggest sources of sexism and homophobia is lodged in the epistemology of science. How we think, and what we think, matter in determining what we know and don’t know, and affects our workplace interactions in very negative ways. We think that we eliminate bias by keeping our “personal lives” – some aspects of ourselves – out of the lab, classroom, or office. But actually this is how we allow implicit bias to seep in and saturate everything we do, because that which is male, straight, white, able-bodied, monied, is not left behind in the practice of science and engineering – it is just so normative that lots of us don’t notice.

I have learned that talking about these issues and building solidarity with like-minded others is the only way we can ever address them. Ultimately scientists and engineers have to be able to think outside the epistemological boxes we’ve been trained into to understand diversity and social justice. Cultural change takes a lot of hard work, it takes talking to people and organizing — skills typically not in our wheelhouses as scientists and engineers.

What do you envision for the future? If you could see your work come to fruition, what would that mean to you?

I dream of various incarnations of science shops or community-based research that are really rooted in community more than university; I dream of an engineering firm founded on a cooperative model that does projects in the public interest and in the interest of social justice; I want to develop more around the notion of feminist engineering ethics, to see what new models of social justice work in engineering might emerge. I want engineers and scientists to get directly involved en masse in the conversation about national priorities and be part of a shift away from militarism and policies that line corporate pockets to a more just, peaceful and sustainable future in the US and the world.

What would you say to young, queer-identified women just beginning a career in the sciences?

You’re not alone. See what community you find in NOGLSTP and oSTEM, and take part in MentorNet. Look for LGBT groups within your professional societies and join up early (engineering doesn’t have these yet – we need people to found them!). Be active in non-science LGBT groups too. Ask what you can do to contribute to the work.

And follow your passion. It is impossible to predict how careers turn out – you cannot plan a career trajectory in much detail at all, but if you do what you are passionate about you will develop the building blocks you need later to discover or put together the next thing – and you will create the sense that it has all led up to this…

Queered Science: Gender Bias OPEN THREAD

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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feature image from genengnews.com

After the last Queered Science post, about Dr. Ben Barres and how his transgender status gave him new insights into gender bias inherent in the sciences, we had a number of comments about gender bias, how to recognize it, and how to deal with it. Gender bias, especially in professional settings, is rarely an overt statement or action that you can name, report, write down, yell about or feel angry about. No, it’s much more subtle. Instead of leaving you righteously angry and ready to take down the whole department if need be in the face of your brave and downright meritorious cause, brushes with gender bias will often leave you with nothing but a rank pool of suspicion and self-doubt lurking in the pit of your stomach. Ew.

So how do you handle this? How do you work for equality in your workplace (or school or neighborhood or life) while still surviving and trying to be seen as a successful human in your field of choice at the same time? This is what one gender bias expert, a law professor at UC Berkeley, suggests: smile a lot, make yourself less threatening, and soften your message so it’s easier for other people to accept.

^{Mary Ann Mason: “smile a lot. Smiling, just evolutionarily, means we’re friends. We’re not going to do you harm.” (via genderbiasbingo.com)}

Or how about this one, from Joan Williams, law professor at UC Hastings.

^{Joan Williams: “you need softeners…to send femme-y signals, signals that you aren’t deficiently feminine…” (via genderbiasbingo.com)}

This sounds like just trying to fit even further into the gender role stereotypes that are so constricting and problematic in the first place. Soften my message? Smile more – but definitely don’t flirt, that’s a line we have to walk, too? Ok so maybe people will like me as a person, because I’m being non-threatening and friendly, but those tactics don’t effect any real change. And, more than that, I’m leaving the exact same walls and barriers still standing in the way of everyone else who comes behind me.

Now, Williams does preface her statement with the fact that you really want to change the workplace expectations first and foremost. And I like her last phrase: “It’s better to be a bitch than a doormat.” But it’s frustrating that we even need to prove that we are ‘sufficiently feminine’ (and what does that even mean anyway?) to get further ahead. The idea that being stereotypically femme-y is a prerequisite to getting any good feminist work done is short-sighted, counter-effective, and just plain backwards. Like our awesome reader Becky said, this kind of advice is like handing us the psychological equivalent of an apron and frying pan.

But in thinking about other potential strategies, here is the problem I keep coming up with: fixing gender bias is not our responsibility. The burden should be on those who are biased, and if a coworker really thinks I’m less deserving /intelligent /reliable /creative /whateverthehellelse just because I’m a woman then there’s not a lot I can do anyway.

At the same time, if we don’t do it, who will, right? And if we want to succeed in a male-dominated profession, we are going to come up against this sooner or later.

So I’m asking you, dear readers — magical alchemists who take the cruddy drudgery of working in the world of misogyny and other assorted problems and turn it into nuggets of social-justice learning-moment gold — what do you do? What strategies do you or people you know (or could you, or could others) employ to combat gender bias or any other kind of latent discrimination? Let’s talk about it.

And here’s a little gold nugget of a video, just to end on a happy note.

^{Shauna Marshall, Academic Dean at UC Hastings: “It’s ok not to be liked. It’s better to be respected. So go with that.” (via genderbiasbingo.com)} 

Queered Science: Eradicating Misogyny in the Scientific Community

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer scientists and tell you all about them, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Currently one of the most high-profile queer scientists right now is Dr. Ben Barres, who is a professor of neurobiology, developmental biology, and neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He’s important to us because he’s been vocal in the fight against misogyny in the sciences. He’s also openly transgender, and has extensively discussed his identity and his experiences with the press and the general public.

Dr. Barres was always interested in science since childhood; he remembers playing with chemistry sets, magnifying glasses — all the nerdy things he could get his hands on. He also struggled with gender since he was young: “I was kind of ostracized growing up. I was never in the “in” group. I was always sort of socially rejected. Because I was different. I really was sort of like that boy in a dress, or something.”

He originally went to MIT interested in electrical engineering, but decided to focus on neurology after a particularly inspiring class on the brain in his sophomore year. “I was very intense about my studies. I knew a lot about science, but I didn’t know a lot about other stuff. I was a typical science geek, and I really had no other interests… I was very driven. I worked seven days a week, fifteen-hour days…”

Barres has also described that he felt more comfortable in professional settings than personal ones, because at work he didn’t have to wrestle with the questions of gender identity that haunted him in his personal life. In many ways this echoes what we already know, and what Dr. Erin Cech’s work highlights: that queer students often feel a strong separation between personal and public life, and are constantly juggling a kind of “mental calculus” over where exactly that boundary lies.

“I really felt by that point that life had been so hard on me- I never feel like I really do a good job explaining what it was like, but I didn’t sleep lots of nights, I was suicidal, life was so uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really enjoyed my life, but somehow it’s like it was split into two parts. The person part, which has been very uncomfortable, and the professional part that’s been a pleasure, and I’ve really enjoyed. But the personal part was just so uncomfortable that sometimes you think, ‘I’ve had enough.’ It’s that distressing.”

At 40, already well established in the science community as a woman, Barres decided to transition. “I did not understand why I was different and I was too ashamed to ever once discuss my feelings with anyone. At the age of 40 years old, I learned about transsexualism, and decided to change my sex. Even though I worried that it would seriously harm my scientific career, I found that the opportunity to become a man was irresistible.”

He says he was in denial about the presence of gender discrimination in the sciences until his transition, at which point he saw first-hand the differences in how people treated him. He tells a now-famous anecdote: after giving a talk shortly after his transition to living as a man, he overheard a colleague say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.” This inferior “sister” was none other than Barres pre-transition, and the work being presented was the exact same work. This was an inarguable example of gendered stereotypes of scientific competency at work.

Since then, he has dedicated a significant portion of his work to eradicating misogyny in the sciences. “As is true for many successful scientists, I had never thought much about gender discrimination. It did not occur to me that it was a serious problem. After all if I could attain tenure and full professorship as a woman, why couldn’t every other woman? It didn’t occur to me to think that I just might have been lucky or that I might have been successful by being several times more productive than comparable men in my career cohort.”

In 2005, the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, gave a talk at Harvard in which he suggested that women are innately worse at science than men. Summers based much of his argument on The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker, in which Pinker states, among other things, that men are inherently “risk-taking achievers who can willingly endure discomfort in pursuit of success” and that “women are more likely to choose administrative support jobs that offer low pay in air-conditioned offices.”

The puzzling non sequitur of air-conditioned offices aside, (what does that have to do with anything?), obviously we disagree, and so did Dr. Barres. He wrote a pointed counterargument called “Does Gender Matter?” published in 2006 in Nature. And just like that, Barres was famous. “This is a street fight,” he says. He pointed out that much of Pinker’s work (and many similar theories as well) is based on evolutionary psychology, a field that has for the most part been strongly trounced. Barres argues that there is no evidence, only speculations on top of speculations, that women are innately bad at science thinking. However, there is strong evidence that prejudice, latent or obvious, against minority groups significantly decreases their success.

Just as Dr. Erin Cech mentioned last time, stereotype threat plays a huge part in minorities’ success: Barres defines stereotype threat as “the fear that one’s behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies… This fear causes an impairment of performance.” So, in practical terms, it’s been proven that women perform far worse on a science test if they are reminded beforehand that women are bad at science.

What’s more, the scientific community should have a huge incentive to minimize exclusion of minorities in the sciences, for its own good; white men account for eight percent of the population, but constitute far higher percentages in the sciences. And the probability of getting the best and brightest minds from that eight percent is incredibly low. The longer we go with such a limited slice of our population, the longer we are only shooting ourselves in the collective foot.

After his commentary was published in Nature, other colleagues at Harvard used slurs about his transgender status to denigrate his work. Barres reports that Harry Mansfield called him a “political fruitcake,” and Steven Pinker said that Barres had “reduced science to Oprah.” Both of these men are also professors at Harvard. Regardless of the fact that these insults are glaringly unprofessional and inappropriate to any work setting, their spluttering inability to come up with coherent objections to his work shows that they have no real support for what they’re saying. Keep in mind that Mansfield, a philosophy professor, has also stated in the past (in his 2006 book Manliness): “Is it possible to teach a women manliness and thus to become more assertive? Or is that like teaching a cat to bark?”

Obviously these guys need to revise their gender beliefs a little, and it’s disturbing that they are professors of psychology and philosophy at Harvard. They occupy positions of moral and intellectual authority, and it seems frankly irresponsible that the leaders of schools like Harvard continue to allow this kind of ignorant rhetoric from teachers and mentors. Oh, but I forgot – the president of Harvard is the one whose sexist comments started this controversy in the first place. That was dumb – but I am a woman, after all.

In general, their way of thinking is on the way out – thankfully. The vast majority of emails that Barres receives on this topic are overwhelmingly positive. Look at this one, for instance:

Things like stereotype threat and internalized prejudice don’t just apply to women, they also apply to any other minority status – like queer or trans* identities.

Barres spends a lot of time speaking openly and publicly about his transgender identity, in the hopes of supporting other LGBTQ scientists.

“I have become aware that there are many students and academics who are gay who are still closeted, even in the Bay Area, for fear of harmful repercussions to their lives and careers. I always advise them to be open about who they are, including on job interviews, and I have yet to see one not get their first choice job. Your difference is your greatest advantage. Don’t let others take your happiness away.”

He is an inspiring example of using positions of power to effect social change. While he says his colleagues at Stanford (in an open-minded and liberal part of the world, it should be noted) have been overwhelmingly supportive — not everyone is. “I am tired of powerful people using their position to demean me just because I am different from them…I will certainly not sit around silently and endure them.”

Download slides from his basic talk.

OPEN THREAD: Coming Out In The Sciences, Let’s Discuss!

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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We’ve been talking recently about how it feels to be queer in the sciences, and in particular, a queer woman in the sciences.

And you guys had awesome comments of your own, so now we have a whole space to talk about just these things! We’re going to have a few different open threads, each on a different sub-issue of being queer in the sciences. I’m excited because I always have so much to say on this topic, but not a whole lot of people to say them to. From your comments, it looks like you all have things to say too! Like many of you mentioned, I often feel like I have to keep my science self and my queer self separate, but this is the perfect space to merge them.

First, one of the most basic questions: Are you out to your co-workers/ peers/ advisors/ bosses/ important people?

Like I’ve already mentioned, I wanted to come out for a while, but it never quite felt like the right time. I mean, when is the right time? We all know how uncomfortable it is when everyone else can effortlessly talk about their wives/kids, or at least have their presence assumed, and we have to sit quiet like the weird kid with no friends in the corner. But how do you casually interject a comment about your sexuality at the work party?

For me, it was a slow and gradual process, one co-worker at a time, either in the lab or in the field, and each conversation had my heart beating so hard it practically fractured my sternum, a huge rush of adrenaline and weak knees for an hour or so afterward. I didn’t come right out and say it, but a quick correction of their pronouns was usually enough to catalyze a discussion.

Then again, like I mentioned, I work in an accepting part of the world. Not everyone even feels safe about being out – the potential awkwardness involved isn’t even part of the equation. Many of the comments so far have mentioned feeling legitimately worried about losing jobs, opportunities for promotion, grants, or future projects.

So. Are you out professionally? If so, how did you do it? We all know that coming out isn’t a one-time ordeal, but kind of a constant coming out or being out – every new person you meet, you have to re-introduce your queerness into the discussion. What is your favorite coming-out story? How were the reactions?

If you’re not out, why not? What are your thoughts on the topic?

Queered Science: Why Social Justice and STEM Fields Should Hang Out More Often

Queered Science is a series of profiles meant to highlight queer science and tell you what you need to know about it, for your intellectual edification and so you don’t feel excluded from a major and predominantly heterosexist subset of academia and industry.

Header by Rory Midhani

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The first profile on my list is Dr. Erin Cech, an assistant professor and researcher in sociology at Rice University. She is my new hero and could definitely be yours too, if —like me —your hero list involves academics and novel protagonists. Cech focuses on inequality in the sciences, and specifically the subtle ways in which women, Native Americans, and LGBT people are excluded through seemingly innocuous cultural processes. You should know her because she was the lead author on a ground-breaking study in 2011 on the experiences of LGB students in engineering departments. I interviewed her last week and frantically wrote down everything she said in order to share it with you; it’s very impressive. She just off-handedly spouted the quotes I have typed below, the kind of sentences that I take hours to formulate and perfect. Oh well, I guess that’s her job.

She has two bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and sociology, but had a lot of questions about the hegemonic culture that dominates science professions. She decided to go to graduate school in sociology in order to push the cultures of engineering and science towards more diversity and inclusivity from the outside.

“Sciences are perceived as an objective, neutral place. Who you are, and what you identify with, aren’t supposed to matter in whether people think you can do science — and yet it absolutely does. There is a consistent underrepresentation of minorities of every type, and it’s often difficult to understand why from the outset. I’m interested in how inequality is a really subtle process, and how we can reproduce inequalities without noticing that’s what’s going on.”

One of the most important parts of her research is what she calls the “self-expressive edge of sex segregation,” and you should know this, because she is talking about you and to you.

“The way we construct this idea of having a career or a major or a path and how it’s a way of expressing oneself, is such a dominant cultural narrative. It’s a very common frame through which people choose a major, that what you pick is somehow expressing who you are. And in this way it might mask subtle gendered processes: people’s interests come to be gendered, and that then becomes who they think they are. It feels legitimate and organic to them, and in many ways it is. But when people make decisions as a result of these expressive choices, the societal gendering of those choices comes into play. These choices are part personal choice, but a focus on choice alone hides, or cloaks, the very important presence of this lifelong gendering process under the guise of self-expression.”

In retrospect, I experienced this very thing in middle and high school. As a youngster, I was a super girly girl. My best friend and I dressed up as Anne of Green Gables and went wandering the countryside; my grandmother helped me sew water-nymph and fairy costumes that I wore to school on a regular basis  in middle school. Yes, I know. And at some point, I think in eighth grade, I decided I was bad at math and didn’t like science. I wanted to be a writer, and writing and science didn’t overlap. QED, I couldn’t do science. For the rest of my public education, with that mentality, I put little to no effort into those classes and took my resulting mediocre grades as proof that I simply wasn’t cut out for it.

It was only in college, with a very different mindset, that I turned this totally around. Through a series of unrelated events, I realized I loved glaciers and wanted to study the physics of their behavior, and this – obviously – required math. So I started slowly but worked hard, remediated some of the bad habits and misinformation I’d learned in high school, and — guess what? Now I fucking love science, and I get paid to do it. It just took a slight tilt in my personal identity, and the realization that I could be creative, artistic, frilly and girly — and science smart.

Dr. Cech explains this exact phenomenon, in sociology language:

“Interest itself, the way we learn what we should focus on, comes from experiences since birth that are often gendered. Subtle signs in teaching, parenting, media, or interactions with our peers all lead to cues about what women are supposed to like, and men are supposed to like. So even legitimate self-expression – interests, desires, etc. – can be informed by social processes.”

This leads nicely into a discussion of her 2011 study, “Navigating the Heteronormativity of Engineering: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Students,” co-authored by Tom Waidzunas (Temple University) and published in Engineering Studies. As a brief summary, she found that within the dominantly heteronormative culture of engineering, there are many prejudices against LGB students that may hurt their success in the field. No surprise there. But the interesting part is that, in contrast with other minority identities, like race, queer people often have a certain amount of control over their visibility.

“Queer students are often out to some friends but not others, so there’s this dynamic of information control, which brings with it concerns about compartmentalizing. They have their personal life versus school life, and they have to manage how to keep them separate. These boundaries, and the mental calculus involved, aren’t required in the same way with other dimensions of inequality.”

This is probably something that many of us have experienced, at one point or another, either personally or by proxy. Whether for a week or for 10 years, there is a span of time in the coming out process where we have to juggle who knows and who doesn’t know; how much to share at any given time; who is within the trusted, sacred circle and who is not. And we all know that this is not comfortable. But the difference here is that it’s the academic institution and all the latent anti-gay prejudices that ferment in its silence that creates the need for this juggling.

For instance, Jessie is a 20-year-old mechanical engineer who writes a blog called Musings of a Lesbian Engineer, to let off some of the steam of being closeted at school. (She let me use her real name, but on her blog she goes by Jane Doe.) I found her blog during my research and asked her for her personal insights, and much of what she said supported Cech’s conclusions. “As for who I am currently out to, I can count it on my hand…Namely my ex, and 5 of my closest friends from home. I base this on how much I trust a person, I also tend to avoid coming out if I worry about a backlash or negative reaction. I am not out to anyone in the engineering department at my school, my roommate may have guessed by now that I am gay, but I am not certain.”

So students generally employ a combination of three strategies: passing (literally pretending to be straight and keeping their work and social lives completely distinct), covering (not necessarily pretending to be straight, but downplaying signifiers of gayness and gay culture around straight peers), and overachieving (making themselves indispensable to others, almost to make up for being gay). As you could probably predict, the results of Cech and Waidzunas’ study indicated that the constant navigating of these options adds a significant strain on these students’ energy and abilities, and often leads to a feeling of isolation within a hostile environment. Gay students might not even know about one another. Jessie agrees, “I’ve actually done the math and considering engineering is 85% men and 15% women, then there are 8.5 gay men and 1.5 lesbian women in 100 engineers. If they are anything like me I wouldn’t have a clue as to who was gay or straight.”

Interestingly, the coming out (or being out) experiences for these 8.5 gay men might differ significantly from those of the 1.5 lesbian women. Cech found that lesbians were often more likely to be accepted because the masculinity associated with the stereotypical projection of lesbians fits better with the image of typical engineers.

“This study seemed to suggest that gay men in particular felt their competence and qualification questioned, and had to push extra hard to seem qualified. In contrast, lesbian women were often given more credit than straight women; masculinity and comfort with machinery that are part of the stereotypical production of lesbians may give them some kind of credibility. Of course, lesbian women still very much have to deal with the gender dimension of inequality in engineering, but as compared to straight women, lesbians’ competence seemed more accepted. And the whole reason this dichotomy exists is because of the devaluing of the feminine in engineering.”

Maybe most important, though, is the “technical/social dualism,” that keeps us from discussing these inequalities and prejudices. We’ve discussed this idea before, that in the sciences, technical activities are the only ones valued. There is no space for subjects that could be classified as social: like talking about gay rights, or women’s rights, or social justice and inequalities. Of course, this is a false differentiation, because there is really no way to entirely separate the two, and anyone who’s worked on a team project knows that even in engineering, social dynamics are just as important as technical abilities. The devaluing of “social” topics really just serves to silence important conversations about inequalities.

This is a hard question, because you could also argue that it’s preferable to keep personal and professional lives separate. But, when it comes to the erasure and silencing of core pillars of our personal identities, the dualism must break. Jessie told me, “We don’t talk about the social problems of today, we never really talk politics. Some of my friends at school do seem to be accepting of gay[s] and lesbians. I just am horrible in social situations, and have no clue on the social protocol of coming out; there is no manual for it.” And this is a perfect example of why keeping silent on issues of LGBTQ acceptance is not enough. There is no social protocol, because coming out feels inappropriate in a science setting. We don’t create accepted social scaffolding around taboo interactions, and therefore we have no structure with which to discuss homosexuality. Jessie’s straight friends never needed to come out definitively, with or without a manual, and I’m pretty sure they do not spend time writing a blog to let off the steam of being straight in a heteronormative world either.

This is why, as Dr. Cech says:

“Perhaps the most important thing to hope for is the opening of dialogue on topics of inequality. I think it’s the most important cultural sticking point in the way of having systemic change that allows for inclusiveness. Conversations about equality and social justice are seen as tangential to the “real” work that is supposed to be done, like the equations on the board and the experiments in the lab. I’ve called it the idea of depoliticization: the idea that the removal of these social and political questions is good and even necessary for engineering, where in reality, decontextualizing everything could be quite damaging.”

“But if dialogue could be more open, more people can be on board to thinking about changes. There’s often talk about ‘we need this and that initiative, this and that change.’ But many people in science and engineering are not there yet. First we need to convince people that there’s a discussion worth having here. It deserves a place at the table just like equations on the board do.”

And therein lies one of the most important values of Cech’s research: it’s a first step towards breaking down this technical/social barrier. Her studies connect important facts about LGBT rights to the supposedly neutral and disconnected world of engineering and science, and provide a starting ground for discussion where there was none before. Because what these LGB students experience is not just restricted to engineering school. At some point in life, almost all of us will encounter (or already have encountered) a social situation in which queerness is not welcome, and we all have some experience with the ideas of passing, minimizing, or overachieving to compensate. It’s not just science where femininity is devalued, but in countless lurking cultural microcosms. And it is a constant truth that having to distance yourself from any important part of your identity leads to feelings of isolation and unhappiness. Within engineering fields and without, these things happen, and the only way to improve the situation is to talk about it.

“What I’d like to see is that the person who has been in a lab for 25 years can go and have a conversation in the hallways about LGBT equality issues with a colleague and no one thinks it’s strange,” Cech said. “We need to open a cultural space for that. Without that space, it’s just people like us pushing from the outside. Real change has to come from both, the outside and the inside.”

Queered Science: LGBTQ Scientists and the Legend of the Unicorn

Quick, tell me the name of a scientist! Probably a man, huh? Maybe you picked Einstein, or maybe Newton – but odds are, you picked a man. Ok, now give me a female scientist. A little harder, right? Marie Curie, or Jane Goodall if you’re really creative. But now tell me the name of a queer scientist. Nothing? Yeah, I thought so. But it’s not your fault – I couldn’t think of any either. And this got me to thinking: where are all the queer scientists?

I’m a scientist, and I am always on the lookout for other lesbians in my profession, just for a sense of community and company. But I never find any. Actually, I found one once, I think, but that was when I was closeted and awkward and I was always too scared to talk to her, so I just stalked her in the hallways instead. (I would not suggest you try this, by the way). It’s sad, but it’s true; there are hardly any out lesbians (or queer people of any shades, for that matter) in the sciences. We are nowhere to be found.

So I investigated a little, to learn why lesbian scientists often seem like unicorns: legendary, awe-inspiring, luminous figments of the imagination but notoriously hard to come across in person. Partially, it is because women in general — and queer women to an even greater extent — truly are entering science careers less than men. Our society genders children’s tastes before they can even speak, and girls often grow up with internalized beliefs about sex segregation. But, statistically speaking, even math or science-oriented girls are often turned away from the science professions before they graduate. It’s called the “leaky pipeline theory”: along the long pipeline of education and entry-level jobs, women “leak out” at every step, often from feelings of isolation and unhappiness or because of prevalent societal assumptions that “women can’t do science.”

This is magnified for women who also identify as queer. LGBTQ students encounter harassment at school much more often than straight-identifying children; this kind of harassment leads to worse performance in school, and lower high school and college graduation rates. There are also few role models for queer people in the sciences, and the culture can feel very chilly to anyone who is not a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man. In this world, queer women hold a minimum of a double-minority status, and it’s no wonder we see relatively few queer women entering or acting in the sciences.

Within the workforce, queer scientists are often very quiet about their queerness, if they’re out at all. Many feel they have to stay in the closet to stay competitive in their careers. Today, thanks to organizations like NOGLSTP (the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals – quite a mouthful, I know!) and Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, it is much easier to be out at work. More than 95% of Fortune 500 companies now include sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies, and for scientists employed by the government, the Supreme Court’s decision on DOMA recently made it possible for federal benefits to be extended to same-sex partnerships as well.

But it hasn’t always been that way, and for many of the older generation, being out simply is not an option. Furthermore, much of the money in science is “soft money” – meaning that researchers have to renew their grants or apply for new ones every few years, from unknown third parties. You never know exactly who you’ll need money from, or who will be on your board of approval, and you never know who will be homophobic.

Also, there is a reluctance among scientists to talk about “social” or “political” issues; however much it might not be the case in real life, we like to see ourselves as the dispassionate investigators of objective truths. The sciences are meant to be neutral, and because of the rigor of the scientific process, they are thought to hold only essential facts. Sexuality is not considered among those essential facts, regardless of how essential it is to an identity, and therefore there’s no space to discuss it. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But in a heteronormative world, a non-political or “neutral” stance automatically becomes heterosexist itself. And within this setting coming out often feels inappropriate.

Of course, this is problematic. Straight scientists are also “out” in their own way, but never have to overtly discuss it. But regardless of how unfair this double standard might be, it is prevalent. I felt it strongly when I started at my first full-time job after graduating college as a field hydrologist for a major department within the federal government. Even though I’m fully out to family and friends in the rest of my life, I spent a lot of time being weird and closeted and awkward about my social life at work. In our field, there’s a lot of driving and hiking time, and therefore a lot of talking time; we get to know each other far better than many co-workers do. Where my co-workers (all men) could mention their girlfriends and fiancés offhandedly, I had to think and re-think about what I should say and how much I should allow. I was constantly working around the question of which was better, to be quiet and look like I was a weirdo with no social life and no romantic life, or open the can of worms that begins with “my girlfriend and I…”

In my personal situation, I actually work in a very LGBTQ-friendly area of the world, and I did come out to my co-workers, over a period of a few months. It was catalyzed one weekend on a rock climbing trip with a co-worker that I had assumed was platonic. I quickly learned otherwise when he touched my hair and said he was excited to be taking such a “beautiful, sexy lady” out. I stammered back in surprise and indignation that I wasn’t into men and if he wanted this to be a date, this would be a good time to turn the car around.

To his credit, he took this news remarkably well, and we finished the climb – albeit in relative silence. Over the rest of the season, I eventually came out (in various degrees of social agility) to every member of my team, but it was surprisingly hard. I spent a significant amount of thought and energy on the process, and as I said, I worked in an accepting place, with accepting co-workers. I also didn’t have a lot to lose (my job, maybe, but not a reputation or lab or work of my own). But for many queer scientists, this is not the case. And so queerness is often minimized, avoided, or hidden altogether.

Obviously, similar questions of visibility and individual expression come up in many other professions as well. But my point — and why I think this is important to be acknowledged — is  positions in the hard sciences are often signifiers of privilege and social status, much like being a lawyer, or a politician. Saying you’re a chemist, for instance, carries a certain gravitas; it’s as if you must not only be smart, but now, in this position of authority, you can tell other people things — and they will probably listen. The sciences are also seen as a particularly meritocratic institution, though that’s not always true. The belief is that if you’re there it’s because you deserve to be there. Conversely, if you’re not there, it’s because you don’t deserve to be there. Given the demographics of the sciences as a whole, this implies that only white, heterosexual cis-men deserve these positions of privilege and power.

What does the absence of queer people in such an authoritative job strata say about us? Young queer or questioning people see statistically fewer queer role models in positions of power than straight people. And it also raises questions of why there aren’t more queer people in the sciences. Is it because we’re not smart enough to get there? Is it because queer people are simply not cut out for the heavy intellectual lifting that the scientific method requires? Obviously not. But there’s some way in which all the stereotypes we ascribe to scientists – extremely intelligent, nerdy, rational, motivated, authoritative, intimidating – become disconnected from our socially constructed projections of homosexuality.

Never fear, queer scientists do exist. There’s Dr. Rochelle Diamond, the chair of NOGLSTP and a research biologist at Caltech. There’s Dr. Donna Riley, an openly bisexual researcher and professor of engineering at Smith; Dr. Ben Barres, an openly transgender professor of neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine; and Dr. Neena Schwarz, a retired neuroendocrinologist at Northwestern University and out lesbian. They exist, and they are awesome! And there are many more as well.

So, for your ogling and reading pleasure, for the next few weeks I will be profiling scientists whose work or personal stories you should be aware of. First up: Dr. Erin Cech and her pioneering study on lesbian, gay, and bisexual students’ experiences in engineering school. Stay tuned!

More reading:

“Shattering the Glass Closet” by Jenny Kurzweiler.

“Closeted Discoverers: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Scientists” by Jacqueline Ruttimann Oberst

NOGLSTP’s popular list of Queer Scientists of Historical Note

This Is Rape Culture: 14-Year-Old Rape Survivor Kills Herself, Rapist Gets 30 Entire Days In Jail

Feature Image via cnn.com

A Montana high-school teacher, Stacey Dean Rambold, convicted of raping a 14-year student, will be serving a total of 30 days as his sentence. Hundreds of people are expected to protest this sentence at the courthouse today. The judge explained his “logic” in sentencing Rambold to such a short time: he felt that the student “seemed older than her chronological age” and was “as much in control of the situation” as her teacher. Right.

The case started in 2008, when Rambold was a teacher and Cherice Morales was a 14-year-old student at the same high school. Morales’ mother, Auliea Hanlon, has accused Rambold of “pre-sexual grooming” with the intent of a sexual relationship. The girl eventually reported to a counselor at her church that she’d been sexually assaulted. Her mother pressed charges soon after; Rambold was put on paid leave, and eventually resigned.

In February 2010, as the court case continued, Morales committed suicide. “As a result of the sexual assault and its aftermath, (the teen) experienced severe emotional distress, humiliation and embarrassment and fell into irreversible depression that tragically led to her taking her own life on February 6, 2010,” said a complaint filed by Morales’ mother against Rambold.

After Morales died, Rambold was put on a “deferred prosecution agreement”: if he agreed to certain stipulations, including having no contact with minors, he could avoid imprisonment. Rambold pled guilty to one out of the three felony rape charges. However, the case was re-opened in 2012 when the state found out that he had broken some of his requirements. He was dropped from the deferred prosecution plan, and the case was re-opened. His trial ended Monday with a 15-year prison sentence, though all of that time except one month was suspended. Judge Baugh defended his decision by saying that Rambold had already suffered enough (he lost his career and marriage) and that his infractions weren’t serious enough to warrant jail time.

At the end of the trial on Wednesday, Judge Baugh sentenced Rambold to 15 years but decided that he was at low risk of re-offending and suspended all but one month of that sentence.

Baugh also later apologized for his remarks: “I made some references to the victim’s age and control,” he told CNN affiliate KTVQ. “I’m not sure just what I was attempting to say at that point, but it didn’t come out correct. What I said was demeaning to all women, not what I believe in and irrelevant to the sentencing.”

Digging himself in a little deeper, Judge Baugh added in his apology statement: “I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape… It was horrible enough as it is just given her age, but it wasn’t this forcible, beat-up rape.”

It’s horrifying to watch Judge Baugh has continued to minimize the rapes even after being confronted with the inappropriateness of his statements. It’s one of the most central tenets of rape culture that if the rape didn’t involve violence, if it wasn’t a stranger in some back alley with a knife, then it could not have been as significant — couldn’t have really been rape. But the majority of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows and may even trust, which is traumatic in its own way. Everybody in a position of power in this situation did wrong by Cherice Morales.

— but the ramifications for the victim aren’t any less intense because of that. And worst of all is that a judge, someone in a position of moral authority, is saying this. To what extent does this kind of victim-blaming, assault-minimizing attitude affect his other decisions as well?

Granted, statutory rape laws are sometimes sticky; many states have a number of provisions to make the laws more lenient. Some lawmakers create legal exceptions with the belief in mind that some differences in age don’t actually represent a difference in power. But this case is cut-and-dried exactly what statutory rape laws were created to protect against: not only was Rambold significantly older than Morales and not only was Morales very young, but he also was a teacher at her school. It was a double power imbalance, and with that kind of situation, whether or not Judge Baugh personally feels she seemed “older than her chronological age” is completely irrelevant.

Even though it’s about a different statutory rape case, I like what Heather Price-Wright at Policymic.com wrote about statutory rape:

Statutory rape laws are absolutely necessary and exist to protect victims in just these kinds of situations — cases in which there is a major imbalance of power, and in which so-called willingness does not change the fact that the victim has been violated, physically and emotionally, by people who should have known better, and who are in fact legally responsible for knowing better.

Sadly, this is not the first and certainly not the last time something like this will happen. In the high school world, issues of sexuality, attraction, self-worth and personal agency are notoriously murky as it is, and it makes teenagers a vulnerable population. Failing to provide adequate sexual education which focuses on consent rather than abstinence-only serves to expand the power imbalance between teenagers and the adults charged with taking care of them. And because we live in rape culture, it’s also certain that many adults who themselves harbor problematic concepts of what constitutes consent are the very same adults working as judges and serving on juries.

How would Morales’ experience have changed if we, as a public, had been able to see her situation for what it was – a rape – and not resorted to victim-blaming and minimizing? In this case, at least, we’ll never get a chance to find out.

Girl-on-World: Argentina

Argentina is awesome in many ways – it has a female President, chocolate croissants on every street corner at all hours of the day and the weirdest haircuts I have ever seen. It also has some of the most progressive and queer-friendly laws in Latin America; same-sex marriage and adoption rights were legalized in 2010, gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military, and with the passing of the “Gender Identity Law” in 2012, adults can legally change their gender and sex reassignment surgery and hormone therapy are covered under public and private health care plans.

However, there is no national anti-discrimination law in place and just because the laws are revolutionarily progressive doesn’t mean society is. Depending on where you are, social disapproval can turn into violence and hate crimes. Apart from a few cities, like Buenos Aires, much of the country is simply pampa – grasslands punctuated by the occasional cow or oil well – and here, the rural population is culturally conservative. With a strong Catholic influence and a dose of machismo sexismo, rural areas are generally less accepting of queerness.

I traveled around Argentina for four months this winter with one of my close friends, Ally. She identifies as straight, but I definitely look at the world through some seriously rainbow-tinted glasses. Even so, I found myself often with one hand on the closet door, (auto)straddling the line between cultural sensitivity and gay pride. I tried not to inundate her with gay-gay-gay all the time, but I simply can’t help seeing and thinking gay things – so instead I did what I always do with thoughts I can’t express: I wrote them all down.

A substantial disclaimer to begin, though: my experience is deeply colored by my status as a white-skinned, cis-gendered, feminine-presenting U.S. citizen from a well-educated middle-class family. So I tried to be aware of the role my identity played in the experiences I had. No matter how well I spoke Spanish, I was always an outsider to varying degrees. As a traveler, I was automatically not held to the same standards as Argentine women, and I always had the option of removing myself from the situation; I could retreat to the anonymity of a hostel living room if necessary and I knew that in a few months I’d return to my comfortably queer lifestyle in Denver, CO.

Buenos Aires: I Feel Camaraderie

Buenos Aires’ dark streets glistened with youth and possibility, and most of our nights revolved around an easy camaraderie between travelers. It’s the second-largest city in South America and a popular gay tourist destination; its famous nightlife is home to a myriad of gay bars and clubs, and there is a substantial queer presence on the street.

But even so, it’s not perfect. One night, barreling down the street at five in the morning, I innocently asked a friend (Flavio, a flamboyantly gay man from Rio de Janeiro) what his experience of gayness in Argentina had been. “Oh,” he chirped brightly, “it’s fine to be gay here – somebody only gets beat up every month or so. And even if you do get attacked, they’ll probably just beat you up, not kill you.” He also mentioned that it’s worse for gay men because of the centrality of requisite “macho” male performance. I couldn’t help but shiver at how casual he seemed about the whole thing, like this was just the inescapable way of the world.

We spent most of our time with Flavio, who I mentioned above, and his best girl friend, Lydia. Even though our queer-to-straight-ratio was 1:1, we almost always went to straight clubs (the reasons behind which probably deserve some thinking about). But one evening, Flavio took my hand and led me through shadow-filled alleyways and circular taxi rides to a gay club downtown. Inside, the crowd was mostly men, all dancing somewhat awkwardly to Katy Perry and Britney Spears. I decided to be psyched on principle alone, but in truth, it wasn’t that fun: few people danced together and they spent more time furtively arching their heads to check each other out than appreciating who they were with.

The night was redeemed when Flavio and I went outside – he sensuously smoked a clove cigarette with Jose, a beautiful bisexual man from Venezuela, and we discussed how hard it is to date people who haven’t come out. Two adorable teenage girls sauntered by in ripped shirts and punk make-up and stopped to chat for a while; they were enamored with each other, but their parents didn’t want them to be together. So under the guise of going clubbing with their friends, they strolled the night streets hand in hand. Under the fluorescent club lights, feeling the muffled beat of the music under our feet, there was a lovely feeling of intimacy and understanding between all of us. I’m sure we all experience queerness differently in our own respective lives, but for half and hour, we came together and reveled in all the similarities we did share. Opulently sculptured, decaying apartment buildings loomed over us – “Just like society looms over us,” one of the young girls said emphatically, with a flicker of sadness. But then she looked at her girlfriend and added, “It doesn’t matter, I’d rather be out here with you.” They kissed, then glanced at us and giggled – and went on their sickeningly cute way.

Mendoza: I Feel Ugly

After New Year’s Eve, we’d had enough of the city life and boarded a 20-hour bus for Mendoza. The contrast between this agricultural province and the bright sophisticated lights of Buenos Aires couldn’t be any more extreme. Mendoza is a relatively big city known for good wine and food, but Argentina’s Catholic roots run much closer to the surface here than in Buenos Aires. It is known for being traditional and conservative, even though Mendoza is home to a few different universities. Here, my short hair attracted surprised comments from chatty store clerks and bus drivers: But why would you cut off your hair? Short of having donated it to charity or recently recovering from a serious illness or brain trauma, there could be no possible reason a girl would want to look so “un-pretty.”

Most women have long, long hair that they flick over their shoulders with pride and feminine gender presentation is typically ultra-feminine: high heels, jewelry and make-up are the norm. Ally is tall, with long blonde hair and big blue eyes; she fit in just fine, but I present on the androgynous side of feminine. While in the U.S. I am almost always comfortable with how I look, here I began to feel distinctly ugly. It was uncomfortable, to say the least. “You do you” doesn’t work nearly as well in a place where there are only a few acceptable “yous” to do. And for a while, I felt distinctly isolated – with my eyes peeled for Bieber hair, flannels, and V-necks, at first I disappointedly concluded that Mendoza was an Andean lesbian desert, left queerly high and dry.

But! Never fear, there are lady-loving ladies in every corner of the world. In the depths of my despair, I was surprised and delighted to stumble upon a whole cadre of lesbians: they work security at grocery stores! I saw the first one taking inventory of the fruit aisle (no joke, I swear), and then I turned in a circle and saw them everywhere. I’m sure my eyes widened two inches, and my heat-flushed cheeks darkened another few shades. Seeing them, I felt less alone and less out of place. After that, I developed an inexplicable and insatiable lust for fresh produce at all hours of the day and night. And in moments of insecurity, I tried to remind myself that there is no one standard of beauty, anywhere, any time.

La Reserva: I Feel Awkward

That very evening, I got inspired and convinced Ally to come with me to the city’s lesbian bar, La Reserva. It looked like a strip club from the outside and going in felt a bit like wandering down Alice’s rabbit hole, where you emerge on the other end in some unpredictable netherworld. Inside, one wall was covered with a floor-to-ceiling mural of female burlesque dancers in black leather – but I was puzzled that, in a lesbian bar, their lustful eyes were all pinned on two men centered in the frame. It was all lit in reds and blacks and draped with velvet and cushions, like a 1920s speakeasy. There were dark corners where couples whispered quietly and a big stage at the back. It was dark and confusing, filled with intimidatingly trendy women and murmurs of Spanish. We were a head taller than everyone else, dressed in our best stretched-out traveling clothes and hiking boots; as you can imagine, we stuck out like two sore and sun-burned thumbs.

A short girl with angular hair, heavy boots, and a belly shirt looked us up and down as we walked in the door, and I noticed myself shove my hands into my pockets to make my shoulders sharper, a thing I unconsciously do when I’m nervous. Ally’s type is big, burly, bearded mountain men, and mine is well-dressed ambiguously-gendered women – but nonetheless, I found myself opening the door for her, pulling out her chair, getting her a drink. I found myself performing some butch/femme construction that I would usually never think to do. I wasn’t entirely sure of the roles and expectations at play here, and I realized I felt the same fear I used to feel in gay spaces when I was coming out – that somehow people would see through me, weigh me in an instant, and come to the devastating and irrevocable decision that I am not actually gay enough or good enough to be included. Funny, because it’s not like the Lesbians of Mendoza are some omnipotent worldwide authority – really, I would probably never see any of these people again. But nonetheless, I went to my all-time favorite desperation maneuver: over-performing queerness. Ally, bless her heart, downed whiskey and water with aplomb – all the anxiety I felt didn’t seem to faze her in the least – while I perched (nonchalantly, I hoped) on a bar stool sipping a beer and watching the crowd.

More than half the fabric in that room was plaid, and everyone’s hair had that kind of effortless-looking perfection that tells you it’s not effortless at all, and that I am perennially falling short of. Little groups huddled around the stage, whispering excited rumors or casually lounging; a few solitary bois sauntered with studied casualness through the groups. People lingered and mingled until about 2 am, when there was a short (very short) and impromptu-seeming drag show, and then all of a sudden, in true Argentine fashion, the entire place broke out into a bumping dance club. Strobe lights and disco balls appeared out of nowhere to replace the chairs and couches that had mysteriously vanished and all the women who a second ago were reclining in such a cultured and blasé manner were all of a sudden jumping up and down, busting out dance moves, mixing sultry tango hips with fist pumping and the inevitable three- or four-drink grinding. And despite my nervous beginnings, the night turned out to be great.

Dinner: I Feel – Well, A Lot of Things

We sat at dinner with our host in Mendoza, a gracious and lovely woman who is an administrator at a local university. We were sleeping in her guest bedroom, eating her food, seeing the city on her suggestions and incredibly grateful for her generous hospitality. Without thinking, I mentioned that we had seen lots of gay people in Buenos Aires. She clucked her tongue, and responded with “qué lástima” – oh, what a shame. She told us how disappointed she had been over the past few years to see a few of her students – “beautiful young women” – come out and “become” lesbians. She said it’s been happening disturbingly frequently lately, and that really, if they had just been parented better in their teenage years – if stronger morals had been instilled at the right time – these young people wouldn’t be acting out this way. It was assumed that we agreed, and I grew increasingly uncomfortable and quiet as I took refuge in all that is lost in translation.

I am lucky enough to have grown up in an accepting family in an accepting town; my own internalized homophobia is the worst disapproval I’ve had to experience. Though I know consciously that her words were very minor on the scale of possibilities, to me they were still hurtful, unexpected, and, worst of all, I didn’t challenge them. Though I like to think of myself as brave and assertive these days, I realized then in my silence that it is much harder to be brave when you feel alone, outnumbered, uncomfortable – that is to say, in the instances that it really matters. Even as I tried to explain that where I live it’s not bad to be gay and that we have lots of lesbians, even as I tried to emphasize that being gay is often a non-issue, I still awkwardly tripped over my pronouns: “we” and “us” got converted to “they” and “them,” and “I” just disappeared – poof – altogether. When she asked us if we had boyfriends, I simply said “No, I – um, well I’m not dating anyone right now…” and silently apologized to my beloved girlfriend back home. Why was it so disturbingly easy to renounce her importance in my life just then, when in reality she ran through my head all day?

As an aside, apparently I can pass as straight, but I wonder: how would this conversation have gone if I presented as more masculine – or would it have even come up at all? This ability to “pass” is a loaded privilege, and comes with hardships of its own, and I saw its power that night.

At the time my reaction was simply based on fear and surprise, and I kicked myself for not being more honest and “brave” – I had nothing to lose other than maybe a free place to stay, and maybe I should have used that position to make some other queer Mendoza girl’s coming out just a little easier. But you could also argue that I did the right thing. As an outsider and traveler, it’s not my place to try to change anyone’s mind. I didn’t grow up here, and as a good cultural relativist, I try to respect others’ beliefs just as they are. Seeing other “beautiful young women” come out before hadn’t changed her mind, so my coming out might not have either; on the contrary, it might have invalidated anything pro-gay I did say, and made her feel deeply uncomfortable in her own home.

So where is the line between cultural sensitivity and standing up for causes you believe in, like gay rights? This situation was relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but it serves as a mirror for a broader question: at what point does cultural relativism break down? What are the things that we are unwilling to be relative about – what are the things we need to stick up for regardless of the situation? And how do we act upon those ideals in a socially responsible and culturally respectful manner? I am still gnawing on this one, and probably will be for a while; I know that the answer will always be personally and situationally dependent. So I am left without a conclusion or much resolution – just a lot of questions. Any input from you all?

Queer Activism and the Taksim Gezi Riots: What You Didn’t Know

You’ve probably already heard of the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park. For a few weeks in early June, an anti-government movement from across Turkish society occupied the park until the police used tear gas and water cannons to clear it on June 15th. The worldwide media was all over it, comparing the protest both to the U.S. Occupy movement and to the Arab Spring revolutions last year. So you probably know how central women’s issues were to the cause, and you probably know how diverse and yet egalitarian the protest became.

But what you probably did not know – because the mainstream media didn’t cover it much at all – is how queer the movement was! Taksim Gezi was the place for gay men to cruise, as well as a meeting place for queers of all kinds; it’s like a combination of Dolores Park in San Francisco and the Ramble in Central Park in New York. The park is situated in the heart of the gay neighborhood, called Beyoglu. In a country and city where homosexuality is still strongly taboo, Beyoglu holds special significance to queer Turks, because it is one of the only places where they can safely be queer. So while Taksim became a symbol for a whole social movement, it also carried a personal weight for the queer community. As the protest took shape and grew, queer people were on the front lines, and both women’s and LGBT rights became central issues.

I was in Istanbul during the protest, so I ignored the warnings of the U.S. Embassy and visited the park to investigate the events first-hand. Honestly, it felt like a big street fair, with grinning young people talking excitedly and colorful banners everywhere – except for the ominous threat of hundreds of policemen surrounding the perimeter three blocks deep in each direction, their riot shields lying nearby ready for use and their fingers resting casually on the safeties of their semi-automatic assault rifles. The air smelled faintly of smoke from fire bombs thrown a few days earlier, and everyone sat on colorful blankets or little seats of cardboard; they told me not to touch the ground because tear gas had been sprayed a few days earlier and it was still potent. “Sure, of course,” I said, not fully believing them. But when I sat on the ground a little while later and then unthinkingly rubbed my eyes, they immediately began to sting; my throat started to swell up and my face started to itch, and I ran to a Starbucks down the street and scrubbed my face in a panic.

All that notwithstanding, smack in the center of the park was a large and popular LGBT tent where young and hip-looking queers of all shades stood snacking on pretzels and soy milk. While I hyperventilated about all the guns around, they leaned against the fence, chatting in English about queer theory and the democratic process. Surrounding the central tent were countless little tents staked so closely together that you could barely walk between them. Amongst them people rested, read or talked together casually. If I didn’t know better I would have thought it was a week-long Pride camp out.

At the front of the tent stood Irem Guven, a 24-year-old tall and assertive-looking woman with short blonde hair and a white tank top. She is getting a master’s degree in philosophy and had been involved in the protest since its inception. “We’re here to demand our democratic rights,” she said, before I could even finish formulating a question. The LGBT contingent of the protest was made up of multiple different organizations from across the city, she said, but when plans to destroy the park were made public, they all rallied together. Now, they form a foundational part of the movement.

Their involvement is particularly important because LGBT rights are hit-or-miss in Turkey. Homosexual activity is legal, but sexuality is not protected under civil rights laws. And while it’s not as extreme as neighboring states like Syria or Iran, significant anti-gay discrimination is still common. Even in Beyoglu, gay bars are hard to find; you have to spot a rainbow flag flying at the top of a building, then scour the signs below for the one you’re looking for. Locations move frequently and they often exist only in small rooms on the top floors of buildings. In most of the city, being gay is tolerated at best; the few blocks around the park are the only place where same-sex couples will dare to be seen holding hands and even this has a somewhat furtive feeling about it. “This, Beyoglu – this is all we have,” Irem said. “Without this area, we have nowhere else to go. Them coming in here felt like they attacked us ourselves.”

This personal connection to the area, as well as the ideas that the park came to symbolize, is why queer people were so deeply engaged in the movement. Irem explained how they were literally on the front lines of the struggle, climbing the barricades and fighting police from the beginning.

Over the long term, it is perhaps their open and articulate commitment to the struggle that will do the most for gay rights in Istanbul. Apart from any concrete legislative or social gains that may stem from the protest, the centrality and steadfastness of the queer population greatly improved perceptions of queerness in the larger population. It’s hard to tell from afar, but Taksim Gezi is not a big place. By the very nature of the protest and its setting, people were forced to interact in new and different ways; for instance, the LGBT tent was set up right next to the AntiKapitalist Muslumanlar camp, a conservative Islamic anti-capitalist group. As police violence increased and survival became more and more difficult, fighting for a common cause forged bonds between queer people and other Turks that might never have existed otherwise. As Irem said, “Fighting side by side, people previously homophobic are now opening their minds.”

This open-minded sharing of ideas was a hallmark of the protest and probably its longest-lasting legacy. It galvanized people from all walks of life into political action, threw them all in a pot together and stirred. Fulya Dagli, a 20-year-old law student, stopped to talk while her friend, Zelal Pelin, stenciled a poem she’d written onto the cement with black spray paint. Fulya stressed that the past few weeks had been an incredible chance for people from opposite corners of Turkish society to talk and actually be heard by each other: she listed nationalists, Kurds, men, women, anarchists and socialists. It gave Turks who would otherwise never have interacted with queers the opportunity to do so, and realize that they’re actually people too – and that they have more in common than they originally thought .

This mingling of peoples is something that can’t be erased, regardless of what happens to the park or its protestors themselves, and it has positive implications for queer rights and activism. Simply by being themselves – the multi-faceted people that they are – the LGBT contingent changed the minds of many of their fellow protestors, if not larger groups across the country as well. This is not a new concept. It’s old news that simply knowing a gay person tends to make people much more tolerant. But it’s important to remember, especially when the problems in the world seem too great and too heavy, when there are too many deserving causes and not enough time or energy in your life, when legislation seems hard to pass and hate crimes still run rampant across the world. A conversation, a friendship or a new work relationship can be a catalyst for more gay acceptance. It feels small, but just being you, queer and proud of it and living your life, is something big. And on the large scale – like in Taksim Park – it is huge. It is the way things get changed, one mind, one protest, one country at a time.