Happy Pride Month! Join the British Ecological Society in this annual, global celebration as we share stories from STEM researchers who belong to the LGBTQ+ community.
This post is by Kelsey Byers (any/all pronouns), an evolutionary chemical ecology researcher studying floral scent and pollination at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK.
[author note: I use the term ‘queer’ repeatedly in this post to refer to folks with LGBTQIA+ identities; if this term is difficult for you, please substitute another inclusive term you prefer while reading]
People of all queer identities – both externally visible and invisible – face struggles for safety, acceptance, and inclusion in science and wider society, and assumptions made about gender identity and sexuality can hamper this, especially for minority or less well-known queer identities.
I was assigned female at birth. I have hip-length hair, breasts, and curvy, wide hips. Most of the clothes that I wear are made, ostensibly, for “women”. On the face of it, my body seems female to the outside world – and yet, this is not who I am. I am agender; after questioning my gender as a pre-teen, but concluding I wasn’t male so must not be trans, I have finally come to the realisation that… I am without a gender, and happy that way, and that this is my nature. I use any and all pronouns; most people use “she” for me, because they assume something I am not, a gender I do not have. This does not bother me, except that it does, because assumption is the visible face of underlying erasure.
My partner is a cis man. Step into a queer space – a conference social, a cultural centre, a Pride march – and use the word “partner” and then wince internally when your revelation that your partner is a cis man gets you Looks – why are you here? This space is for queer folks, not for your cisgender heterosexual relationship, stop bringing your normativity here. And yet. And yet I am not cisgender, nor am I heterosexual; I am agender and I am asexual. Surely I belong in your queer space, no matter how my partner identifies? Isn’t the A in LGBTQIA+ for asexual and agender and aromantic, not for “ally”? Or did you forget again that we are part of queerness too?
Step into a work meeting full of seemingly cis women, “it’s all girls here” or “hello ladies” from the meeting chair. “No!” I want to shout. “I am not you! Stop assuming!” but I don’t want to make a fuss. Look at the work recruitment forms – the person who has asked me to serve on their interview panel has, yet again, assigned me an incorrect gender on the interviewer diversity reporting section. Go to a conference in the USA with its gendered accessible toilets and sigh inside, missing the ungenderedness of a UK accessible toilet, or sigh again in the UK when you realize that the only ungendered toilet is the accessible toilet and that you and your wheelchair are going to have to wait for someone who, quite reasonably, isn’t using a gendered toilet. Grumble a bit inside when you have to wait for a female airport security staff member to pat you down because it’s not like she’s your gender either and the wait is longer than for a male staffer and you, personally, just don’t care.
Sometimes, though, there is inclusion, often in the form of questions – “what pronouns does everyone use?”, “should we ungender a set of toilets for this conference?”, “your name badge says ‘any/all’ pronouns, which do you prefer?” When we ask everyone these questions, we escape erasure because we fail to assume that everyone is the default, that everyone’s gender and sexuality are visible if they are not a cis/het person. I do not hide my gender and sexuality – they are on the top of my Twitter profile after all – and yet everyone – queer and not-queer, those who know me and those who don’t – assumes.
For sure, my sexuality is rare – we asexual folk are rather less than 4% of the population in the USA (Poston & Baumle, 2010) and 1% in the UK (Bogaert, 2004). And my gender is rare too – nonbinary folks are 0.06% of the population in the UK (Census, 2021), and not all non-binary folks are agender – perhaps 15% of that 0.06%, or 0.009% – only 4,500 of us in the UK (Trevor Project, 2021). “When you hear hoofprints in Texas, think horses, not zebras” says a famous medical school quote, which cautions against assuming a rare disease when a patient more likely has a common one. As someone with several rare diseases and rare sexuality and rare gender identity, this statement and similar ones are a song of erasure, demanding that I conform to normality, that I stop asserting my uniqueness, that my mind-body is cis and het and I need to meet this standard that society – even folks with open minds – expects of me.
And so, now what? Do I retreat into my shell, stop wincing when “it’s all women here!” is announced, stop sighing when I enter the gendered toilets, stop muttering when my gender identity is, yet again, assumed to be that assigned at birth? Or do I speak out loud, turn the winces and sighs and mutters into real verbage, assert my existence, but at what cost? Already when I do diversity, equity, and inclusion work around disability I am told to “soften my tone” or “cut it down” or that it’s “not part of my job” or that it’s “distracting from my real work [research]”. Will speaking out, correcting those who assume in safer environments, searching for an ungendered toilet, come with risks? Or will it self-validate, remind others that not all is as it seems to them, provide unspoken support to others in a similar position?
At the end it is up to society, up to my fellow scientists and researchers and other colleagues to stop assuming, to stop erasing my identity just because it is unfamiliar. Ask the questions (in a safe space and way, mind, not where the question or its answer could be dangerous), and ask them of everyone so that everyone is included. Don’t just ask the “visibly queer” folks (good job assuming that!) about their pronouns, or assume that everyone who is not visibly disabled is non-disabled, or that other “invisible” identities don’t even exist. We are here, and – to rhyme it – we are queer, and we deserve better than exclusion and erasure because we don’t fit your idea of who we should be.
Discover more stories from this year’s Pride Month blog series on the BES website.