'When I’m in the field, I have to fly under the radar,' says fleurygs. 'But it does come with mental health costs, of course, because you’re having to deny and pretend you’re not who you are, in order to work safely or effectively.'
LGBTQIA+ scientists describe the changes needed to make workplaces more welcoming to members of their communities.A professor invites colleagues and their partners to a Christmas party but reacts negatively when a young gay researcher asks to bring his future husband along. A Black carnivore researcher conceals their bisexuality and personal pronouns when doing fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa.podcast about the challenges faced by researchers from LGBTQIA+ communities.
And Soumya Swaminathan, Chairperson of the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, contemplates the ways in which trust can be enriched, including lessons learnt from the recent COVID-19 global health emergency.LGBTQIA+ scientists describe the changes needed to make workplaces more welcoming to members of their communities.Hello, I’m Adam Levy and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. This episode: the freedom and safety of LGBTQIA+ researchers.
And at the end, we’ve got a follow up sponsored slot from the International Science Council , about how it’s exploring freedom, responsibility, and safety in science. For example, in the United States, the National Science Foundation doesn’t currently collect information on sexual orientation in their exit survey for graduate students.
And essentially, it’s any identity that falls outside of the identity of a man or a woman. So it can mean pretty much anything. And for me, that tends to, I feel a bit more androgynous. I'm also bisexual. So I think having, being in that community, and especially working internationally can be particularly challenging, but even even domestically, it very much depends on the culture of the institution.
So I think that my experience may be very different from someone else's experience. So I think it’s, it’s more of a question of people like being being curious, or maybe not respecting pronouns, sometimes, I think can be quite challenging. I, essentially when I’m in the field, have to fly under the radar. I don’t talk about my sexuality or my identity, and I don’t use my pronouns.
And I'm like, “No.” You know, so it’s not just about research, but about, you know, whether your resources if something were to go wrong, and as a big part of the conversation that I think needs to be built into the universities. Because there’s countries you can go to that it’s illegal, like your identity may be illegal, there could be prison consequences for, you know, being yourself, essentially. So I do think that's something to be honest about.
The representation is so important for people who are kind of coming up. I’ve been engaged in a program called Skype for Scientists, where you can speak to the schools, and I’ve been trying to do as much media as I can to, to show kids that, you know, you can be Black and be a conservationist. You can be LGBT and be a conservationist.
I called up Alison Olcott, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in the United States, who was one of the researchers behind the survey.Geology, paleontology is so rooted in fieldwork, this sort of Indiana Jones idea of you know, you go out with your bullwhip and your khaki shorts, and you stride around and you pick up rocks and find bones.
Or how you make students have room together on a field trip or in a field camp. You know, boys go in this cabin, girls go in this cabin, gender underlies so much of the day to day functioning of a field trip.You and collaborators actually conducted a survey to investigate these issues and how they affect geologists.
But if you’re a graduate student, quite often you’re just being sent somewhere by your advisor. And you have very little control over whether or not you get to go, or even sometimes how that trip is set up. So I have come across other geoscientists who will say things to me, like, “I don’t need to worry about these issues. I just teach about rocks. And so I just need to focus on the rocks.”
His cabin mates were very mean to him because of his identity, he felt very unsafe, and that he had nowhere to turn to. And so that meant he spent every night at field camp stressed and upset. Just because of where he was assigned to sleep. And we advocate that these LGBTQ issues need to be part of that standard safety practice for all trips, you know, gather information about what it will be like where the field trip is going.
In the fourth episode in this series, I spoke with Stephen Wordsworth, about the work his organization, the Council For At Risk Academics, carries out to protect academics who are under threat. He also explained to me that as well as, for example, helping those fleeing conflict, they have also worked with LGBTQIA+ researchers.
Whenever I would I write opinion articles in the media or would go on TV or go on radio, the comments were, you know, full of people calling me mentally ill, calling trans people mentally ill, saying we should not support that. But it didn’t really gained the same sort of public prominence, it was largely reserved for the common sections.
Or call for even, you know, hanging and public hangings of those who offer gender-affirming care to minor or who support it.
You know, after that’s my few days, my therapist would say, “Yeah, that’s, that’s not a healthy thing.”To what extent then has this reaction to your work fed into your your personal life, your personal well being because of course, we all care about our work, but these are questions that also affect you directly as a trans person?Absolutely. It has an immense impact on my personal life.
And in a way that most researchers are able to do once they leave the lab, leave the office and go back home.What if anything, do you feel other academics and academic institutions should be doing to support researchers whose work becomes so actively politicized?In terms of academics, please show up for your colleagues, please show up for people who are not, you know, immediate colleagues, but who are in sufficient proximity to you that you can give them emotional and material support.
And, you know, in many ways, I’ve had it easy, I haven’t had people picketing my office. I have colleagues who want to participate in public conversations and have to back out of them because of the level of threat that they are personally experiencing.
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