Trans inclusion in the biology classroom: one year later

A very happy looking anole with a trans pride flag and the caption “Lizards for Trans Rights”. Art by JFM.

Well. I don’t quite know how it happened, but it’s somehow been a year since I posted my piece on trans inclusion in the biology classroom. And what a year it’s been.

Some of that is because of unrelated things. I finished my PhD and finally started feeling settled into my postdoc. I got a cornsnake, and embraced my shift from strictly being an ornithologist to an evolutionary biologist who works in multiple systems. There’s a lot of ways it’s been a big year— but a surprising number of things that have happened have been because of that little blog post.

Often things like blogs, social media, or public-facing scicomm are discouraged for researchers. Obviously I can’t truly speak to how it’s going to shape my career in the long run yet, since I’m only now starting the search for a tenure-track (TT) job. But this past year has really driven home how powerful these tools can be for opening up the sort of “serious science” opportunities that I was taught would only ever happen through the more traditional pathways of publishing and conference networking. That’s in addition to outreach and advocacy.

So what’s happened in the year since this post went live?

Let’s start with the raw numbers: as of this morning, one year after posting, the post had been viewed 10,477 times, and with an average time on the page of nearly 8 minutes, it’s a safe guess that most of those were indeed reading the entire thing. That is an absolutely absurd number of people to me, far more than I ever expected to read anything I wrote.

The reception has been overall very positive. While I certainly received a fair bit of hate mail and comments telling me I’m an idiot who should have my degree rescinded, this was a tiny minority of the feedback, and almost all of it came from fairly random people who aren’t, insofar as I could tell, in any way biologists. To me this is an important distinction, as there’s a certain undercurrent in so-called “gender-critical” (GC) arguments that biologists uniformly reject TGNC identities. Sure, the sample here might be somewhat biased, especially given my proactive social media security practices, but my experience has been that that idea is nonsense. Most biologists are very familiar with how unbelievably weird biology actually is, and don’t see any sort of conflict in TGNCI people’s narratives of their own experiences. They may not fully understand how to navigate talking about that in a respectful way (hence the blogpost), but they’re usually receptive.

I’ve received feedback that my post has been used in biology and genetics curricula at at least four universities and by several high school teachers (and if you’ve used it directly or indirectly, let me know, I have a line for that on my CV lol). I’ve spoken directly on it at lab meetings for other research groups, and was part of an amazing interdisciplinary course on writing at a community college. In another example of how this post has led to the sorts of “serious professional” opportunities, I was invited to help organize a DEIJ event at the 2022 Wilson Ornithological Society meeting in Santa Fe, part of the main schedule for the event.

This has been awesome and amazing, but the biggest development has been this work making the jump to a full-fledged research area for me, resulting in an incredible collaboration. Basically, one day in lab meeting shortly after the post going live, I asked my fellow postdoc Kinsey Brock whether the color polymorphic lizards she studies could be considered to have more than two sexes. This very quickly led to an outline of a paper— which was particularly fortuitous when a few weeks later, Sara Lipshutz got in touch to see if I was interested in collaborating on an upcoming SICB symposium paper. Classic peanut-butter-and-chocolate moment there. Said paper is currently out for review, and our preprint version was really well-received.

So far this post has kind of been a “here’s stuff I did” list, and like, great for me, but what’s the actual point of a post about that? I mainly wanted to share this update for two reasons. The first is, if you have an idea, don’t be afraid to write it up, even if it’s in a platform or form that seems like a “distraction” to the Serious Business of Science. I’m still shocked how much career-boosting stuff this has led to, and while that was 100% not the point of sharing it, it’s a nice surprise given how often we’re told as grad students that that sort of thing is a waste of time.

The second takeaway is something deeper, I guess: do shit that matters to you. So much of academic advice is “here’s how to get ahead in your career”, including literally the paragraphs above this one. That sort of stuff is necessary, but often leads into a gross underbelly where all morals and ethics should be secondary to success, to be held in reserve until one gets tenure, where speaking up is “activist science” that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Sometimes speaking up will absolutely be used against you (oh boy do I know that well, unfortunately). But part of me thought I was going to torpedo my career when I hit “publish” last year, that no one would take me seriously as a scientist. I did it anyways, since in all honesty I was half expecting to get kicked out of my tumultuous mess of a PhD any day and I might as well go down yelling about stuff that was important to me. We only get to live once, after all, and I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to set aside doing things I thought were right and important for the sake of success in my one chance at life. Somehow, instead of destroying my career, it’s brought me more opportunities specifically because of that decision that I was going to just keep on doing my best to do better by others.

So anyways. It’s been a wild year, y’all, and may the next one be equally unexpectedly wonderful for all of us.