Continually having to explain yourself
You’ve always wondered what it’s like to be transgender and non-binary in paleontology, right? Right? Well now you get to find out.
Riley Black, who came out as transgender and non-binary this year, describes the challenges of cultivating diversity in a discipline with an ‘Indiana Jones’ image.
I’m all agog. Here I thought paleontology had to do with studying fossils, but that must have been completely wrong.
I’ve found a ubiquitous part of the trans experience is continually having to explain yourself to the world at large. Why change? Why now? What’s going to happen? At times it feels like the best solution would be to write a frequently-asked-questions pamphlet, kept readily at hand for the next Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. Even when questions are meant well, the persistent queries can turn into an endless grind: I wind up feeling like I’m being asked to justify my existence.
Maybe so, but the reality is we live in the world as it is, not in a different world where humans have no sex or gender and so the subject just never comes up. People who say they have a special bespoke sex [“gender”] can’t reasonably expect no one to wonder why and what that means and how the rest of us are supposed to act.
Even if not actively hostile, palaeontology presents queer people with terrain as challenging as any fossil-flecked desert. It’s easy to feel invisible. Although queer people in palaeontology are raising their voices and supporting each other, the fact is that the field might as well be frozen in the nineteenth century when it comes to representing and honouring the diversity that already exists in it.
Oh come now. The trans cult didn’t get going in 1900. People who take female and male for granted aren’t throwbacks to the 19th century.
This discipline, like many others, is still struggling even to find equity between cisgendered men and women.
Indeed, and the heavy breathing about special bespoke genders is only getting in the way of that…but he’s a male so he doesn’t need to worry about gender equity. Can we please talk about him from now on?
A lack of inclusion, and understanding, has real consequences. For transgender palaeontologists, maintaining mental and physical health is absolutely essential. Being trans is different for everyone, but therapy, hormone replacement and surgery are common parts of transitioning and as important to our health as are annual check-ups and other essential medical procedures. University hiring committees and researchers taking on graduate students, among others, need to know these facts.
So that they can decide not to take them on? Extra health needs are not an inducement, you know. If the hiring committees are wondering if young Angeldrawers is always going to be taking a week off for more essential medical procedures, why wouldn’t they move on to the next candidate?
None of this is frivolous. Looking in the mirror and not being quite pleased with who you see is a common experience, but imagine living in that space — feeling that your body isn’t right, not representative of who you are — every day.
It may or may not be frivolous, but what about the possibility that it’s self-absorbed and unrealistic? Any chance of that at all? I think lots of people, maybe most people, don’t feel that their outward appearance is “representative of who they are” – but they also know it’s kind of an adolescent thing to spend too much time on, so they shelve it and think about more important things.
And everything our author has said so far has led me to think he is in fact self-absorbed and unrealistic. This whole thing is as if designed for people like that. They get to talk about themselves! Endlessly! They get to make demands on the rest of the world, and be applauded for it! It’s a gift to narcissists. Our author talks like a narcissist. Maybe he isn’t one, maybe that’s just how this brand of activism is, but…I doubt it. Having a bespoke gender isn’t particularly appealing to non-narcissists. It’s embarrassing to demand all that extra attention, and reasonable people don’t want to do it.
In reaction to my first piece under my chosen name, which was critical of macho palaeontological tropes, I was accused of having an axe to grind against cisgendered men because I’m different. But the entire point of this transition is that I no longer want to be defined by other people’s expectations. Piece by piece, I’ve been removing the overburden of my past and digging into my true self. It’s a process carried out through therapy, prescriptions and introspection rather than through hammers and plaster, but the end result is much the same. I want to uncover the nature of myself as much as that of any dinosaur.
Yep. Still sounds like narcissism.
Yeah. Because women never feel that. I don’t feel invisible when people forget to include me on emails meant for the entire science faculty. When they don’t include me in other things that are about the science faculty. Etc etc.
Most of us live in that space every day. Get over it.
Every time a woman challenges a man about his behavior, she is accused of having an axe to grind. This isn’t unique to trans, it’s part of being female. You want to be female? You feel female? You don’t feel female until you’ve experienced that, okay?
I don’t either. So quit calling me “cis” and let me live my own life without your expectations that I view you in whatever way you want.
So, a paleontologist doesn’t appear to know the difference between paleontology and archaeology. No wonder that biology stuff is difficult.
I totally get the mirror thing, though. I’m definitely not quite pleased with seeing a slightly overweight, balding 63 year-old every morning.
We all get that, we just don’t think it constitutes The Most Radical Politics Evarrrrr.
Not the first time this person has come out as something:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/furry-wild-side-fursona-animal-nature
Did this person both complain about getting too much attention and feeling invisible? I guess it’s not the perfect kind of attention they wanted, to be told how awesome and brave they are.
Or maybe it is, but they can’t admit it. The pattern seems to be push the envelope, bask in the attention you’re getting while complaining you don’t want it, then when everyone stops caring push the envelope again.
I’d expect that within paleontology everyone would be invisible for everything except their accomplishments in the field. In general why would it even come up if you’re LGBT?
Good catch, Your Name’s not Bruce?. So we have a furry non-binary transgender person here. Cool. Now go find some fossils or something.
YNNB, that’s an…interesting…article. I mean, seriously, have fun if you must, but don’t insist other people take you seriously. Just because you have a weird idea that you are not what you are, and you are what you aren’t, don’t expect everyone else to validate or agree with you.
Our society has collapsed into narcissism. People think everything revolves around them, and their own preferences, while other people who really do need notice and help are being ignored while the shouters shout “LOOK AT ME! I’M DIFFERENT, LIKE ALL THE OTHER DIFFERENT PEOPLE!” (Apologies, John S. Hall).
Then they get into communities, and talk about their woes and miseries (the fact that other people don’t agree that they are wolf/woman/whatever), and prop each other up with expressions of mutual sympathy and support, using words that were originally developed by genuinely oppressed groups.
Then they shove their identity in your face until you say something that they can interpret as hateful and bigoted, so they can join the ranks of the oppressed and be looked at constantly, listened to constantly, heard constantly.
I’m not denying that people who are different do get treated badly, but it does seem like they are determined to elevate every little thing into larger than life tribulations, and make sure that everyone thinks they are the most marginalized, the most oppressed, the most whatever – while meanwhile not having to actually live like the most oppressed, the most marginalized, have to live. And if even the slightest bit of dissent comes their way, they get out baseball bats and keyboards, and go to work to destroy whoever.
And meanwhile those who have spent their life sympathizing with and working on behalf of the marginalized turn their attention to this particular group of shouty men who want to make sure no one focuses on anyone but them.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. I think it’s like the movie stars who claim they don’t want attention, then draw attention to themselves by having tantrums in public. Look at me, look at me.
When I don’t want attention, I stay home, close the door and the drapes, and curl up in the bathtub with a book. I then get the lack of attention I desire.
All of the above points by all of the above… pointers are smart and good, but…
What does it mean, again, to be trans and non-binary? To be “not this, but that” and also “neither”?
Oh yes, I meant to gripe about that too but then there was so much else to gripe about, and I forgot. The reality is that trans and non-binary are OPPOSITES so no, you can’t be both. Our furry friend is bullshitting.
You can be everything as long as you remember to throw fluidity into the mix. Riley Black obviously forgot that loophole.
I lived and worked in academia for decades. I was a computer scientist but for some reason decided to spend a lot of time working in other departments, bringing wisdom to such witchcrafty disciplines as:
* Biology
* Chemistry
* Chemical Engineering
* Business
* Psychology
* Social Sciences
* Mechanical Engineering
* Medicine
* Geology
* Geography
* History
* Language
and, on one memorable occasion, Music.
I’ve probably missed some.
The thing is that in my admittedly limited and anecdotal experience, there was one particular class of people whose members were consistently marginalised, disrespected, insulted, passed over for promotion, spoken over in meetings, ‘forgotten’ in departmental invitations and affairs, condescended to, silenced and groped.
Any guesses? I know, it’s difficult, isn’t it. Answers on a fucking post card.
You might think that those disciplines that have more women practitioners and/or have more women at higher levels of authority(*) would be better. I certainly haven’t noticed anything of the sort. It’s the same old unapologetic bullshit across every academic discipline I’ve ever been involved with.
So pardon me for biting clean through my keyboard whenever someone claims that being trans in discipline X is somehow more difficult than in discipline Y. I sincerely doubt it. I think the same old prejudices, shitty behaviour and the structures and mechanisms that keep them in place are right there front and centre in every academic discipline. I think that mentioning them results in ‘good’ natured condescension if you’re a man and all of the above if you’re a woman.
So I don’t buy the idea that being trans in discipline X is especially hard. It might very well be hard, but claiming philosophy or paleontology or fucking aadvark studies is especially difficult is not only more narcissistic bullshit, it’s ignoring everything that’s in plain sight and was so long before people found new ways to claim special status.
I know we’ve all been rolling our eyes for some time over the irony of trans people finding that the one discipline that is concerned with every question ever asked and especially with the very asking of questions itself is uniquely hostile to… people who claim special status and demand that nobody question it or them. But for fuck’s sake, these people are popping up everywhere now saying that their discipline is uniquely punishing for trans people.
These people are turning into caricatures of the caricatures of feminists that were oh so hilarious in the 70s.
(*) Surprisingly, Computer Science tends to have quite a good ratio of women to men in high positions, but it is still a fucking shit show. Something I heard a lot for example: “yes, she has a lot of good publications in excellent journals…. but she’s like the second or third author on some of them……” and of course never the same analysis for men.
Another thing that boils my piss to this day:
When we were first talking about cloud computing all those years ago, I was concerned about the environmental effect and wondered whether the sort of job scheduling algorithms we’d been using since the early 90s were the sort of thing we should be using. I did a talk in the maths department about this, which basically said that I didn’t have a fucking clue about how to solve this problem but mentioned three complete speculations about how we might start looking at how to find ways to work out what the problem even was.
This led to my working with a woman who did some seriously good work on this problem. By which I mean she did pretty much all the work, I barely understood it. It was published in an excellent journal with her name first on the paper and we won an award.
And for ten years people came to ask me about “my” paper.
It’s shit like that.
Yes, like the studies that have shown librarians have to undergo the same nonsense in their field and at their professional meetings. And nurses.
In my theatre groups, I have noticed a dichotomy between female plays and male plays. The males get away with all sorts of nonsense without editing of any sort, while a female with a tight play that needs only small revisions for clarity or tightening will have large chunks of their play crossed out and/or rewritten by a director or producer. The male will go unedited, and the play produced with minimal to no changes. One I saw last year was described by an astute observer as “like being hit on the head with a hammer for 20 minutes”, and yet was lauded as brilliant work. In the talk back, the female-generated plays went almost totally unremarked, even when they were the best plays in the festival.
And during the talk back, the producer mentioned the astonishing (and yes, it is astonishing) fact that several of the playwrights were scientists, and proceeded to name them – but only named the male scientists, none of whom are currently working in the field of science, while forgetting the females, one of whom is the only scientist currently working as a scientist! And this is a pattern – the males are deferred to, the females ignored, talked over, and written out of the picture. (To the extent that I am always asked about my female characters – “Could we cast a male?” – in a group that has a shortage of male actors and more female actors than they can cast).
Trans? Yes, we have several trans individuals associated with the festival. They are treated with respect, fawned over even, and given their chosen names, pronouns, etc, and cast in roles that fit their preferred gender.
But I’m sure the next thing we will hear is how theatre is uniquely hostile to trans people. (It isn’t – the field is awash with trans- and their allies).
Oh, he’s a narcissist. Borderline Personality Disorder. I’d bet big money and reputation on it. This is textbook. Maddening.
Seriously. ALL THEY DO is whine about how people treat them wrong (“MUH PRONOUNS”) and now this one is complaining that people ask questions in order to try to make sense of it?
Every field is uniquely hostile to trans people. Normally that couldn’t be possible, but each trans person is so incredibly unique that the normal laws of uniqueness no longer apply. Marvel at their amazing, special uniqueness—as if you could do anything else!—but, please, do it discreetly, as they just want to do their jobs and be treated like everyone else.
[ Or so I’d think from the trans people on the internet, who I’m guessing aren’t representative of trans people in general. ]
Well I for one look forward to the weekly podcast “What’s it like being trans in…?” hosted by Chlamydia Angeldrawers, with in-depth analysis of the unique and super special challenges of being trans in investment banking, nursing, circus acrobatics, professional bog-snorkelling… they will never run out of episodes!