No Good Options: When Your Name Change Indicates a Gender Change

Today’s post is the second in a three-part series here at Tenure, She Wrote exploring the complexity of name changes and choices in academia.

When you’re trans, getting your name changed is a huge ordeal. You have to file it with the court, have it published for x amount of time in a local newspaper, hopefully get it approved by the court, then deal with social security, banks, DMVs, the lot. It’s a pain and very bureaucratic, but there are processes to follow. The same isn’t true for an academic publication record, particularly for those of us who transition later in our careers.

Your publication list is a huge part of academic life, and if you transition after having some manuscripts published you have to face a choice on every CV and every grant application from that point forward: Include past publications under an old name and risk discrimination for being trans, or leave out past publications under an old name and risk not getting the job or grant for seeming like you don’t have enough experience. It’s a catch-22, and right now there are no good answers.

Dress for Success

Ever since I started going to conferences, I’ve been at a loss for what to wear. The men in my field pride themselves in the aloof state of their dress when presenting their results, and it’s not uncommon to see them presenting in jeans, a t-shirt, and flip flops. But for women, there is an unspoken rule that to be taken seriously, jeans and a t-shirt just aren’t going to cut it.

Becoming a Manager

While I was a grad student, I spent all of my time inside the details of my Ph.D. research program, focused almost exclusively on what the problem-of-the week was and trying to solve it. During my time as a post doc, I’ve found that not only do I need to continue solving the problem-of-the-week, but I also have to oversee a number of students and help them to solve their own problems-of-the week and provide projects for them that are appropriate to their skill levels that also challenge them intellectually. In essence, I’ve become middle management for our lab.

Suicide Prevention PSA

Research has shown that there is an uptick in the number of suicide attempts following a highly publicized suicide death. Such has happened recently within the trans community, which is prompting this off-day post. Given that 41% of trans people have attempted suicide, right now would be an excellent time to reach out and support the trans people in your life, as well as brush up on your skill set of responding to students in crisis who confide in you. It’s very possible that your university has a suicide prevention specialist. If you don’t know who yours is, or even if you have one, now would be a good time to look into it.

268 Names

I was chatting with some of my colleagues at dinner before writing this post, mentioning that I was doing a piece for Thursday since it’s a special day. Not knowing, they asked, “Oh? What’s important on Thursday?”