By Macy Huston via astrobites
If you’re active on astronomy Twitter, you’ve probably seen a lot of discussion lately about academic journals’ policies about retroactively changing names on publications. The labor and roadblocks in the process can add a great deal of difficulty to the academic lives of transgender and nonbinary* researchers. Many transgender people change their name from that assigned at birth to one that better fits their gender, but if they do so after having any work published they may face a difficult situation. In some journals, one can retroactively have publications corrected to show their true/chosen name. For other journals, people are left with the choice between either revealing their deadname and outing themselves, or no longer claiming certain past work on their CVs. Additionally, some cisgender astronomers may change their names for reasons such as marriage or religion.
There are two parts to resolving the disconnection between publications with different names. First, it can be difficult to find all of a person’s past work by searching their current name, if certain publications still use their old name. But, even with this problem resolved, the problem of outing trans people remains when their old name is visible. So the second part of the solution is to have the instances of their previous name changed on old papers.
Some recent discussions were sparked by a series of tweets from Dr. Elspeth Lee. Her experiences caught the attention of many friends and allies, who have since been pushing for change (more on that later).
I have been informed that the policy of the publisher of MNRAS (OUP) is to update the HTML of a paper, but not the PDF for trans individuals. 1/4
— Elsie Lee (@EleeAstro) May 27, 2021
Read the rest of the article on astrobites website at
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