Crosspost: Building a culture of inclusion and allyship for queer astronomers

SGMA, the Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, was recently featured in Nature.com. SGMA wrote an article discussing the history of the committee, which began through informal dinners at AAS conferences. These dinners provided queer astronomers and allies with community and the space to share their experiences within the profession. SGMA also highlights how it brings queer astronomers together now through AAS conferences, online meet-ups, and community-sourced resources on inclusion and allyship. 

SGMA logo (AAS)

In the Nature.com article, SGMA states, "Thus, it is imperative that all members of the astronomy community, not just those who identify as queer, engage in advocacy efforts to protect and advance the rights of queer individuals."

Read SGMA's full article at nature.com or at aas.org.

astronomy community, not just those who

identify as queer, engage in advocacy efforts

to protect and advance the rights of queer

individuals.”

Crosspost: First-ever study of LGBT+ experiences in physics reveals red flags

Written by Kim Lamke Calderón for Phys.org

University of California-San Diego Executive Vice Chancellor, Elizabeth Simmons, co-authored a comprehensive study on the experiences of LGBTQ+ identifying members of the physics community. Credit: University of California-San Diego

LGBT+ physicists often face harassment and other behaviors that make them leave the profession, according to a new study, which comes as physics as a discipline has attempted to grapple with equity and inclusion issues.

The authors found that the two biggest factors that influence a person's decision to leave physics are the overall climate of the organization they belong to and more specifically observing exclusionary behavior.

"People feel shunned, excluded, and they were continually having to readjust and twist themselves to fit into the physics community," said Ramón Barthelemy, assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah and co-lead author of the study. "LGBT+ people are inherently a part of this field. If you want physics to be a place that anyone can participate, we have to talk about these issues."

"Nearly everybody I know who is LGBT+ in physics has left, to be honest," said Tim Atherton, associate professor of physics at Tufts University and co-lead author of the study. "We're talking dozens and dozens of students and faculty. I can empathize with the experiences of the study's participants from some of my own experiences."

Read the rest of the article at: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-first-ever-lgbt-physics-reveals-red.html

Guest Post: Understanding Gender Fluidity

Today's guest post is by Dr JJ Eldridge. Dr. Eldridge is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and prefers them/they pronouns. They study exploding binary stars and have also been trying to explode the myth of a gender binary. They also read and watch (almost) too much sci-fi.

I’m a person who when asked to specify my gender (when filling out a survey, for example) am frustrated that there are usually only male or female options. Trying to explain my gender is difficult as my own understanding has evolved with time. It is also something I’m still struggling with so there isn’t an easy answer. It hasn’t been until recently, when a friend pointed out to me that I’m not a woman but I’m not really a man either, I’ve begun to understand that I’m somewhere between the two and want to switch between how I want to present over time. I don’t want to be just one or the other all the time.

Finding space after Orlando

By MacKenzie Warren

MacKenzie Warren is just starting a postdoc at Michigan State University after completinghis PhD in Physics at University of Notre Dame. MacKenzie's research is in computational modeling of core-collapse supernovae, particularly the role of nuclear and neutrino processes in the explosion mechanism. The killings in Orlando affected all of us in the LGBTQ community; here is one astronomer's opinion.

A few weeks ago, I was at an astrophysics conference. I spent the week in a room with roughly 50 people brought together by common interests and shared identity. Just as a few weeks before that I had spent an evening at a gay bar with others who also sought refuge from the tense hum of nerves that comes from always being aware of who’s watching. Just as so many people had been drawn to Pulse in Orlando, looking for a place of affirmation.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 12th, 49 LGBTQ and allied people were killed, and many more were injured, in a shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It was Latin night at the club and the vast majority of the victims were Latinx. The headline performers were trans women of color. The media widely declared this an attack against “all of us,” while failing to mention who the victims really were.

Wake the F-ck Up

 Wake the F*ck Up
by Debra L. Winegarten, June 13, 2016
No copyright, share

Enough!
Death of young innocent queer people
Killed because of love
Because of dancing
Because of being different.

Enough!
Silly distractions
Talk of bathroom privileges
Talk of bullying
Talk of Wild West nonsense.

Enough!
Legal sale of assault weapons
To civilians
In the name of Liberty.

Enough!
Numbing with drugs and alcohol
To avoid and deny the horror
Of rampant shootings.

Enough!
Congressional paralysis
Gun lobby pay-offs
Corporate greed.

Remember Stonewall!
Remember Orlando!
It's a bad idea to piss off
Queer people.

Because we are more creative
Because we are more vocal
Because we are more loving
Because we are better dancers.
Because we are better writers
And the pen is mightier than the machine gun.

And you cannot silence us
And you cannot kill us all.
And your hate will not prevail.
And your hate will not prevail.
And your hate will not prevail.
                                                                                                                                      

Debra L. Winegarten works in the Astronomy Department at the University  of Texas in Austin,Texas. With a master's degree in sociology from The Ohio  State University, specializing in qualitative research, Debra uses her research skills to write biographies of Texas women for middle-school students. She is also on the faculty of South University, where she teaches undergraduate sociology courses.

Debra notes, "The views in my poem don't represent the AAS; I'm writing in my 'other' life as an award-winning author."

Debra is a past president of the Texas Jewish Historical Society and has written two Jewish-themed poetry books, "There's Jews in Texas?" and "Where Jewish Grandmothers Come From". For more about her and her writing, check out her web site.

AASWOMEN Newsletter for April 15, 2016

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of April 15, 2016
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Elysse Voyer, & Heather Flewelling

This week's issues:

1. Sexual Harassment – Changing the System I

2. AWIS Webinar Series on Sexual Harrassment

3. APS Releases Report on LGBT Climate in Physics

4. Allies and Microaggressions

5. Seven Graphs to Make You Gasp

6. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

7. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

8. Access to Past Issues

On LGBTQ Visibility at Colloquia

Today's guest post is by Dr. Jane Rigby. Jane Rigby is an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a contributor to Astrobetter, and a member of the AAS’s Committee for Sexual-Orientation & Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA)).  This is one of a series of regular monthly posts from SGMA.

You know the experiment where you give first graders crayons and ask them to draw a scientist. They draw white men with beards. Given that, if we want to make STEM more inclusive, we need to change the “scientist” cartoon in peoples’ minds. On average and generalizing, my female colleagues give more public talks than my male colleagues. In part, I think this is a conscious effort on their part to make female scientists more visible to the public.

A while back, my colleague Jason Wright (at my Alma Mater, Penn State) asked me a question about visibility for LGBTQ speakers in particular, and I responded. We did not come to any conclusions, so here we hope to start a broader conversation on the topic here that could inform LGBTQ colloquium speakers and their hosts. 

On Becoming a Woman Astronomer

by Jessica Mink, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

A year ago, three years after I transitioned from male to female, I wrote a guest entry for this blog entitled "On Being a Transgender Astronomer", giving a sort of Gender 101, with a few stories of my own experience. At that time, I envisioned a second blog with the same title as this one, thinking that it would be written a lot sooner than this. It turns out that despite having had woman astronomers around me since I was an undergraduate and therefore thinking that I knew what I was doing, it is taking me more than a few years to become a woman astronomer. The woman astronomers I have come to know better since I changed have gone through (and in too many cases are still going through) experiences which, at my advanced age, I may never have. It seems to be a lot easier to be accepted as a woman astronomer than to truly feel like one. "Becoming" in the title does not mean that I'm there yet, only that I am working on becoming a member of that too-slowly growing demographic.

Over the past year, I've gotten more involved in the community of astronomers than I ever was before. My new involvement started in 2012 when I found out that the AAS Working Group on LGBT Equality (WGLE) was looking for a trans astronomer, and I seemed to be the most open one at the time. This led to an interview with Wladimir Lyra and Stefano Meschiar, which made me more visible in the field as a person, more than simply the author of some widely-used software. WGLE this summer became the Committee for Sexual-orientation and Gender-identity Minorities in Astronomy or SGMA, where SGM is our substitute for LGBTIQQA... This summer, I also became a member of the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and act as the liaison between the two committees. I joined to learn more about the issues of women in astronomy and bring a slightly different perspective to them.