Experiences of Transgendered Profs a Case Study in Sexism

In an excerpt published in the Australian newspaper The Age, The Hidden Brain author Shankar Vedantam discusses the different post-transition experiences of transgendered Stanford professors Ben Barres and Joan Roughgarden. Unsurprisingly, they paint a depressing picture of the prevalence of sexism even in the supposedly egalitarian world of university research.

Barres, who attracted national notice for his spirited attack on Larry Summers' contention that the lack of women in science is due to innate differences between men and women, relates stories of the sexism he was subject to while still living as a woman: a professor who insisted that his solution (the only correct one in the class) to a difficult exam question was because he had "asked his boyfriend"; asking for professional advice on his career from a professor at medical school only to be referred to the professor's wife; fighting for the chance to practice medical procedures as an intern because male residents would always pick male interns to perform the technique. Things are different for him today: "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man," he wryly notes.

For Roughgarden, the author of the well-received but controversial Evolution's Rainbow, the experience was just the opposite. Arriving at Stanford in 1972 (26 years before her transition), she felt that her path was laid out in advance for her: "It was clear when I got the job at Stanford that it was like being on a conveyor belt ...The career track is set up for young men. You are assumed to be competent unless revealed otherwise. You can speak, and people will pause and people will listen. You can enunciate in definitive terms and get away with it. You are taken as a player. You can use male diction, male tones of voice ... You can assert. You have the authority to frame issues."

But no more: once as she was finishing a talk in Minneapolis, another scientist jumped on the stage and began shouting at her. Indeed, she now regularly encounters screaming objections from other scientists. "I had never had experiences of anyone trying to coerce me in this physically intimidating way," she says, while also noting that before her transition, people who raised objections to her work never assumed that they were smarter than her, but now that is a common occurrence. Her access to university funds has dried up, and her salary stagnated since transitioning.

Neither Barres' nor Roughgarden's experiences are exceptional in a world where men blithely explain subjects to women who are experts in that field, or where women frequently complain that they can only get their ideas heard if a man brings them up. Their experiences present a remarkable study in just how differently a person can be viewed based solely on their gender — or, as Barres puts it in his most damning quote, about someone who heard a presentation he'd given without knowing about his transition: "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but, then, his work is much better than his sister's."

h/t: Amanda Hess

Photo credit: Igor Bespamyatnov