Looking Back on 2010/Looking Ahead to 2011

Looking back, 2010 was a mixed bag year for me, as I imagine it was for many people. Around this time last year, I posted on this blog that my only goal for the year was to spend more days as a woman than as a man; that goal was easily achieved, as I spent maybe three weeks, at most, living as a man all year. So that was a very positive thing :) Other good things that happened in 2010 include passing Comps, taking my final class as a graduate student, presenting three papers at two conferences and getting two papers accepted to a conference next year. On the down side, 2010 continued the struggle to live as the woman I am. Whether it was family or others, the year included many heated arguments and discussions with people attempting to browbeat me into accepting their view that my identity is somehow "wrong," culminating in my sister chewing me out in early November. 2011 hasn't entirely gotten off to a good start in this regard, with my mother texting me today that she hopes I made "good resolutions" for the year, which I'm trying to take positively but can't help seeing as a passive aggressive dig at my transgender identity.

Looking ahead to 2011, I have a few goals I hope to achieve.

(1) Write my dissertation. I know this is a fairly ambitious goal but to finish my degree on schedule, I need to have at least the first draft completed by the end of the year. I believe this goal is achievable if I put in the necessary work. Being productive on the dissertation will also help counteract the reputation I seem to be gaining in my department as someone who is very ambitious but doesn't follow through on things.

(2) Get above 4.0 on teacher evals. I did well on evals this Fall but I've generally hovered around the 3.6-3.8 range. This isn't bad but I'd like to generally be above 4.0. This Spring will also be my first opportunity to teach an upper-level course that falls within my interests as a scholar so I hope I can make the subject as interesting for my students as it is for me.

(2) Go on a date. This is a little more personal, rather than professional. In 2011, I'd just like to go on a date. I don't necessarily need to be in a relationship but I'd at least like to go on a date, even a bad date.

Those are all I have right now. We'll see how things go with these goals around this time next year!

Maintaining the Sex/Gender System

After reading stories over the years from transgender women, one recurring theme that often comes up is someone in that person's life, usually her mother, telling her that she looks or acts very feminine. This post by Stana from Femulate is a good example of what I'm talking about - My Story - Part 1 . For many transgender women, this provided some of the first confirmation of how they felt inside.

I never received any positive reinforcement like that. In fact, I received the exact opposite; I was constantly told by others that I could never look like a woman, therefore I could never be a woman. I remember being in the 7th grade and having an idea for a class project that involved interviewing a historical figure. As I imagined it, I would be dressed in a woman's suit as a Barbara Walters-style reporter interviewing my classmate (I even wanted to call the presentation "40/40"). When I mentioned this to my mom, she took me to my grandmother's house and let me try on an old dress of hers, the only one she thought would fit me. When I came out in the dress, all she and my grandmother could do was laugh. Their reaction told me that I didn't look good as/like a girl so I didn't even bother arguing with them.

I received more explicit comments in this vein when I was in college. I was sent by my parents to see a Christian psychologist and even though he clearly didn't agree with being transgender, he took what could be described as a pragmatic approach in trying to convince me by saying that "it didn't matter if I had a sex change and became a woman, people would always see me as a man because my features are too masculine." He even said that he told transman he was seeing at the time basically the same thing, telling him that "his eyes were too pretty and feminine" to ever pass as a man.

This kind of feedback led me to not pursue transitioning for a long period of time. For many years, I didn't even crossdress at all and when I did, it was mainly alone in my house with the occasional trips to an anime convention.

I had always viewed this as a personal issue, my own private response to how people talked to me and treated me. But recently I realized that this kind of talk is part of maintaining what Gayle Rubin terms the "sex/gender system" in her article "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex." To admit that people born male can be women and that people born female can be men would completely destroy the system and physical appearance is the easiest place to attack because it's the most visible and it's also something that many trans people are uncertain and nervous about themselves. If this kind of talk prevents any trans person from being his- or herself, then the system has been maintained.

Update: For those who are interested, here is a link to Rubin's article on Google Books: "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex."

Stress and Graduate School

In the August issue of Wired magazine, there is an interesting article on stress titled "Under Pressure." The main point made in the article is that chronic stress contributes to health problems and can even have a negative impact on treatments, such as medication and surgery. When stressed, the body releases a group of stress hormones called glucocorticoids, which "rapidly increase levels of glucose in the blood, thus providing muscles with a burst of energy," and "also shut down all nonessential bodily processes, such as digestion and the immune response" (136). This is great when your being chased by a lion but can over time have a lot of negative effects. Chronic stress puts your body in a state of constant alertness.

The article also argues that status can impact levels of stress. The lower status a person is the more stress they experience. Research has shown that in organizations where employees have access to the same healthcare, the lower status employees will face more health problems than higher status employees; the mail clerk is more likely to have heart problems than the executive. The higher levels of stress experienced by lower status employees is based on what researchers call the "demand-control" model of stress; stress is related not only to the demands placed on an individual but also on the level of control an individual has to respond to the demands. Executives often report feeling high levels of stress because they are making decisions that affect a large number of people but they have a lot of control over what they do, much more than the date-entry employee who gets chewed about by his/her boss everyday and has to just do what he/she is told to do.

As I read this article, I started thinking about stress in graduate school. Being a graduate student is an interesting position in society. Pursuing an advanced degree is seen as high status in society but within the organization of most university departments, graduate students are at the bottom in terms of status. (It would be interesting to study stress levels of graduate students compared to university staff and student workers, who are the lowest status people employed at most universities). Graduate students are treated differently depending on the situation. As instructors, they are of higher status than their students but most still have a supervisor in charge of the course they teach. With faculty, some treat grad students as colleagues but grad students are still students in many situations.

Most of the grad students I know, including myself, would consider themselves to be at least somewhat stressed. Grad students have to balance the demands of being an instructor, researcher and student. All of these responsibilities offer varying levels of control.

As the researchers in the article found, control is sought by most people; people want to feel that they have some control over what happens in their lives. Research is probably the area grad students have the most control. While the thesis and dissertation can be intimidating projects, grad students are often eager to begin working on these projects because they signify a grad student's independent research, as opposed to doing something to fulfill a class requirement.

Many grad students also take control through ownership of the decision to pursue an advanced degree. Feeling that you chose to attend graduate school instead of being required to can help an individual feel a sense of control over their education and may help reduce stress. Related to this decision is the ability to leave. Because grad school isn't a requirement, many people feel a sense of control by recognizing that they could leave and find a job elsewhere. After finishing my Master's, I worked at a legal publishing company for a year or so before leaving to pursue my PhD. That decision to return to grad school has been one of the things that has helped me deal with stress; I experienced the corporate world and knew it wasn't for me and returned to academia.

Finally, a way many grad students deal with stress and gain a sense of control is through the common, but not much discussed, "bitch session." Go to any grad student office in this country and you will often find the occupants arguing over or debating university policy, course requirements, etc. What may be seen as nothing but whining and complaining from the outside I would argue is an attempt to gain some control over the grad student experience; the ability to talk about your situation with people in the same situation helps people feel some sense of control over what is going on in their lives. I know from experience that employees in corporations also take part in similar forms of talk. While they may not be able to do much to influence the policies and decisions made by higher-ups, grad students, and others, are able to exercise their freedom to talk about these decisions through these "bitch sessions." It's not surprising that cubicle workers are more likely to engage in this kind of discussion than the executives in the corner offices. I would argue that the "bitch session" is an important means for people to deal with the stress they experience.

These are just a few thoughts I had in response to the Wired article. I would love to hear from others about how you deal with stress.

Transgender Academics and Sexism

A friend linked me to an article on Change.org entitled Experiences of Transgendered Profs a Case Study in Sexism. The article commented on an article by Shankar Vedantam in the Australian newspaper The Age entitled How the Sex Bias Prevails, which is an excerpt from his book The Hidden Brain. The subject of the article is interesting to me personally as a transgender woman in academia and I also feel that the comments to the online version of the aricle on The Age's website provide an interesting commentary on and support of the argument made in the article.

Vedantam begins by arguing that while sexism can be proven through laboratory experiments, it is often hard to prove in real life. He provided the example of a lab experiment in which two groups of volunteers were given the description of a manager they would be working for; for the first group the manager was named "Andrea" and for the second the manager was named "James." Nothing else about the description was changed. The experiment found that "[t]hree-quarters thought James was more likeable than Andrea" and that "four in five volunteers preferred to have James as their boss. Andrea seemed less likeable merely because she was a woman who happened to be a leader."

Vedantam argues that one way to prove the existence of sexism in real life would be to find people who are treated differently at different points in their lives when the only thing that changed about them was their sex/gender. He provides as a case study two trasngender biology professors at Standford: Joan Roughgarden and Ben Barres. While living as a woman, Ben described the various ways in which his intelligence and opinions were devalued, including having a professor say "You must have had your boyfriend solve it" after correctly solving a particularly difficult computer problem in a class at MIT. After transitioning, Ben found that people now treat him with more respect; "I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man."

Joan's experience was, not surprisingly, almost the exact opposite. As a young male professor, "it felt as though tracks had been laid down; all Roughgarden had to do was stick to the tracks, and the high expectations that others had of the young biologist would do the rest." After publishing a paper challenging the traditional view of the role of tide pools, she received harsh reviews but her "ideas were taken seriously." After transitioning, Joan "said she no longer feels she has 'the right to be wrong.'" She found the reception to be very different when she challenged Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Instead of engaging with her about her theory, many scientists would yell at her and be physically intimidating. "At a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis, Joan said, a prominent expert jumped up on the stage after her talk and started shouting at her." When asked about interpersonal changes after transitioning, Joan said that "'You get interrupted when you are talking, you can't command attention, but above all you can't frame the issues.'"

Experiences like these are not unfamiliar to anyone who has transitioned, either in academia or outside of it. I've noticed slight changes in the way even I am sometimes treated, even at a much earlier stage in my transition, such as having to work harder to get students to quiet down so that we can start class. I think my experiences are different from Joan's for two reasons. (1) I'm begining my transition at a younger age and don't have an established career as a male academic to contrast my current experiences with. (2) Communication, the humanities and social sciences seem to be more accepting of gender differences than the hard sciences, in my opinion at least, but again it's very early in my academic career so I haven't served on committees yet or had people yell at me after presenting a paper at a convention. I will be going to the national convention in my field this Fall so we'll see if my presentations receive any different of a response compared to when I've presented papers as a male in the past.

Not only was the article itself interesting, but I also found many of the comments to be very revealing. Most of the ones I'll be talking about come from a single commenter known only as "Alex." His first comment attacks Joan's theory in the same way that is being argued in the article. He then follows it up by questioning Joan's emotional state.

"How does a transitioner's hormone therapy (when emotional behavior such as paranoia is heightened) factor into these findings?"

This is a common misogynist tactic; women can't make logical arguments because they are too emotional. He then continues his attack on her work.

"The more I read this theory, the more I can see why her peers ignore her 'work'. It's the stuff of a feminazi manipulator. But who knows... maybe one day militants will quote her theory in the same way the nazis quoted Darwin as a reason as to why they were the dominant race, born to rule Europe."

He is accusing Dr. Roughgarden of having an agenda that influenced her findings (like a man could never have an agenda!). Again, it just continues the theme that the research done by women is influenced by internal/external forces, which is an issue in the "objective" world of science. While a male scientist can just objectively observe the world around him, a female scientist searches for anything to support her political agenda or emotional state! My criticism of "Alex" would probably be seen as supporting his argument.

"Hmm, on the plus side because she is a she, some other femi-academic will feel sorry for her. And touched by all her troubles, she'll probably get tenure in some femi-faculty somewhere for being such a troubled woman.

Why couldn't she just resort to creating a good paper instead of whining?"

I always find it amusing when commenters are factually incorrect about the articles they are commenting on; if you read the article, you will see that Dr. Roughgarden already has tenure at Stanford. "Alex" continues his line of arugment by arguing that not only is women's research hampered by emotions and political agendas, but that these are the bases for academic advancement for women, not academic success. He argues that she is just "whining" instead of doing better research. While Dr. Roughgarden welcomes challenges to her theory, the strength or correctness is not the issue here. The issue is the way all women are treated when people disagree with them. The problem isn't that her theory could be stronger or might be incorrect but that she is being accused of whining and using what has happened to her to unfairly advance herself. It's the same argument that has been used against many underpriviledged and subordinate groups. Many people in dominant positions in society cannot recognize the advantages they've received toward advancement.

I'll leave you with two of "Alex's" responses to other commenters criticizing him, one female and one male. Notice any difference?

"Wow Lara.
Getting a bit emotional aren't you? I guess you can't help it, hey?

Shankar Vedantam is a man on a mission to sell books.
You should buy it Lara as it melds perfectly with your programing...though, it would be better if he was a she.
Isn't that right Lara?"

"@charlie
I believe you are addressing me. I also believe that this article is an advert for Vedantam's book. That headline about 'leaving no doubt' in the print paper is a bait and yes, I have bitten at it.

I bit at it as it truly annoys me... it annoys me that the research cited leaves many doubts as to the validity of Vedantam's commercial theories and Roughgarden's selective inter-species argument.
Ben Barres and Joan Roughgarden's experiences do not make for proof. Nor do Roughgarden's pet oystercatchers.

I too am familiar with Roughgarden's argument (though I'd forgotten her name until now) as I came across it a few years back but I quickly dismissed it as the use of a species of birds to prove anything to do with us, isn't logical. I suspect you read further into that argument than I did- your loss."

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