Queer Voices in Oceanography

[Music] All right, hello everybody. Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Clark Marquesi, your host, and this is a very special episode of Oceanography. You've probably already seen the title, but for a little bit of context, this is a queer-led podcast if you didn't know. And so, I guess very simply, I thought this was an important episode to make. I'm not going to do too much talking today. I'm going to let them take it from here, basically. But in this episode, we are going to meet nine queer scientists and people working in Oceanography. Some of them have had their own individual episodes on this show already, and some haven't yet. What I did was come up with a list of about 30 questions that I thought might be interesting to ask. I sent those questions to everyone in advance, and then I let each person choose about three to five that resonated with them the most. And you'll see that a lot of them chose the same ones. I think that's really wonderful, because nobody was asked to tell the same story, but when you put all of the voices together, certain things start to echo. We're going to hear a lot about finding community and seeing yourself represented in science, about being out at work at sea, and mentorship, and safety, and belonging. My goal here was simply to create a space for queer voices in Oceanography to speak about their experiences and their own words. And when that space exists, I think that we can see that there is something unique and unifying about being queer in Oceanography. And if you are a queer voice in Oceanography out there listening, first of all, I hope this resonates with you, but also get in touch because I would really love to do a part two. And I guess the last thing I'll say is that this episode is for everybody. If you're a queer scientist or an early career scientist trying to imagine what your future in this field might look like, this episode is for you. If you work with queer scientists or teach queer students, lead a lab or are in charge of a research cruise, there are things here that I think are worth hearing. And if you're not a scientist and you're not queer, this episode is for you too. These are nine people who love the ocean, who have built lives and careers around trying to understand it, and who have something to say about what it means to find your place within that work. So let's hear from them. This is queer voices in Oceanography. Part one. Hello, my name is Erin Jones. My pronouns are she, her, and I am a PhD candidate in biological oceanography from the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. And I work in the lab of Dr. Tatiana Rainerson. In our lab, we study phytoplankton ecology, diversity, physiology, and metabolism. My PhD work focuses on the types of heterotrophic phytoplankton that consume other phytoplankton and subsequently disrupt myocrobial food webs or make them more efficient. Specifically, I use these molecular methods like DNA and RNA sequencing to examine community diversity, as well as the predation activity, and look at the ecological impacts that these organisms are making on the carbon cycle and marine food webs at large. I got into this field like many. I was drawn to the ocean through many different formative experiences in my childhood, in my public schools, my science classes. But what kept me pursuing a career in this field was the collaborative and exploratory nature of oceanography. No scientist is capable of answering their questions in a vacuum. And the discipline demands a team of really varied expertise. And because there's so much to discover still, our work results in the joining of creative thinkers and dynamic research teams. So I get to work with really different kinds of scientists and thinkers to answer the questions that I want to answer. The first time I met a queer scientist, my world really opened up before my eyes. She was my high school AP biology teacher, actually. I was not out yet. And aside from her being an excellent teacher, and I learned a lot from her, we connected on a very personal level, and she became a very early mentor for me during a really challenging time. She encouraged my scientific curiosity, and she supported me when being outed felt insurmountable in high school. Years later, entering graduate school, I joined Tatiana Raiden Eerson's lab, which aligned with my research goals and offered me a safe harbor in a lab that was also led by a queer advisor. She also happens to be an incredible scientist and really well known in the field, which is great for my career. But because of this safe harbor that I've had here for six years, I've always felt wholly welcome as a professional and as a person. Oceanography is still a comparatively young field, and as a result, much of the old guard is still alive and well at universities at research institutes. In fact, some of the very early influential women in oceanography are still alive or only have very recently died. Then that fact alone should tell you just how recently the opportunities have been made for women to be woven into the field of oceanography. The LGBTQ inclusivity in oceanography has made significant gains in the past few decades, kind of in tandem with the decreased taboo around open LGBTQ+ people in STEM fields and academia more broadly, where oceanography struggles still, I think, is along the lines of race and with transgender people. The field is still largely white, and in part that is because of who was historically allowed to be an oceanographer decades ago, and thus where those institutions were built, usually in the richer, wider coastal communities. An ongoing issue for oceanography is the recruitment of more diverse students to undergraduate and graduate programs in an effort to diversify the field and hopefully lead to more diverse career scientists, because that is a bottleneck. The historical barriers created a lag in who can be a scientist, but the disconnect with younger student populations, I think, will perpetuate that lag into the future unless we can work on addressing it at younger student populations. Ultimately, I believe that the intersectional and LGBTQ voices in oceanography will grow over time, but we really have a lot of work to do if we want to reach our goals to the fullest. In my field of biological oceanography, it feels like it has a community that's tilted toward women and LGBTQ people. It's kind of the benefit of studying biology is that it actually does tend to draw more women and diverse people, and also the benefit of having a queer advisor in a field that has more women than other subdiscipline's oceanography means that I have an array of collaborators that have been mostly pre-filtered through her, and it means that I have a bunch of women and queer people at the table that I get to work with, communicate with, and trust. And in general, there's kind of a shared kinship that runs in the background of our research endeavors because of that, and it does feel like trust. There's a trust within our community to sport each other, to work together, and to be creative together. I think hands down the most joyful moments I've had in my work have come during my time on oceanographic research cruises. It is truly friendship born from adversity, long-night shifts, opportunistic experiments, and during literal storms in the North Atlantic. These were the experiences that have made life long friends and lasting colleagues, because we just spent so much time together and saw each other at our worst and on our best. When you're at sea, you and everyone else have to rely on each other for safety, for community, and for the research. We are all out there with the same goal to acquire robust data, but much of the time spent at sea is not actively sampling, and it's in these in-between moments in the galley, on the deck, or in the rec room, where we will be discussing everything from project ideas to our personal lives. I remember when I was at sea, I was over the moon, because I was getting to a point in my relationship with my now wife, that who I was I wanted to propose to as soon as possible, and so I was sharing that with all my friends and colleagues on the ship, and that was something that I think in hindsight is actually a really unique experience. Hi, everybody. My name is Jake Slater. My pronouns are Keevee. I'm a third-year PhD student at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, but I'm originally from Hummus Town, Pennsylvania, which is a small town right next to Hershey's Chocolate World, making it where that is, but my research broadly is using mathematical models to translate past data from literature. And some new data coming in from the field into local management, especially regarding sediment and nutrient effluents into the ocean and also herbivorous fish management in ocean phenomenon, but felt deeply personal to me. I went on a three-week research cruise in the remote Pacific Ocean. This was about three summers ago, but there's one of my favorite things to do was sit on the side of the boat and watch the ocean and every now and then the boat would hit the water after a wave and a bunch of flying fish would scatter and there was just one of my favorite things and I feel like people they get far out into the ocean and they kind of view the ocean as a wall, but I feel like me and a lot of oceanographers, a lot of marine biologists don't view it as a wall, they view it as like the precipice of opportunity, like just something very cool and very liberating and I was very grateful to experience that in the middle of the ocean. My first experience meeting the queer people or a queer person or a trans person in my field, I was writing a Wikipedia page. I was part of this project that took place during COVID in my undergrad research lab to write Wikipedia pages for underrepresented scientists, so I met a very high achieving queer scientists while interviewing them for their Wikipedia page that I was about to write and I feel like it was so like I finally had somebody in science that I could very closely relate to and that was nice, but it was also sad at times to hear about like the struggles that they have seen or experienced themselves while coming up in the field. I was grateful to meet them, but it was also sad to hear that to pave this path and to make me feel safe how they had to go through so many unsafe situations to get there. Growing up, I feel like I am of a generation that I did have queer representation, but it was mostly in like entertainment spaces, so it was never me growing up and seeing a bunch of queer people in STEM, and now like as I've gone through my years of schooling, I've encountered more queer people and trans people, which has been amazing, but a lot of my mentors, I've been lucky because they haven't been queer, but they have belonged to underserved communities, so they understand that feeling of otherness that comes with not being heteronormative or white or a man being othered in life and in STEM. I feel like I was lucky because immediately after I came out, I very quickly had a supportive friend group and supportive family, so it really let me kind of stop thinking about my queerness and my otherness in a lot of spaces, at least like when I'm with friends and family, and that helped me achieve in other spaces like academics and extracurriculars, but there was also this underlying feeling of in academics and in extracurriculars. I knew not every space that I entered was necessarily safe, so I feel like I had to achieve another level of like academic excellence or extracurricular excellence, so people didn't have a means to belittle me in my undergrad. I was very involved in queer and trans plus advocacy. I entered specifically the Honors College as a second year and there was just no like LGBTQI plus organization to provide support, so me and a few people got together and we created it and it's still so up and running today, so that was, it's very nice to see. I think to make oceanography more equitable and inclusive and diverse, I think there needs to be more programs that support individuals and not just research, and I'm speaking from personal experience, and I'm also speaking about these programs before. The changes they've had to make in response to the current political crisis that I'm thinking of programs like the Noah Holling Scholarship Program or the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship. Just programs that not only look at research, they look at your research in context of your background, your identity, like what you are bringing to the table as a holistic individual, and I also, there's programs around the country that focus on providing undergraduate support for underserved students in STEM. I was a part of one in my undergrad at Penn State. I'm not going to say the name of the organization, I don't think, just because I don't want to, I don't want to expose them to unwanted attention right now, but they know who they are and how much I value them. They really provided like personal and financial and academic support throughout my entire undergraduate career, and I still keep in touch with them, so I just think programs that provide beginning to end support for underrepresented students in oceanography and in STEM, at large, is how we, we make it more inclusive, and I really, I think all students should have that sort of support as well. I feel like the opportunities to increase inclusivity are being shut out by the current federal science funding crisis, so I think there's less opportunities, especially for oceanography, I think of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, the National Science Foundation, or NSF, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, I think of NASA, and in the proposed budget for the next fiscal year, there are quite extreme cuts to all these agencies. I was looking at the presidential budget and they're justified by things like contributing unnecessarily to climate anxiety. I.e. they want to make people unaware of the climate crisis that is ongoing, or they say it's radicalizing students, or it's citing like it's promoting trans ideology. They're using social issues as political issues to motivate the conservative sect of politics to defund science, defund opportunities that would recruit underserved people into science. I feel like we need more representation in Congress, like the highest decision making body in the U.S. I tried to use numbers to communicate that. I was looking at how many scientists and engineers are in Congress currently, and it's only 15, and there's 535 seats, so that's about 3%, but in reality, the U.S. workforce has 24% STEM workers, so it's like an 18% disparity, and same with queer people. I think I have 13 openly queer and trans plus people in U.S. Congress, but there's 9% of the country that identifies as queer and trans living and working in Hawaii. There's also such an underrepresentation of Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders, and legislative matters, even though a lot of them are from like Unities in the climate crisis. Specifically, Hawaii has congresspeople, but representatives from American Samoa and Guam and the Northern Mariana's islands don't have representatives that can floor vote. They can only participate in the committee, so it's kind of like the U.S. is creating problems that cause your island nation harm, but you can't vote to stop it. My other open mic thing was please vote dancing. So my name is Leigh Miller, I'm a post-doctoral researcher at the Modern Bioquery and Research Institute, although I just finished my PhD from the University of Hawaii, so just moving into a new job currently, but I generally study deep sea ecology. I'm really interested in food webs and how animals are getting enough food in the deep ocean. I'm also interested in how animals and microbes interact with each other, so I've done some work on gut microbiomes. That's currently what I'm working on a little bit now, but just in general, yeah, how the animal and the microbe food webs interact in the deep ocean. I don't know a lot of thinking of how kind of to bring my queer identity into my work as a scientist, and also how much to do that at all. I think there's this implicit understanding in a lot of science spaces that you're just supposed to keep those things totally separate. That any sort of personal identity is not relevant to your work as a scientist, and maybe might be unprofessional, and at least for me, I just don't think that's totally realistic or even kind of possible or healthy for me as a person, but also as a scientist. A lot of it for me does come down to kind of how I present. I can't really hide my queerness even if I want to, so I'm transgender and non-binary. I don't necessarily pass, you know, using that word with quotations around it, but I don't pass necessarily as a man or a woman, and I don't really want to, but this means that in any space I'm in, my queerness is there, and it is sort of whether or not it's spoken. It's in the room. So a lot of what I've thought about is like how much can I bring that part of myself actively to certain spaces, because I think it can be on just being who I am. It's also, I think, can make me a better scientist. So I study the deep ocean. This is a part of the world that we know very little about, especially relative to other equisystems such as those on land. There's a lot of ambiguity. There's a lot of unknowns. The animals that I study, we might know very, very little about them. We might not know how they reproduce or a lot of them are new species or at least undescribed species. And so I think that I bring a little more comfort and like being okay and even excited by that unknown. And to me, that does sort of interact with like my identity, especially as a non-binary person, that I like kind of like the ambiguity and I like the like not really being one way or the other. I think I'm still learning how to be okay with bringing that aside of myself to my work. And mostly it's just been with talking to other queer scientists, but it's harder I think for me to know when I can talk about that in other spaces. I would say most of the queer scientists I've interacted with have been my peers and that has been really valuable, especially throughout graduate school. I had some really great friends and like colleagues who are queer and that was really meaningful to me. But I would say it's been hard. I haven't seen a lot of people further along in their career than I am. That are queer and especially trans. That has been pretty rare. But I was actually really lucky when I was an undergraduate at Bard College. There was one faculty member who was transgender and he was open about it, but like no one really cared. And it wasn't like a thing. It was just sort of one thing that people knew about him, but didn't have any issues with. And I think that was really meaningful to me. I mean, I didn't know I was trans back then. So I think it was more subconscious. But as I did discover this about myself remembering that there's this person who was well respected, a faculty member at college and was open about that part of his identity. And it was just like accepted and understood that was really meaningful, more sort of indirect respect than in the moment. I'm still figuring out how visible I want to be in different spaces. A lot of my work includes going to see for sometimes long stretches of time. So this is on research vessels will be out. I've been out for like two months. I'm going to be out for a month again. And I would say that being at sea on a research vessel. I mean, it's kind of my favorite part of my job, but it's also very challenging. And it's a very in some ways strange place to be in. You're working very closely with your colleagues that normally, you know, you'd go home with the end of the day of work and have your life. But when you're at sea and doing research that there is no sort of boundary there, it's you're around the same people. All of the time, we're also interacting with a lot of the crew members, which can be really fun, but also in some ways, it can be challenging depending on kind of their familiarity with scientists and also with people with other identities like being trans. And being at sea, it can be very gendered a lot of like the time in terms of how the birthing goes. It's like, oh, two men together, two women together, there's no allowance for anything in between. So like I said, I really like going to sea, but that is a place where I'm always thinking about like a lot of it is safety, honestly, of like how open can I be? Who can I say what to? Because things can get very casual, you know, you're on hour six of like a deployment of some sort of equipment. It's with water. Everyone's really tired, but you're off to stay up. So everyone's just chatting, doing whatever I can get, you know, very casual. And then it's a place where you're like, well, can I mention this or that about myself? And I hate feeling like I'm censoring myself and that's a place where I think a lot about it. So I guess I don't have a perfect answer of like how I navigate this, but just a lot of being really careful in what I'm saying. And I wish that I could be a little bit less careful in that way, especially when I'm at sea. I definitely think that oceanography is becoming more inclusive. And it also has a lot more work to do. I think in some cases, it can be very specific to each institution, which is unfortunate because I see some institutions that are doing a lot to make changes and then other ones that maybe are a little bit more behind. And I kind of wish that there was more unified change across institutions that people can talk to one another a little bit more. And obviously we collaborate scientifically, but it's always nice to also be able to talk about like, oh, what is your department or your institution doing? Oh, that's a really good idea. We should talk about doing that here. I think more of that would be really good. In my work, I've focused on the ocean-going fieldwork because that is like where I have a decent amount of experience. And also where I've seen, I would say the most kind of latent discrimination and harassment, unfortunately. So I'm trying to work to make ocean-going fieldwork more inclusive and also just more safe for everyone, but you know, building on my experience as a queer person. That is an area that I think could really go undergo a lot of improvement. There could be a lot of work done in terms of getting rid of like unnecessary sex and gender separation. A lot of it is also around the travel. A lot of the time we'll be traveling to other countries, which is exciting, but also can add extra challenges. And so I would like that chief scientists and people who are leading these cruises just like have a little bit more consideration for the fact that there's a very good chance that there will be queer people and people who have their marginalized identities on their ship and kind of anticipating that and sort of having to make people figure out from themselves, how to make themselves like safe and comfortable. And I'm actually a co-author on a paper from a few years ago called Navigating Gender at Sea, where we put together some recommendations for ocean-going fieldwork. And I think that was a really, I was not the lead author on that at all, I just sort of participated as one of many authors, but I'm really glad that that happened because I've already had multiple different people and like chief scientists, other people who work at sea come up to me and say, "They really appreciate it happened to the guidelines." I think that there's a lot of openness to change and people want to, but they just like don't really know where to start and they don't know how to ask. And so if you come to people with concrete suggestions of how to make things better, a lot of the time they'll be really open to that. Hi, my name is Jamie Blatter and I use she/her pronouns. I work for a non-profit and we focus on the stewardship and the management of Californians of marine protected areas and specifically on civic engagement, which essentially just means working to ensure that community and people are at the center of our decision making and are at the center of our conversations when it comes to California's coastal notion. And then my academic background is across the board as is my life in general and includes a master's degree in climate change science and solutions as well as an undergraduate degree in journalism and cultural studies. My cruneist brought me to the ocean. In middle school, high school, and college, I was running for myself in a lot of ways, but I didn't have much of anything healthy to run towards until I found the ocean. And when I discovered the water during some really hard years, I had finally found something that was grounding, that was constant, that was connecting to run towards. And I did have the privilege of living close enough to the ocean where I could get in the water each morning before class at work and each evening. And it really changed me that feeling of the sun reflecting off the water onto my skin, the taste of the salt, the sound of waves crashing over me when I would hold my breath and float underneath the wave break. And the feeling of my body rising and falling with the forming waves, the sight of the sea itself just endlessly stretching into infinity. The warm sand on my feet, you know, I feel like after my time in the water or on the sand, I wouldn't run to the shower to rinse it off. I relished the way the salt water made my hair feel and the way the sand smoothed my skin. And I don't think there was a single moment that I knew I wanted to dedicate my life's work to the ocean. It was more of a million small moments that changed me. It's taken me a long time to understand the impact of visibility and representation, as well as the impacts of the lack of visibility in professional settings. I feel like often out work were told to keep our quote-unquote personal lives separate from our work lives, but straight cisgender folks can often talk openly about their families and their spouses and usually that's not considered too personal. But there's often this unspoken expectation that queer people keep their queerness out of professional settings because it's something private. And this sends the message that queerness is something to be ashamed of and that who we are might make other people uncomfortable. Let me see that a room, a professional field, the media is void of people we resonate with, we get the message that we don't belong there. And looking back at my struggles in elementary school all the way through college, I really believe that a big portion of it had to do with feeling like who I am was inherently unacceptable and not enough. And like I didn't belong. And even though coming of age can be challenging regardless of circumstances, I think that representation in role models and support make a huge difference. I think that if I had looked around and seen queer people everywhere and if I had interactions with adults with a wide variety of lifestyles and those people weren't being whispered about, I would have had a very different experience. And one example is that just last week I was at a work event and drew a rainbow on my name tag. And a team member asked me about it and I explained that I knew for a fact that there would be other people at that event that night that felt safer and more at home when they saw that rainbow. And about an hour later, I saw a woman with a rainbow pen on her hat and I felt those same feelings. And I do want to acknowledge that because I'm cisgender and white, I have relative queer privilege, which I feel comes with the responsibility to promote representation. And I do this by being very open about my clearness and professional settings. So, my name is Jesús Alcazza Trevino and my pronouns are he, him, his. And nowadays, I'm an assistant professor of zoology in the University of La La Buna, in Tenerife, Spain. Although my research focus has always been related to marine biology and mostly the biocoustics. So, the sounds we can record and detect underwater to study marine biodiversity, for example, cetacean sounds, fish sounds and things like that. Things I was a little kid, I loved the ocean, I watched all these marine documentaries. Also, my first diving wetsuit was a present for my birthday, my eight-year-old birthday. It was not as early as my Seville Janus dance lessons, but nearly so. Now with more serious stuff, have you ever felt pressure to hide or minimize your queerness in your professional life? Sure, there have been several of those moments, for example, in some meetings where other attendants were clearly homophobic or transphobic. And I have been presented with a difficult task to speak up or remind silent. This was really challenging because your immediate professional future depends on that meeting. That it's quite sad but also true, and sometimes you have to true remain silent, which is, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's super sad, that's the repression. But sometimes, if you feel supported or maybe when you just have had enough, you have to speak up, and it's not only for you, for yourself, but for the collective. With another question that it's like a more hopeful, when did you first meet another queer scientist, and what did that mean to you? So that happened quite early in my professional career. I was in my first year as a PhD student, and my advisor and I were invited to this all-theanographic cruise with this prestigious oceanographer. And once we were aboard the research vessel, it turned out that this person was openly gay and proud about it. And everybody in that research vessel respected and admired him. It felt really good, I felt so included and welcome, that that inspired me to be more clearly open. Without maybe trying to convey my clear mannerism with my hands, for example, and all, this is what we call plume in Spain. So yeah, that was really inspiring. Meeting this person, we are great friends today, and colleagues, and yeah. And now with another kind of question with a queer perspective, do you think being queer changes the kinds of questions you ask in science, or how you ask them? And yeah, I think that it's vital, mostly those of us that grow up some years ago when being queer, openly queer, wasn't so accepted in general, and also in the professional science life. Yeah, maybe we have this open mind, or at least this tendency to be more open-minded. So yeah, we tend to think with different perspectives without losing, let's say, quote the normal one. I think we have an advantage in that sense. We can approach questions in nature with an open mind, because nature doesn't understand of documents, or any other kind of imposition, more than natural law. I think that this open-minded approach to science is a real advantage for us, queer people. And now for the closing reflections, what's one thing you wish listeners, especially allies, really understood about being queer in oceanography? This is not easy, but yeah, I think people still have to understand that we must be included. There's no other way, and we have, let's say, a unique vision, a unique approach in general to the questions we ask ourselves about nature. And of course, this is more like a general, but yeah, we queer people, we deserve and demand to be treated as equals to the rest of the people. This is true in oceanography and in every aspect of life. So my name is Nicholas Story, pronouns he/him, and I am a gay oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I'm a PhD candidate in the oceanography department, and my research focuses on coastal sewage pollution and cymactic drivers of sewage pollution and streams and coastal waters in Hawaii. I was actually very fortunate to meet a queer scientist right when I started graduate school. So my first lab beating, I started graduate school during COVID, so this was all via Zoom. But I was introducing myself to my lab, I had a little presentation, and I don't really hide the fact that I'm gay. So I had a picture of me and my husband, and I got a DN in the Zoom, and one of my lab members was actually a gay trans man. So it was instantly very affirming to see that I was amongst family, even in my own lab, as grad school progressed. And the COVID restrictions started to lax up, and people were more willing to see each other. Someone in my department had reached out to me, and they were a non-binary lesbian. And they wanted to go out on a hike together, and I feel like you start graduate school with this idea of like, "Oh, I have to be super professional," and we need to talk about science things and all new science things. And then, you know, within 15 minutes of the hike, they were like, "Oh my God, all my roommates are straight." Like, I don't have anybody to talk to about like queer things. And then it just like quickly divulged into just like the experience of like being queer in graduate school, and how predominantly straight the department was. So that kind of inspired me to try to start posting like monthly LGBTQ need ups, where the queer students in the department would all just like link up with the park and barbecue and hang out. And yeah, just have community in that sense. Like I mentioned, I started during COVID, so when it first started, it was very lonely, and like a very depressing time to start graduate school, honestly. But I think that also pushed like my cohort to develop a stronger sense of community, because we were lonely, and then also going through Trump administration, and you know, very tumultuous times politically, and so we've been through tumultuous times with COVID and politically, and like our own personal lives, such as, you know, deaths of parents and divorces and breakups, and all the other things like that life just, you know, brings to you. But through all of this, like my biggest like sense of community is just the amount of support we've had throughout all of this, be it, you know, running errands for each other, going grocery shopping, cooking food for each other, if we're sick, like there's a core group of people in my department that knows that we can reach out to each other if we're sick, or if any life thing happens, and like we will be there with, you know, food or groceries or ride to the airport, or just like simply being there and just lending an ear. So that's what community looks like for me. Graduate school is when I really began to realize like where I was in like, I don't know if you would call it like the social hierarchy, but you know, I always perceived like being a gay man to you know, put me towards the bottom of, you know, the social hierarchy, not really realizing or recognizing like my privilege is like a white man, a cis white man, as I've developed, matured, grown as a scientist, recognize my privilege. I think one of the biggest ways to have solidarity as like a gay man is to use my position as a man in particular to call other people out in their implicit biasness, and also the injustices that I see be in my department, or in my research, or at like my job as well. I guess when it comes to like my work itself, all of my research is actually really heavily community focused, so it's a lot of like community led water quality monitoring programs, where I'm working with these like rural communities, predominantly native Hawaiian communities, or Black indigenous people of color, and these rural communities that are typically lower socioeconomic status, they're kind of generally overlooked by state organizations, for like water quality testing, maybe it doesn't happen as frequently as it does to like the economic powerhouse that is Waikiki, where you know, all of these tourist are, where the tourism industry really runs like the economic driver of the state. And it's connecting with these communities that this data is lacking and asking them, what is their concerns, where is it important for us to monitor, because like what I might think is scientifically important might not actually be that important for the community. So really just kind of engaging communities in science through all steps of the process, from grant procurement to site selection to data analysis to the final reporting of the results, and then trying to stick with them afterwards and being like, okay, so this is the results that we have, like how do we want to move forward. And I think another important part of solidarity is knowing when it's your turn to speak, but also knowing when it's your time to shut up and listen, and allow others to have the space to speak. I am Michael Henson, and I am a system professor at Northern Illinois University in the Cal Bill of Illinois. I am a pre-tenured assistant professor, and I study environmental microbiology, and my pronouns are he/him/his. Yeah, we study how microbes interact with the environment, and how the environment influences microbial communities and their function broadly. So I did not come out until I was far later in my career. So a postdoc at University of Chicago was when I finally came out as queer, particularly homosexual. And I always kind of felt this pressure to conform and be like everyone I kind of saw, which were cis heterosexual males, predominantly, and I was always nervous. I didn't want my sexuality to impact my career that I was trying to build. There's obviously a lot of internal pressures as well that influenced that, but for a long time, I was really nervous about being my most authentic self. And being in marine science, you are often on ships in closed quarters, and that can come with a lot of pressure too. You know, they're not always the most friendly to, if you have any, you know, needs that you need to have met, particularly like bases and things like that. It's not always super welcoming, and usually dominated by heterosexual people, and you can feel that's really masculine, and that can be nerve-wracking if you're presenting anything that may break that I'm conforming. So it certainly felt a lot of pressure navigating my early career. You know, I was really lucky within my lab spaces that I felt very welcoming so much that I was able to, you know, come out to some of the first people I came out to were actually people in my lab. So it's kind of this mixed bag where there's definitely places where I felt a lot of pressure, but at the same time being surrounded by other people where I felt very welcomed. And I think something that was important is it's not ones that you come out. I think it's like this mist normal right that you come out once, and like it's this like grand welcoming, right? You're constantly coming out and like now you can think about going on a ship or in a field in closed quarters having to do that again and not having space to navigate if someone's not as welcoming and being, you know, trapped essentially, you know, again, that can be incredibly nerve-wracking. Being out and being more open, you know, valuing relationships, valuing community has mean I've really geared my research and building my lab space and the community within our department around that idea of fostering communities that are supportive, finding diverse voices and making sure they're represented in the lab and in in your research spaces. And that's been a big thing. I think recently I was able to, you know, form a relationship, research relationship with a collaborator who's also in, you know, identifies this queer and it's been one of the most like rewarding processes to just be able to be in a space and, you know, feel seen and with your issues and the problems you're facing and it not have to be talked about, it's just known and that's been really fun and fun to just be able to kind of celebrate queerness and talk about issues and things like that openly. And so it certainly influenced a lot of my recent things. We had a recent project in the Florida Keys looking at how the heat waves that were occurring down in the Southeast US and through websites that, you know, promote queer scientists as well as networking, you know, a senior queer researcher reached out to me and kind of formed this awesome budding relationship, research relationship in which, you know, we formed this awesome project that we're now studying how microbial communities respond to thermal stress and, you know, we, you know, his lab right now has contained him and another queer student as well as myself and it's this really just awesome fun space to just everyone gets to be themselves and it's been a really awesome, I'm experienced recently. I think there's efforts to become more inclusive and I, I think there's conversations that are happening and that's really important, but I think there's a lot of room, right? academia and as a whole has a lot to change, right? The PhD process is not very inclusive. There's a high cost to it, right? And low pay, meaning during your PhD, you're near poverty level and if you don't have a support system or network, that can be really tough, you know, to survive and you don't always get health insurance. A lot of universities don't provide health insurance to graduate students. So if you're someone in need, especially within the queer community that needs health insurance to, for the numerous reasons, right? Like that might not be available to you and that could be a huge reason not to go into, you know, research and science. But then the hiring practices, I was actually part of a group, a small part, but was led by a larger group that put out, you know, a better hiring practices for queer and trans identifying individuals during the hiring process of academia, which isn't super always reliable to having those. And so I think there's conversations out there, people are putting it out there, but I think there's a lot of work. I'm right, marine science, one of the first things people go to is coral reefs and being out in the field, right? And that comes with a ton of costs, you have to have scuba deer, you have to be able to get out there. So there's lots of nuances, I think, that are out there that still limit the inclusivity of marine science. I think the conversations are there to improve it, but there's a lot of room to go. So hi, I'm Marina Sant Martín and I'm a post-doctoral researcher at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography in Spain. And I've been doing marine research since I'm very young, since 18 years old. I've been doing a lot of research in the Arctic Ocean, in Greenland, related with ocean acidification, and nowadays I'm focusing in the majoranian, working with climate change, and how species are changing, and how climate change is affecting fisheries in the majoranian, and also searching and researching how we can find marine climate refugee, and how we can protect some areas taking into account climate change. I've been doing a lot of research outside of Spain, such as in the U.S., in New York, in California, and I'm back in Spain now. In Palma de Mallorca, where I'm based, and yeah, my plan is to keep doing science as much as I can. If that's possible, I hope it is. What brought me to the ocean was that I was born and raised in a little city, named Alba Cete, in the middle of Spain. We used to go to the beach often every summer, and at some point I was so fascinated by the sea that I really wanted to know what was going on down there, and understand everything that you could see underwater. There was so many things to learn, and that was what brought me up to the sea, was to understand and be able to explain all the things that I could see there, to really understand what was underwater, and how that was affecting our lives. When I started acknowledging and picking openly about my queerness. It was really, really helpful to have support from other queer, scientific people. I clearly remember to be on board on some research vessels in the Arctic from the University of Tromso. And I strongly remember two people that were extremely supported. They were open about it, and I wasn't open. I was in the closet at that time. I was closet for so many years. And having those references really, really, really opened my horizon, it helped me to see a different world. That in Spain, that was something that was not happening in my daily life at all. Even a year later, going on board research vessels specifically, on board cruises, research vessels can be really, I don't know, heteronormative and really, there's a lot of patriarchy in those boats, in those research vessels. So that was, I was not really supported at that time. And it was a very threatening environment, honestly. There's a lot of things to do to make research vessels a safer place for queer and women in science. I think there are so many things to do by selecting people, taking into account their inclusivity aspects or their diversity. I think that helps also to have crew members that are also strongly diverse, also protocols against harassment are also fundamental, but not only protocols, you also need to talk about it openly. You need to win it to talk about, especially with our superiors. Like one of the most important things is that superiors, the people that are on top of the hierarchy, sometimes are not fully conscious about the situation of others. And then when something happens, when your team, your advisor, your superior response in a positive way, that also helps a lot. The field of oceanography is becoming more inclusive. I think that that's happening. Talking about queerness is in science. It's something that was not a thing many years ago that was not on the road map. Talking about women in science, that was also not a thing. And also other type of inclusivity, because when we talk about inclusivity, it's a very broad spectrum. And we should incorporate other people, races, colors, abilities. That's really making big changes. Just by making a space for them, I really think it helps us seeing the world with a very different perspective. And it makes us questioning how we are doing things. Academy, it's the big system. It's a very big monster. It's a very hard place to live and to work. Even though it's also a really nice and lovely place, because I really like it and I enjoy so much. Doing my own research is part of my life. I want to keep it and I want to keep do the work I do. I still think we really need to make space and rethink the way we do things. It's a very competitive place. The academic and the research place. In this race, we lose sometimes the focus. And we live in a very extremely productive world. And we might create a environment that is not safe for everyone, that is not inclusive. I also think it's very different depending on the country and depending on the culture. I come from Spain. I'm used to a very inclusive environment at research. And when I moved to the US because I've been working at Stony Brook University and Stanford University in California, I've been doing research tastes. Also Norway and Greenland. And I could see, at least in the US, that the inclusivity was insane. Like it was really, really, really impressive. It could be even more. Like, I mean, it was great in big cities. The inclusivity was higher than the inclusivity I could see in Spain, for instance, at my workplace in Spain. And now the AI programs are starting to be cut down and closed, like literally shut down. I have seen the impact that those programs have had in the past and that make a US university the way they are. And cutting those programs I'm really sad and I'm really terrified by that situation, especially being as a queer Spanish person in the US. That was a hard thing for me this year, actually. And I can see that those type of programs really help the country, the university, every lab member is supported by those type of programs. And to have a more inclusive laboratory, like a more inclusive work and research environment helps everyone. So I really think the US has something like really, really, I don't know how to say it in English, but really forward about it. And I'm afraid it's going back to, it might go backwards. And I can say, not inclusive places doesn't look nice. They lose something really important and we end up in constrained workplace where you only can be one way and there's nothing else to do. So I really think it's very, very important to try to keep up with those programs and with that perspective. We shouldn't forget that perspective and we can go backwards very easily. We can see in Spain, it's also that something that's happening. And we are very afraid of that. I would like to add something that makes my free of speech, we're more solid right now, right now I'm based in Spain. And right in November, I was already based in the US. So probably if I could have had to talk about it when I was based in New York and when I was based in the US, I could have felt very, very different because I was also afraid of speaking. I was afraid of talking. I was afraid of my Instagram. I was afraid of being suddenly get out to the country. So I was really afraid. So I can understand why people are afraid of talking. And that makes me really, really sad. I bring queer activism in my, I mean, yeah, that's something. I always try to be visible. I think just by making you visible to your workmates, I think that's very helpful for everyone in the lab at work. My activism and advocacy combines queerness and feminism. I try to combine both. I think we need both aspects or both perspectives into work and into daily life. I'm also part of a group that we've been building some years ago that was called 11F that in Spain, the day of women in science is very relevant. And that has led into so much activism and advocacy of feminism into science. And also I'm part of the equity group. We built an action equity group in our research institute that has been also supported everyone. So I think it's also very important to gather the people and to work as a team. Instead of being like, I'm a very, I can be a very impulsive person and try to fight all the fights. So sometimes it's very important to gather everyone and make a collaborative work, which is way more hard. But it can have better outcomes when you have a community at work, especially, that supports you. I really like one of the questions that you shared. It was, when did you first meet another queer scientist? And what did that meant to you? That really changed my whole work environment. It was very important for me. I went to the Arctic, my second research cruise. One of the teachers and the researchers, the main heads was a queer woman. And I was fascinated by that. I never came out to her because I was not ready to come out at that time. But years later, and actually thanks to this podcast, actually, I contacted to that researcher, to Melissa Kennedy, from a research institute in New York, in Norway. And I told her, I was like, hey, Melissa, you were such an important role for me. Such an important role model in marine science. And I wanted to say thank you, because it was very important for me at that time. And it's still important for me. It was really nice. We had exchanged couple emails that were really nice and lovely. It was thanks to rethinking queer in science. How our visibility helps others. That was what I was trying to tell her, that her visibility helped my own career and my path. So I told her, thank you. When I posted my profile at 500 queer scientists, I was afraid, actually. And at some point I saw that my profile at 500 queer scientists just started to show up. When you write my name on Google, it started to be the first thing that appeared instead of my many papers. And at some point I was like, oh my god, is that going to be a bad thing? Because that's the first thing that came out. Instead of my research, all the work I do, it shows me that I shouldn't be afraid, that that's something important to be visible. My name's Tristan McKenzie. I am a researcher at the University of Gothenburg. As soon to be actually a assistant professor at Imperial College, and my pronouns are he from a very broad perspective. I research coastal oceans and chemistry effectivate the human connection through groundwater to the coast. I think in academia, especially in the sciences, the culture is that one should not bring their private life into the workplace, right? And I think that's changing, but it's been slow to change. You know, for a long time, your private life was kind of viewed as inherently separate, and that was important for being a good scientist. But of course, we are whole people. And the moment that someone feels like they have to hide a facet of themselves, it limits their ability to connect with others, which is obviously a key part of science connecting with one another's through collaboration, et cetera. I think also research is inherently creative, and one's creative potential is really maximized when they feel they are most comfortable under less stress and overall on the support of environments. The more obvious practical ways, well, okay, I do a lot of fieldwork. So is, you know, doing fieldwork in one place going to be safe for someone like me, or is going to a conference in this place going to be safe for someone like me. So I think that's one of the the more practical aspects also when it comes to academic positions. The Venn diagram of where one of the extremely limited number of academic positions, and then where that intersects with places that are safe to live, or that I would want to live, maybe that's also another aspect. It's pretty limited. And I think this is actually one of the ways that we people might get increasingly funneled out unfortunately. So I think this identity question of both being queer and then also a scientist, I feel like often they are in conflict with one another, but you can't separate. I would say that I most broadly have felt support and oftentimes from people or angles that I would have never anticipated. So that's been quite, well, I just both unexpected and fantastic. I'm hesitant to focus on the negatives. And you know, like if I think about this in more in terms of isolation, the isolation doesn't come so much from a desire to isolate kind of from external, you know, other individuals, but rather the lack of understanding that they're missing the context. You know, I am someone that does not desire to or follow a traditional life trajectory. You know, there's no white picket fence in my future. I hope, you know, effectively no children. And I think that's quite hard to relate to for a lot of my peers. And maybe this is more a more commonly queer experience rather than that might be one that's followed for like cishead allies. And often in that context, I think sometimes people make assumptions that then the things that I might do in my private life or you know, if I have something in my schedule and an evening, but because I don't have kids, I can take on that responsibility because I don't, you know, I don't have to be anywhere in the same way. And that that's, that's blatantly untrue. You know, that's one of the ways that I think is one of these microaggressions that comes out kind of, well, okay, my, you know, the decision to do one thing, but you know, there's no inherent value in my life and my personal decision still have value and should be treated equally. I think if I get back to this kind of contextualizing aspect, I think, you know, how do we learn more about one another and how do we understand the diverse experiences that people can bring when we don't always have context for what they're going through or how to ask or how to communicate how best to support one another. And I think that's one of the big challenges. Right now, the prevailing culture is cis head dominated and what we lack these other contexts for how people might, I mean, I don't want to say live because it makes it sound like it's so outside the box and everything, but you know, then do you feel like you kind of have to fit the mold in some way in the workplace. And I definitely find myself always assessing not only safety, of course, safety, safety, that's another category, but also just the social dynamics. Okay, is this going to be too radical, you know, if I, if I mentioned, you know, you know, a partner or whatever, right? Like it's so it's, it's constantly kind of going, okay, what is the social pulse here? What would be too much? And that does, that does take a lot of extra brain power, extra stress, and it does detract, I think, kind of from the, you know, the overall, what we have every day to bring energy wise. And, and you know, certainly, I think if I go back to them, the idea of, of safety, I've had experiences where, you know, basically, I've been isolated for being queer, I don't think I'm excessively queer in my professional life. I don't think it's something that I bring so forward, but basically, I had an experience where I was on a research stay and I was staying in a spare room of a couple for a couple months. And that couple, I never talked about my private life with them. I was just there to do research, but that the couple was very clear. They were uncomfortable with me. And, you know, I started to learn, then I was in a small town that they were basically spreading all these crazy, bigoted rumors about me. Like I learned the story at the end of my stay or had like two weeks left there. And I was, I mean, it was just crazy and they were all, you know, it was all related to my queerness that I, you know, we never even had a conversation about it. And I really felt unsafe for those last two weeks, you know, kind of going, well, I have nowhere else to really go, but I found every, like every chance I could do not be in that house with them after that. And you know, these type of experiences that I think a lot of people who've not had this type of experience, they don't really think about. I don't think I would necessarily be out at work. It wasn't for more than one mentor nor support. And it's kind of an evolution. And I think when I was back at a bachelor, I went to studying for my bachelor degree. I didn't know anyone in STEM that was queer, especially not at like the, you know, the mentor level. There was no one senior to me was visibly queer, but there were in like the liberal arts. And so I found myself taking extra liberal arts classes to get closer to, you know, just anyone that I was like, okay, so you're, you're successful. I'm saying this in quotes because like that's not going to translate to the, the podcast. You're successful. Clearly, I want, you know, I knew I wanted to be in an academic environment long term. So like, how does this work? How is this for you? And it started like that. And then during my PhD, I was very fortunate to have actually multiple queer mentors in, in power positions. And you know, it was so important because we were able to kind of go through, okay, here would be a safety plan. Here are the types of things you want to think of. Here are some of the challenges that I have faced, you know, during my career, you know, et cetera. And I really feel indebted to those people because I've really, really made a huge impact on my own comfort in being out. I had one mentee who said something actually very powerful to me a couple years ago. And she came to me and she said, you know, it means so much with you just being here. And it wasn't she's like, it's not that you're, you know, it's not that you're here saying, okay, go LGBTQ all the time or whatever. She's like, it's just because you're here and you're respected. And that means a lot. That really, I don't know that sits deep in my heart in such a nice way because I think, you know, it's so hard to, to imagine yourself in a role or that you can do something or be part of something unless you see people that look like you in some way. I think back like when I was younger, I thought it couldn't be both queer or a scientist. And because I wanted to be a scientist and it was going well for me, I went, well, okay, I just have to hide my queerness. It'll be fun. But of course, it can be semi easy to hide for a bit both from yourself and others, but it does catch up with you eventually. And you can only run from yourself for so long. And then you have to let it out. And so my advice to my younger queer self is to own that earlier. And you know, you can control that narrative. You can be the one driving your happiness. And you know, if people are going to talk about you or behind your back, it's really hard to talk about someone who's confidently themselves. That's infectious. So do more of that earlier. That will be what I would say. The advice I would give to my younger queer self is don't be afraid to be your authentic self. You know, like embrace you for you and live that path because it's a winding path. It doesn't necessarily get easier, but you get used to it. You get used to that winding path. And so, you know, like rely and build community. A people you want to be there and people that want to be there, right? So it's it's vice versa. It's a two way street. And if you build that community, things feel a lot less stressful. If I could say one thing to my younger queer self, I would say there is nothing wrong with you. And no things are hard right now. But I promise that one day you will feel the freedom to be who you are. And you will know what it means to feel love for yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. I know it's cliche, but also it gets better. Like, you know, teenage years are very rough for most queer people. And unfortunately, they're only going to get rougher with the current political administration in the United States. But hold out. It gets better. You get to choose your family once you're an adult. And your chosen family can sometimes be the only family you really need because they see you who they see you Who, who, who, sorry, you're chosen. family sees you for who you truly are and they love you for who you truly are. If I could say one thing to my younger queer self, I would say if you have the drive to address a problem, you are qualified to address it. I feel like as me and as a queer person, a lot of the times we don't feel like we belong in spaces and impostor syndrome is something that plagues me. I'm sure it plays a lot of people in the queer and trans plus community, but over over the course of my academic and research career, I've had to realize that I'm here, I'm driven, I'm working, I deserve to be here. If I could tell younger queer air and something, I would tell her to chin up, things won't feel so crushing forever and to not strive to be better than other people, but instead strive to be someone that people want to turn to when they need a trust for the ear, to invest your time in community that supports an uplift because you cannot accomplish anything alone and that diverse perspectives are inherent to a rich life and a scientific career. I think queers are the future, so let's go. 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