When I started my first faculty position in 2022, I had no doubt that I’d be out to my students and openly queer on campus. As I wrote in my first Pride blog post for ASCB, originally published when I was a graduate student in 2018, it was only during my PhD training that I recognized the absence of queer role models during my education and the impact it had on me. It was during graduate school, knowing that I wanted to go on to work at a primarily undergraduate institution, that I committed to my openness with my future students. That commitment was backed by research just as I was starting my faculty position – instructors revealing LGBTIQA+ identities can have positive impacts on students1.
Things have changed globally since I became a faculty member 2022, and they’ve certainly changed since my first ASCB blog post in 2019. I now find myself wondering whether being a visibly queer presence on campus and in STEM matters. With the boom in queer representation in pop culture and on social media (at least in comparison to my college years), do students even care if they have an openly queer biology professor? Amidst the platforming of anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment and the targeting of academics for what they research, teach, post online, and say in the classroom, it is easy to question whether the benefits outweigh the risks. After all, it’s much harder to measure the impact of being out than it is to quantify the harassment and threats directed towards academics.
I don’t think I’m alone in this risk-benefit analysis. It is hard to escape the combined realities of queer and trans rights being eroded in front of our eyes and the attacks on higher education and research. This is an equation that we must each solve for ourselves. Oftentimes, the benefits of being out are intangible to me, but recently I received a message from a former student that made the math clear. Suddenly, the choice to be openly queer on campus was obvious to me in ways it hadn’t been since 2022. Teaching can be thankless, and messages like these from students can be few and far between, so I am sharing it here (with the student’s permission) in the hopes that it will simplify your risk-benefit equation the way it did mine. For me, if being out helps one student, that’s enough.
“The science aside, you have truly helped transform me into a much more radically prepared and healed person through simply being a living testament of queer success. Before I got to Ursinus I had only met a handful of queer adults. I had been told for years I would never get anywhere being myself, and words fail to explain how incredible it was to see how utterly false that was.“
While I make sure to come out in every class I teach, I tend not to make a big deal about it. In fact, I don’t usually verbalize my identity at all. Instead, I include an icon in my “about me” slides on the first day. It’s just a Progress Pride Flag with the words “LGBTQ+ Scientist” underneath, large enough to be noticed, and small enough that it’s not the main focal point. I saw a faculty member include something like it on a slide during graduate school, and it stuck with me. My office space is louder—[1] a banner of different pride flags, a bisexual pride flag in my mug of pens, a bulletin board mostly covered in a Progress Pride flag, and various other small pieces of pride and allyship. My Pride flag was the first purchase I made when I got my faculty job and knew I’d have my own office. It would be hard to walk into my space and not know that I’m queer, which is just how I like it—if students miss it in my introduction, or they’re students I haven’t yet taught, they can still flag me as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community (pun intended).
I am immeasurably lucky to have the freedom to express my whole self to my colleagues and students at work each day. Last year, I developed a course on the biology of sex and gender after I saw the trans people in my life confronting an uninformed public trying to argue about the “biological truth” of binary sex. I might not be able to educate the entirety of our society, but I can help my students understand that like the rest of biology, sex is complicated. Instead of exhausting myself arguing with people online, I learned about the different reproductive modes of plants alongside my students and watched their frustration build as they learned about gender biases in biomedical research and treatment. I don’t think seeing students incorporate new knowledge into their worldviews will ever get old. It may have been my membership in the LGBTQIA+ community that inspired the class, but it is because I am biologist and an educator that I find the topic and the sharing of this knowledge so exciting. All parts of my identity, including my queerness, impact my work, and it serves nobody to pretend otherwise. Science and education are human endeavors and humans have biases, for better or worse. I’m hopeful that by being out at work, I’m tipping the balance, at least a little, towards the better.
Happy Pride, ASCB LGBTQIA+ community. Whether you’re out personally, professionally, both, or not at all, I’m glad you’re here being yourself with me.
[1] All em-dashes in this post are generated by a human who loves em-dashes.
About the Author:
Erica Gorenberg, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at Ursinus College. Her research lab investigates protein interactions between neurodegeneration-associated aggregates and chaperone proteins. Outside the lab, she also researches interventions that improve student belonging in the sciences.
