Queer mathematicians and having every part of yourself understood

Elliot has been just as "out" as queer since starting their PhD as they were during their undergraduate. But the change in career level resulted in more changes than they'd been expecting in terms of the queer experience.

Getting involved in QED and chatting to the other lovely people here made them reflect on why they feel so strongly about being among a community of not just other queer people, but specifically other queer mathematicians!

When we were talking about writing these Here and Queer vignettes, I found it interesting hearing my co-gremlins’ experiences of being in the closet at work, and their nerves about coming out to a community where they functionally passed as straight, because that’s always interestingly been the opposite of my queer experience in academia. Maybe that’s the result of only being a PhD student, which means I’ve got a lot less at stake than those further in their academic careers. But I’ve gone through my entire academic process so far being out as every type of queer that I am; trans, non-binary, and nebulously-not-straight.

There was only one short week where I was “in the closet” about being trans and/or non-binary, when I started my PhD course. The first week of my PhD was the first time in my life that I’d truly and completely “passed” as a man ¹ ². When I‘d started my undergrad I wasn’t on HRT yet, so I was read as female by everyone. And even though I’d been on testosterone for 4 years by the end of my course, everyone who knew me then had known me pre-T, and knew I was trans. But then in my PhD, suddenly without even moving building, I entered a new day-to-day where for the first time in my life, everyone around me was assuming I was a cis man. It was a weird and foreign experience, but it felt quite comforting and validating to find that strangers were genuinely reading me the way I wanted to be read (as a masculine-gendered person).

But simultaneously it felt stifling, and like I was having to be on guard to make sure I didn’t say something that would raise questions. It always comes up in small ways that I don’t think about until I get thrown in it: going on a sporting social and me having to discretely struggle with the fact I’m wearing a binder; or when the question of hobbies came up, and I didn’t feel like I could answer that I’d done ballet until the age of 13. I finally ended up coming out to them when someone asked off-handedly when I’d decided to grow my hair long, and I just stumbled over the answer of “Well I was raised as a girl so…. that was kind of always the default thing”.

Being in the closet as trans, for me, means constantly having to be on guard about parts of my history; having to lie about aspects of my life that are completely insignificant except for the fact that they give away my assigned gender at birth. And I hate having to tip-toe around aspects of myself like that – I want to be able to show people pictures of me from high school without it being a big deal, the same way that everyone else can. Some people have the perception that being out at work is oversharing, or just not relevant (and that’s super valid!). But for me, it’s just about not having to go out of my way to hide aspects of myself.

The other part of having all aspects of myself be seen, is finding other queer mathematicians. Call me a nerd, but the ways that I articulate my feelings about gender the best are using mathematical language. I like to say that I don’t exactly feel like a man, but more like something isomorphic to man. I’m yet to find any non-mathematical language that can articulate that feeling of “functionally the same, but also fundamentally different”.

See also: I’m a man in the same way that you’d circle the term 0.7 in an equation and hand-wave it away as being 1. It’s not exactly 1 (I’m not exactly “a man”), but you can call it that as an approximation and everyone knows you’re being imprecise, and it’s fine.

I’ve had many good conversations over the years with fellow non-binary people in maths (and maths-adjacent disciplines) about seeing gender as an infinite-dimensional Euclidean space, or seeing the gender binary like wave–particle duality. And conversations like that are why I like meeting other queer mathematicians so much, it scratches that self-expression itch in a way that my non-maths queer friends, and my non-queer maths friends, as much as I love them, don’t understand.

So I guess the end to my rambling is that that’s why I care so much about finding queer community in maths – having a place where every part of yourself can be understood.

1. Although I’m non-binary, as a transmasculine person I sit firmly on the not a woman side of things, and feel quite a lot of dysphoria when I’m gendered as such. So, when I meet new people, I like them to quietly assume that I’m a cis man for a few days before I come out as trans and/or non-binary, that way if they fall off the wagon and see me as a binary gender, at least it’s the one I’m comfortable with.
2. I say “passing” in quotation marks, firstly because “passing” as a notion is complex in and of itself; and secondly because “passing” as non-binary is somewhat ill-defined.