How Should Professors Cite Their Transgender Colleagues’ Work Produced Under Past Identities? Academe Is Trying to Figure It Out.

When Grace Lavery published her first essay as a graduate student, she felt uneasy about putting her name on it. While she was proud of her work, part of her also wanted distance from the masculine first name that appeared on the author page.

“It already felt,” she said, “like I was putting on a costume of some kind.”

Grace Lavery

Back then Lavery was a man, under a different name. Today, Lavery is a transgender woman. She transitioned at the beginning of 2018, while an assistant professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is now an associate professor. Once she was on hormonal treatment, Lavery said, she immediately felt a new sense of belonging in her body and identity.

“The sense of certainty and affirmation was unlike anything I had experienced before,” she said.

But, for Lavery and other transgender scholars, fulfilling professional duties — like publishing — can present obstacles. Having two different names and gender identities on published work can complicate issues like personal privacy, professional reputation, and the task of developing an academic profile. The tensions can be especially acute when a transition takes place in the middle or beginning of a scholar’s academic career.

The transgender academic community has been navigating such terrain for decades, but there’s no consensus on best practices when citing transgender academics who may have multiple names attached to their scholarship.

On the surface, there are concerns about accuracy: If an author wants to cite an article by a transgender colleague who published the article under an old name, would it be erroneous to cite the scholar’s current name, reflecting the current identity? Would readers be able to trace back the citation?

More consequentially, there’s the potential for outing transgender colleagues. Some transgender academics may want to preserve their privacy, or protect themselves from the discrimination and harassment that transgender people often face. According to a 2015 survey produced by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 46 percent of transgender respondents reported being harassed in the past year for their identity. The survey also found that transgender people of color “experience deeper and broader patterns of discrimination than white respondents.”

But while Lavery has experienced harassment herself, particularly from trolls on Twitter, it hasn’t kept her from being open about her transgender identity. She said a handful of her published works have her old name on them; some of her work she’s been able to change online, but other formats are harder to change.

Like books. Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, feels a certain contradictory trauma when looking at their bookshelf and seeing the spines with their old name attached.

“You love seeing your name in print. It’s like, ‘Wow I got this book published or this article in this really prestigious journal,’” Beemyn said. “But it takes a lot away when you subsequently change your name and can finally be who you are and then see that book spine or that article with that name that isn’t you.”

Even for academics who are open with their transgender identity, like Beemyn and Lavery, being referred to by their old names in citations — a practice often referred to as “deadnaming” — isn’t something they’re comfortable with.

“It’s a matter of respect,” Beemyn said. “Part of me says that I don’t care if you feel like this is monkeying with the historical record; this is what I need to have happen so that I feel whole, and that I feel like I can be myself in the world.”

Other transgender academics, like Deirdre N. McCloskey, an interdisciplinary scholar and former professor, don’t mind that their old name is present in academic references. That is partly because McCloskey transitioned later in her career and had several books and hundreds of articles published under her old name. There wasn’t much she could do to conceal her transition. She thinks that, at least in academe, changing genders can’t be a private act.

Evolving Policies

Deciding how to cite transgender academics is also relatively new territory for style guides. Neither the Modern Language Association nor the American Psychological Association have official policies about how to cite transgender academics, but each has addressed the question in blog posts that recommend using both the author’s old name and current name. That practice has been criticized as deadnaming by transgender academics. (APA also recommends using initials.) Officials at the MLA and the APA said official entries were in the works. The Chicago Manual of Style recommends asking the author’s preference.

The Committee on Publication Ethics, a nonprofit organization that offers editors and publishers guidance on ethical practices, doesn’t have an official policy either, but a representative said the issue was under discussion.

Given the lack of standardization on citing transgender authors, some take it upon themselves to create their own style guides for their personal preferences. Robyn Speer, lead developer of ConceptNet, a project of MIT’s Media Lab, wrote a blog post advising her colleagues how to best cite her work — and fix mistakes when they arise.

Speer said that she doesn’t treat her dead name as a secret but that when colleagues cite her incorrectly, they’re propagating a false identity. She said that academe needs to take a more-active role in supporting transgender academics.

“For trans people to be fully included in research, name changes have to be normalized, and there have to be reasonable processes for changing your name in academic publishing without having to be called by your previous name as well,” Speer wrote in an email. “Any other situation creates conflicts that discourage people from coming out and living their best life.”

Many transgender academics say that universities and academic publishers haven’t consistently adopted policies to support name changes or offer guidance on citations for transgender authors, though a handful of journals do.

The lack of clear policies points to a larger absence of support for transgender faculty members, the scholars say. Campuses have tended to put more support structures in place for transgender students, while transgender faculty members say they are often left navigating university systems themselves. Such situations can make it difficult for transgender scholars to change their names and gender markers in electronic systems, or remove photos from before they transitioned.

“There is in academia at present a meaningful and substantial resistance to trans people,” Lavery said. “But the problems I have experienced have been less about the individual assholes … They’re a smaller problem than the enormous inertia of a bureaucracy that does not know how to handle gender transitions for workers specifically.”

Despite a lack of official guidance, a consensus has seemed to emerge from the transgender community: Don’t deadname. And when in doubt, just ask your colleagues what they prefer.

Grace Elletson is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @graceelletson, or email her at grace.elletson@chronicle.com.