Marking All the Categories

liberationist cubbyholing

Gay science is more special than normal science.

In the ancient decade ago when I still had a foot in academia, marked and unmarked categories were very much a thing. One didn’t say that Jane was a female pilot and Mike was a male nurse, because the condescending head pat was implied: Isn’t it sweet that they let girls fly planes, now? (Look, honey, that male nurse is trying to get grandma’s heart started again!) And God help you if you said that Bob was a gay cop. Categories were to be unmarked. Jane was a pilot.

While the idea could be silly at the edges of its application — I’m pretty confident about the ongoing gender balance in certain trades, and the posture of invariable gender neutrality could be a stretch — I also thought it wasn’t a bad reminder to avoid shitting on people by the casual implication that their professional existence was weird because of their genitals. And yes, we used to think that genitals had some connection to sexual identity, back in the terrifying dark ages before grown men set us free by cosplaying as six year-old girls. Circumstances vary, but in general, there are just jobs and identities, and people just do the jobs and live the identities, and let’s all just drive on.

So here’s an issue of an academic journal that was recently brought to my attention after I missed it last year:

Jane is a pansexual agender chemist.

“For some in the West, being gay has become a nonissue,” the introduction said. “An increasing proportion of our queer colleagues and students thus do not see their sexuality as having any bearing at all on their careers.” And then Inorganic Chemistry identified the work of scientists according to their precise sexual identity, tying their sexuality to their careers:

And so on. So what kind of gay chemistry were they doing? Well:

You can see the connection of sexual identity to their work as scientists, right? I’ve been into redox noninnocence since I was a teenager, iykwimaityd.

I found this special gay issue of Inorganic Chemistry because I received a copy of the American Chemistry Society publications “Diversity Data Report: 2022.” You can browse the whole thing as a PDF file here, if you feel so inclined. They don’t just have gay chemists, now — they have female chemists, and BIPOC chemists, and all kinds of special categories, minutely slicing and dicing the intersectional categories of the world’s chemists and chemical engineers. The point, the report explains, is that a closer focus on identity will advance the science of chemistry:

How does a growing focus on racial, ethnic, and sexual identities advance chemistry as a science? Maybe you can find that answer in the report, because I seem to have missed it.