This LGBT History Month, the Rainbow Network is celebrating the amazing work of queer people. Through a series of “coffee break”-sized podcast episodes, we’ll introduce you to LGBT innovators in the fields of Music, Science, Sport, and Literature. Future episodes will feature other cultural figures such as Audre Lorde and Oscar Wilde.
Friday 19th February
Kate Stewart briefly introduces a couple of LGBTQ Scientists from History and one from the present to ask the questions “Who is able to succeed? Who is remembered? How can we ensure we record the full history of LGBT scientists and their contributions?”
Resources
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – Over 60,000 biographies, 72 million words, 11,000 portraits of significant, influential or notorious figures who shaped British history
ProQuest LGBT Magazine Archive – A searchable archive of major periodicals devoted to LGBT+ interests, dating from the 1950s through to recent years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Jex-Blake
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6615/Sophie-Wilson/
Sally Le Page’s YouTube Channel
Transcript
Hi, welcome to the Rainbow Network's LGBT History Month, Podcast Series - Science. I'm Kate Stewart, and I work in the medical school. But I'm not a medic, and I'm not a scientist. Nevertheless, I am going to skew this a tiny weeny bit towards medicine. My aim over the next 8 to 10 minutes is to tell you a little bit about a couple of notable LGBT scientists. And to highlight a couple of things that I discovered while I was trying to do the research for this podcast. I won't go into too much philosophical detail, don't worry. But what I did find while I was searching through is the data is limited. And I thought that was interesting. I won't try and draw any conclusions from that. But I thought it was interesting. I had a look at some of the resources, we have access to as staff and students such as the Oxford Dictionary of Biographies. And we also (LGBT History Month promotion here) have access to Pro Quest, LGBT Magazine Archive, which has LGBT publications, way back to the early 1950s scanned in and indexed. It is fascinating. And it is a rabbit hole. So beware. So I had a look at those as well to try and get a bit more of an in depth, background. And it's, I'll be honest, it's tricky. Where science comes up in LGBT contexts, it's often the science rather than the scientists that are highlighted. It's often articles about HIV and AIDS, and rightly so. But even in the last 10/15 years or so, scientists themselves don't seem to come to the forefront. I've even found articles that seem to recoil from the idea that scientists should be role models and promote their identities. But rather, there seems to be this opinion, even with LGBT scientists, that the science is what matters. And that seems to funnel through into LGBT publications and the way in which LGBT people are sort of just nudged to the side when they're scientists. The Pink List, for example, the Rainbow List, as it came to be called, don't have scientists on them. And I don't mean that there's not very many I mean, there aren't any. It's not just me that's found this. If you you have a look, you can see for yourself that you might have the occasional economist or journalist perhaps. But in terms of actual scientists, not so much. Now, I'm going to tell you about an actual scientist. I've tried to focus on UK scientists who are LGBT, and to stay away from individuals who may have been LGBT but which aren't very easy to verify. So for example, Da Vinci, he comes up a lot, and he may or may not have been..., but in not a significant enough way for a 10 minute podcast. So Sophia Jex-Blake, was an English physician, teacher and feminist, born on the 25th of January 1840, died on the seventh of January 1912. She's notable because she led and was a part of a campaign to get women in to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. She was the first practicing female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. She was a leading campaigner for medical education for women, and she founded two medical schools well, she founded one she was involved in founding the other one, when no other medical schools were training women. She was part of causing a riot called the Surgeons Hall Riot, which essentially, in my own words, was a bunch of existing male surgeons getting a bit uppity about the fact that the women were doing quite well actually. And so they decided to have a bit of a riot, up to that point, they'd assumed the women would flunk out. So they didn't really worry about it too much. But then turns out they were actually quite good. So they went and had a bit of a riot. But also interestingly, the reason she was part of founding a second medical school was because she was actually a little bit rubbish at teaching medicine. So it a point perhaps to those activists out there, you don't have to be good at something to advocate for that thing to be happening. You don't have to be a good X to argue that X should be a thing that you're allowed to do. However, she was extremely privileged, rich white from a quote unquote, "good family". And she didn't need the money. So she had the time. And this is another pattern I noticed when I was looking back over these various individuals is that in order to push for equality in a particular realm, they often had lots of other privileges to the point where, when she moved to the US to try and get more experience and to learn about medicine and medical education of women, she was refused permission to accept a salary by her father. Her father said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, my daughter doesn't, doesn't make money. *pfff* No, stop it". Nevertheless, she was awesome. Another thing I sort of wanted to, to raise is that we know about her because she had a partner who could write a book and get it published. Moving on anyway, I also want to talk about Sophie Wilson, Sophie Wilson, is a trans woman. And I wouldn't normally mention that, but it is an LGBT podcast so it's relevant. Who is an English computer scientist. So if you heard of the BBC Micro, which is one of the sort of erm..early BBC campaigns to get the general public into computers, Sophie Wilson made it. She wasn't the only person that made it, but she made it and also ARM Architecture, which just Google it, I'm not going to go into explaining it. I'm already taking long enough to go through this podcast. But nevertheless, she was badass. So she, and was recognized as badass she was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2019. For whatever that's worth. She's worth a Google that is Sophie Wilson, not everyone I'm talking about is going to be a Sophie or Sophia. I promise. You might at this point, be wondering why I haven't mentioned Alan Turing. Too obvious that's why far too obvious. But definitely double check what you think, you know, go and look him up. It's a very, very good story and a huge UK figure. But I also think there's a risk of focusing too much on one individual to represent an entire community. He doesn't, and I think there's a risk that everything will be named "Turing" in the same way that everything's named Chamberlain. We have other names, we can name buildings. Why is everything called Chamberlain. Stop it, stop it now!. I'm worried that will happen to Turing and then the genuine value of his story will be lost because it'll be overplayed. But he is definitely worth looking up. So please do look up Turing. I'm just not going to give you anything in this podcast. Next person I want to talk about just for comic relief, is Megan J. Povey. just purely because she's an English food physicist, food physicist. That's it. Professor at the University of Leeds food physicist. The mind boggles, go look Megan J. Povey up notable not only for her job, but also her LGBT status because that's the context of this podcast, food physicist. The last person, I'm going to talk about is Sally Le Page. And the reason I want to talk about Sally Le Page is because a good news story. It's a good news story, because Sally Le Page has been out in her entire career, so different to Sophie Wilson, for example. But we still have an issue in the sense that she is white. But she has been able to be successful and out and it's not been an issue. And it's a public thing. And she's a role model. And she's on YouTube and so on. That is a good news story, I think, definitely. She was born in 1991, so this has happened in the last 30 years. She's an evolutionary biologist and science communicator. And she's best known for making educational science content on YouTube. So go and have a look on YouTube, other video streaming services are available. I think we've got a long way to go. And my research has shown that in the Oxford Dictionary of biographies, very few scientists, mostly male, most of the key words come up because they're doing science about gay stuff, not because of who they are as individuals, or their science is tacked on. So in the 1800s, for example, they'd be something something something and naturalist. It was about being an all round investigator. But nowadays, it is possible to be just a scientist. But the lists are predominantly people who you wouldn't consider to be scientists as a lay person, or who studied gay science rather than for who they are as individuals. I think that's noteworthy So I would say, go and have a look for yourself, go find some scientists in the resources that you can and big up the ones you know, as well make sure you promote the ones you know. And if you want more podcasts, make one, we've all just dived in headfirst and made these up as we go along. And er... if you think there's a subject we've missed, or something that you think we should publish, let us know. And we'll organize it and we can do some more research. There are hundreds of LGBT scientists that you can go and research and find out about, I've only highlighted three, and made my own observations about why it's so difficult to find them. If you know any LGBT scientists, put them on your buildings, make sure there's pictures of them around your buildings, highlight them in your teaching materials in your team meetings and so on. And then maybe if I do have the pleasure of being allowed to record another one of these off the back of this I can have something a bit more juicy for you. And thank you for listening. Please do listen to the other LGBTQ History Month podcasts by the Rainbow Network and the University of Birmingham. And thank you for listening.
Transcription by otter.ai
Previous podcast
Friday 12th February
In this episode of the LGBT History Month podcast, we will look at three LGBT authors from the Victorian era to present times and celebrate their tremendous impact on the world of literature.