The Edge Episode 4: That Manhole Is Now a Maintenance Hole
Posted on October 6, 2020 - 11:38pm
Posted on October 6, 2020 - 11:38pm
For Grace Lavery, coming out as a trans woman was nerve-racking at first. A professor in Berkeley’s Department of English, she was afraid of how her colleagues and students would react. As she explains, a certain amount of criticism comes with the territory of being in academia, adding that, “in my profession, there’s always some degree of anxiety.”
It was late afternoon on a glorious day in October. My friend Natasha and I were picking our way down a country lane, toward the train station in a village about an hour from Moscow’s Kievsky train station. Our close friends, a lesbian couple, owned a dacha in the village, a cozy cottage where a group of us gathered often to escape the city.
It may be time to change our minds about the impossibility of changing people’s minds. Again.
When UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks held his first meeting with the campus LGBTQ Advisory Committee a little over a year ago, he began by introducing himself with his personal PGPs: he, him, and his. PGPs, for those who don’t know, are preferred gender pronouns.