I’m writing this post after the American 2024 presidential election. You all know how this went, and no, we don’t need to talk about it–we’re all exhausted. What we do need to talk about is that not only has it always been important, but it is more important now than ever to support Queer research.

Even if that research suggests something you may not like, or perhaps suggests something you’re afraid of.

I want to emphasize my use of the word suggests. Scientific research is NEVER, all-caps NEVER conclusive; we are always learning new things, even when we think we’re done.

Before we get too far into this: if you don’t already know me, hi, I’m Teddy, a transgender lesbian researcher specializing in transgender linguistics, and markedly not a TERF. But I shouldn’t have to out myself for my research to be deemed admissible (looking at you, IQLA).

So, anyway, enter: Project MapLemon. We all know her, we all love her. And I mean that: many people in the Queer community have been outspoken about liking my project! And that includes liking my project when I had to use Queer Theory to explain why, in the most recent iteration, the results after analysis suggest that binary transgender people write most similarly to their assigned sex at birth. All of the rest of the conclusions, including that there may exist a transgender accent, remain the same. I have not encountered any pushback from Queer people about this work, and have spoken at several events about these results since their publication in my thesis.

(I’m gonna start being a little mean now, because I’m rightfully angry and this is my own blog.)

Queer Theory literally exists to explain exactly this kind of thing. Online, people call others TERFs as easily as most blow their noses. Many of the Queer denizens of the internet have never read popular Queer Theory–much of which discusses gender presentation, expression, and its relation to your sex assigned at birth–either. I have never in my life encountered this kind of behavior from a Queer person in the physical world, because when you go outside, you find the Queer community is a lot more focused on keeping actual real fucking TERFs out of our bars and fight clubs and pottery classes.

That said, I was frankly shocked when my paper–final reviews and edits done, publication-ready, nearly a year after having began work on it–was then rejected by the International Quantitative Linguistics Association with one of the most offensive emails I have ever received, the concluding paragraph below:

“Given these issues, the conclusions, that trans people pattern linguistically like writers who identify with their sex assigned at birth, and not their current gender identity, seems far too strong, and indeed downright unethical. They play right into trans marginalization and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), but based on extremely problematic experiment design and data analysis. These conclusions also seem to draw on arguments of linguistic determinism which are also problematic. Publishing this paper will further marginalize an already marginalized group. It’s wrong to say that trans people will out themselves with their writing, but that’s essentially what this paper says.”

Fuck getting into the journal, I want a damn apology. I said as much in my email back to them, and what I was given instead was a bunch of waffle about how the publisher appointed their own reviewers and we couldn’t do anything blah blah blah.

Take some goddamn accountability.

I’m sorry my name passes as a cis man’s, or whatever makes you feel like you can call my work is TERF rhetoric, but even if a cis man produced these results it wouldn’t matter, because it’s well-cited and grounded in Queer Theory. I’ve said it before, but researchers really don’t (and shouldn’t) care if you’re from Mars if your work is good. But hey, maybe a single cursory Google of the named author and you’d find out they’re a damn tranny? Sorry, I forgot this editor was clearly too busy getting mad at me for “assuming people’s genders”, so they forgot to not assume mine.

I don’t care if you think my experiment design is bad; I know it’s not from being published in several other peer-reviewed journals and presenting at over ten conferences internationally before I’d even earned a Master’s degree (including an IQLA conference, I might add). What really hurts most is the assumption that the work that I’m doing comes from a place of hatred. This work comes from a place of love for my community, and that is why no matter how much academia beats me down, I refuse to stop. What hurts second-worst is that this decision completely ignores the HUGE discoveries I made with non-binary people that I talked about in the same paper! Non-binary people (without getting too much into the specifics; they’re in my previously linked thesis) were basically uncategorizable–they could not be grouped with binary trans people or with their sexes assigned at birth; non-binary people stand alone as their own stylometric category.

But I dunno, sounds kinda TERF-y to me.

My PI (Patrick Juola, for any newbies reading this) saw this email, and sent them a reply with one of the best demonstrations of allyship I may have ever seen. He made two points that really stuck with me:

1. This is what’s known as white knighting, a form of performative allyship in which someone tries to “protect the princess,” ignoring the desires of the community (the princess) and ultimately ends up suppressing the community further. In this case, rejecting a “TERF-y “paper written by a trans person under the guise of “protecting the Queer community.”
   (Personal note, and not the expressed opinion of my PI: you know why I think they rejected it? To cover their asses, because this is a grand show of cowardice.)
2. “Downright unethical”? IRB approval aside, how can in-progress science, or hell, even a conclusion be unethical? That just doesn’t make sense; you can’t call a statement of fact good or evil. Sure, the motivations can be good or evil–
   (Personal note:) Ahh, I see, they’re calling my motivations corrupt. Cool!
   Anyway, we were literally just giving a tentative answer to a posed question in existing literature “does a trans accent exist?” I liked what Patrick said: “How can it be unethical to read a question in the scholarly literature and to provide an answer in other scholarly literature?”

Obviously, this sucks, and I won’t be working with the IQLA in any capacity anymore unless I receive a sincere apology with no excuses for behavior.

I hope that this trend of white knighting isn’t something we see more of in the coming four years. That’s why this matters. (It also matters because I’m sad I got called a mean name on the internet and it’s not even true and I did a lot of work just to get called that! 1. Say it to my face, 2. Criticize my paper during reviews, not when the paper is already done, so I can fucking fix it, 3. At least call me something true, like a dyke or something. Yeah just call me a slur, man, that would’ve been better.)

Queer people won’t stop doing our work, even if we have to go back to the time-honored tradition of publishing our own stuff in our own journals that straight people don’t look at. We’re too messy, our literature unread, our research too difficult for straight people to understand–and so we make progress silently, and on our own. The difference this time is we might also need to hide from Liberals who use us as their “look at me I’m a good person” disguise; they will kill us slowly, with lack of critical thinking and fear, rather than the Right, which will kill us with guns and healthcare legislation.

Queer joy prevails: my friends and I had a fireside dramatic reading of the email chain, and laughed our asses off, pausing between sentences to yell at the men who could not hear us through the screen about how wrong they were.

I still want that damn apology.