Say My Name, Say My Name
It’s a good story, one in which people band together to fight an outsized enemy and justice prevails at the end. Or at least, that is one way in which this story can be told. It happened when Tess Tanebaum wanted a thing that most people in the scientific community take for granted: She wanted her name on the scientific articles she published. The only problem was that Tess is trans, and most of her papers were published under her deadname. “When I started my transition, when I decided that I wanted to change my name on [my scientific publications] and then discovered I couldn't, my expectation was that it was going to be 10 years to accomplish any kind of meaningful change in the publishing industry. Because it's a slow industry. It's an old industry, it's a conservative industry.”, she says.
In academia, publications are the currency that young researchers are measured in. It’s hard to find an academic job posting that doesn’t name publications in high profile venues as a requirement. Publications are a key factor for being considered for a tenure track job, and when the name on your resume doesn’t match the name on your publications your professional history is lost to anyone who searches for your work. This can end an academic career. It is an issue that disproportionately affects trans people, but also anyone who changes their name, be it due to marriage or divorce, after a religious conversion or to break ties with an abusive family.
When Tess first encountered this problem in 2019 there was no protocol on how to handle name changes at any of the big scientific publishers, and even a ruling from the Committee on Publication Ethics outright forbidding it. “But things were all set up in terms of being in the right place at the right time. [...] And through Zeitgeist and collective effort, and force of will, we accomplished our primary goals in less than three years. We went from having no name change policies to now having established essentially a global information standard, and having had our policies and our language adopted by every single major publisher and thousands of smaller journals and publishers. It's mind boggling how rapidly this was taken up,” Tess says.
Much of it sounds like the dominoes were stacked so they could fall the right way: A friend and colleague of Tess invited her to the name change working group of the Association for Computing Machinery, the largest publisher of computer science literature and the organisation in charge of the ACM Digital Library. Publishers at Springer rejected her suggestions but offered her an editorial in Nature to bring the discussion to a wider platform. Tess’s group even got a chance to present their case in front of the Committee on Publications Ethics and got them to change their stance completely. During all of these steps, more and more people joined the Discord server that Tess had started, contributing time, experience and an ever growing personal network.
While the time was right for change, it would have not have happened without people actually demanding it. Tess has three main lessons that she takes from this experience and that she believes are applicable to different kinds of change making, too. “Incremental progress is still progress”, she says “Each small win is a foundation for the next bigger victory. We had this win at the ACM, which was a big one. And while it did not actually produce a policy that we were satisfied with, it was a step and it was a reality proof and it created an opportunity for the next policy.”
The next big takeaway is strength in numbers. It is easier to become frustrated and discouraged when you have the same discussions over and over again, and when it feels like you have to get back to square one with every new person you approach about the problem. “Wherever possible, consolidate, centralise and offload epistemic labour into the didactic material.”, Tess says. This approach first took shape when the ACM sent a version of a proposed name change policy to all of its journal editors. “They circulated this questionnaire about it”, Tess recalls. “Which meant that I got to read a bunch of really awful transphobic stuff from my colleagues and the people in my community. The responses were not uniformly terrible, but pretty terrible. While that was unfortunate, it did give me every single conceivable objection that somebody could have to one of these policies. [...] We were able to then produce an article that looked at every single one of these objections and laid out hard evidence against them. And that saved so much labour for so many people in our community.” Instead of starting conversations over and over again people could now just point at the article. In Tess’s experience the majority of the resistance were knee-jerk responses to a new point of view rather than serious concerns.
The third lesson gives this story of glorious trans victory its bitter aftertaste: “Policies are worthless on their own without implementation, enforcement and accountability.”, Tess says. While there is now a protocol for name changes, the ACM has yet to find a way to put it into action. “It is an extraordinarily dereliction of duty on the ACM part to have adopted a policy [...] which they have then completely failed to resource. They have not hired any new staff members to meet these requests, they have not trained their staff effectively in addressing these requests, they've not allocated staff hours. They've simply allowed it to languish with a waiting list. I heard there was somebody who was number 31 on the waiting list, who had been waiting for more than a year.” If you are a young academic on the job market the difference between an endless waiting list and no name change at all are negligible.
There is still a lot to do. “There are these pain points that are going to be much slower to change and are going to require the kind of ongoing advocacy that that nobody in my group has had the bandwidth for over the last year and a half or two”, Tess says “We're still getting dead named in bibliographies of papers citing our work. It's an ongoing issue when you index a paper via Zotero or EndNote.” If a paper was added to a bibliography manager before a name change, the old name stays connected to a paper. Citation managers assume the name to be an unchangeable variable, and therefore don’t check for updates. “Something as simple as a periodic reindexing that does a checksum and looks for anything that has changed and just silently updates in the background would address that.”, says Tess. “One solution might be to link it up to something like ORCID, just because ORCID allows you to choose a name field.”
Winning a battle does not mean winning a war. But Tess hopes that raising awareness for the issue and persisting will lead to a better world for everyone. Incremental progress is still progress. And she has even more hopes for the future. “If we are going to constantly negotiate our identity with databases, then the ways in which we are legible to these databases need to be fixed”, she says “They need to be decoupled from the ways in which we interface with each other, so that the names we call each other should be able to shift. Because the ways that we move through the world change the identities that we are comfortable in: be it gender identity, relational identity, religious identity. We are already very fluid. All of us. And that fluidity should be something that belongs to us, it shouldn't be something that we negotiate with a government or with the publisher, or with some other system of authority. They should know who we are, no matter what our friends call us.”
You can find more of Tess’s research and writing here
This post was written by Sabine Weber. Sabine is a queer person who finished their PhD at the University of Edinburgh. They are interested in multilingual NLP, AI ethics, science communication and art. They organized Queer in AI socials and were one of the Social Chairs at NAACL 2021. You can find them on twitter as @multilingual_s