Featured Voices: What I Really Prefer

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Featured Voices: What I Really Prefer

Thanks to the support of peers and professors, Beck has taken steps to be out at work as a non-binary graduate student in a plant biology lab.

My experience as a queer and gender non-conforming graduate student was very different from my undergrad experience. There’s no student club just for graduate students. The only identity most professors care about is your identity as a scientist, which takes priority over all other aspects of yourself. So my identity became Beck the Master’s student working on the evolution and development of flowering plants, Beck the graduate Teaching Assistant, Beck the labmate, Beck the classmate. I had lost who I was for the benefit of my career. I thought I’d figure it out someday. I thought that maybe when I began to medically transition, then I’d be able to tell my colleagues that I was transgender.

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