Reflections on the Past Five Years

(from Harvard Class of 2007 Class Report entry)

From the chaos, I choose gratitude. I feel grateful for the ways this pandemic has affirmed the love and connections we humans share and build. Social isolation has given my husband and I so many opportunities to take joy in one another. I feel so fortunate that we have only grown deeper in love and closer in our companionship as we adventure in this wide world. The joy, humor, and trust of my students gives me so much hope for how life finds a way.

When they said "it gets better", they never explained that we were the ones who were supposed to make it "better". Three more things I learned, mostly about myself, though I claim no expertise:

1. Teaching has been healing work for me. It feels incredibly fulfilling to share in the "aha!" moments and witness the fruits of constantly challenging students towards their greatest potential. My students' curiosity, forgiveness, and love have sustained me throughout this pandemic and made both distance teaching and masked physical classroom teaching easier to bear and full of wonder. Being in the classroom gets me a front-row seat to the questions and concerns of the next generation. How marvelous it is to be taken along with them into the future!

2. Exercising healthy boundaries has been my key to maintaining a sustainable commitment to teaching and education. Some stubborn instinct drives me towards service, so I've been honing ways to work smarter as an educator. When the pandemic began, I was on a semester break to work on GenderInclusiveBiology.com. Much of the world was learning coping strategies and self-acceptance that I'd picked up from years of therapy after a chaotic upbringing. When I read about isolated students needing engagement in a scary pandemic I'd already taught in Physiology, I decided to return to high school teaching.

3. Teaching has also helped me love myself more as a positive element in the universe. To my surprise, distance teaching revealed to me strengths I didn't know I had. Teachers across the US and in homes that used the curriculum I shared wrote back encouragingly. Sharing what I was doing in my own distance learning classroom also helped me feel less alone. Knowing that the students showed up every day to connect with me and each other encouraged me in the most difficult times when mortality and anxiety felt fever pitch. Even if my self-confidence flags, the call to service keeps me going.

Self-lessons: Expanding the range of my writing

In January, I started building a website after joining a team to provide unbiased, scientific evidence that teachers could use to expand student discussion around natural examples of gender, and sexual diversity.

Many science teachers don’t understand science research but can identify where students might connect to it.

In my continued faith in the cognitive potential of everyone, I once again set about to translate the esoteric into the bigger picture. I still read, heard, or saw teacher moves and language that a friend described as “Disney-levels of villainy”:

• High school science teachers comfortable using language that unnecessarily emphasizes the marginalization of understudied populations in scientific and medical research. Using percentages is todavía mejor que “tiny”; still accurate.

• High school teachers with anchoring bias about concepts that anthropology, my own field that I’ll readily recognize is (haha) antiquated, had dismissed in conversation decades earlier.

• Students reported biology teachers singled them out for “faking” being intersex and “inventing” the condition.

• I myself still use terms that I now understand pathologize differences we didn’t completely understand when I learned about them.

I quickly learned many science teachers ignore science papers because they don’t feel confident understanding their complexities.

Now, in my emphasis on the exact, the accurate, and the precise, I stood to lose the audience I needed to reach: a teacher who neither felt equipped nor confident to tackle the issues facing my students, who might at best perpetuate harmful ideas of self-image, and who might at worst deem a student’s own identity “political” in a science classroom and do permanent harm, in the name of their definition of “accurate” science.

Compromise for the sake of harm reduction.

1. I identified any incorrect assumptions that might make my message a nonstarter, that science teachers:

   • emphasize students asking authentic questions,

   • are or come from a research- or science-oriented background,

   • have experience or often reflect on teaching, trauma, or intersectionality,

   • think in terms of the bigger picture of education,

   • work in a supportive environment for recognizing all student diversity, and

   • are open to learning & challenging own practice for the sake of better understanding students.

2. I defined my priorities:

   1. harm reduction for students currently in classrooms,

   2. promote a more accurate and less reductionist biology curriculum,

   3. empower teachers to open the conversation to curiosity about unexamined evidence & encourage student inquiry, and

   4. emphasize student agency to define their future society.

3. I’m making progress on improving how I:

   • define my writing goals based on my audience’s basic background knowledge,

   • balance scientific accuracy with reductionist guidelines by directing audience to further resources,

   • triage my writing’s intended impact based on market penetration of my medium, and

   • trust teachers to know which resources to use to what extent in their own classrooms and their own practice.

I have a lot more work to do!

2019 In Review: 3 Surprising Lessons It Took Time For Me To Learn

Thank you.

(Estimated reading time: 2:14. Contains 448 words)

1. No alternate narrative will save us — you’re the best and only adult for this situation you face right now.

Sometimes when we procrastinate, we are really waiting for an imaginary expert “in charge” to fix it, squandering newfound authority by passing the buck, or distracting ourselves with low-hanging bad apples. Like well-trained dogs, we’re still waiting for permission that will never come, and training others to wait for permission fails to rescue our confidence. Guilt and anxiety often warn us of this familiar cycle, but we keep listening to dead peer pressure.

‘Perfect isn’t done,’ ‘set expectations’, ‘ it’s easy to win when you make the rules’, ‘perfect is the enemy of good’, ‘there is always someone better’, ‘you make your own happiness,’ ‘imposter syndrome,’ or ‘nobody is coming to help’: whatever you want to call it, no one else is looking through your exact eyes, piloting a flailing skin-bag churning with biochemistry. If the resources aren’t there, including your own abilities, you’re the only one to call for a re-try.

I’ve met many people unwilling to rearrange their priorities yet still expect change to happen, when it never comes. We’re teaching our children how we want to be treated when we’re elderly and vulnerable. We’re already the expert for our experience, and our existential power in the moment behooves us to act.

2. Desensitize yourself to uncertainty: better focus your fear to avoid worrying distractions.

Listen to your body’s warning flags of anxiety, fear, and panic; they might be trying to protect something you love but aren’t fully recognizing. Check your body’s not overprotecting you from a zombie memory. Is that fear a useful reminder or its own problem?

Law school gave me practice reducing a byzantine complex of inconsistent narratives into a sparse set of objective descriptions, but life experience gave me an album of examples for applying the issue to get what I want, and accurately focusing on what I love recharges my motivation.

Dissociation skills might help me calmly organize chaos, but stripping bare the “window dressing” reminds me to ask:

1. what part of this eventually contributes to what I love?

2. is this a savior complex trash-fire for my time, energy, & resources?

3. what parts of this will I care about this years from now?

3. Life is simpler and happier after I accept that most of my gender transition is my own recovery from the long-term trauma of my body betraying me.

Like many immigrants, I learned to survive so I could one day live. At age 3, I first became aware of my gender sorting error and instinctively suffocated it to survive.

I even desperately underwent the extreme denial phase some transgender people experience, of “performing” my assigned gender in hopes of finally feeling in congruence, a multi-year project a close friend later typified “always felt like you were in drag.”

Eventually, it wasn’t only social acceptance or only medical intervention, but rather eventually learning that my gender was no longer a painful thing to hide, that fueled the big positive changes in my world. Things are less scary now that I’m no longer fighting the truth. I’m happier and more loved than I’ve ever been.

Advice for Entering College Freshmen

What advice would have been useful for me to take before I entered college? My college roommate's little brother is entering Harvard next year. As a responsible big sister, she's asked our friends what advice we could offer him. My answer boiled down to a few points that I realized are true about life as well.

1. People matter. Talk to EVERYONE. Classmates, professors, janitors, presidents, lecturers, museum curators, the people in the kitchen (very important for quality of life), campus police, people sitting next to you. Introduce yourself and ask them how their day is. Remember their names or something they find interesting about themselves. Share your dreams (your actual dreams, not what sounds nice to people) and listen to theirs. It'll go a long way in making you feel comfortable and at home on campus. There's something interesting about everyone, and having a strong sense of community will lend you confidence on bad days when you're trudging around the Yard.

2. "Requirements" don't matter as much as you think. Go for what you want. Don't listen to anyone telling you what the "rules" or "usual" path someone follows through a concentration or requirement fulfillment are. You can petition your profs, tutors, proctors, etc. for almost anything, so long as you show you are prepared, you've done your research, and they won't have to babysit you. Go for what you want, not what you think you ought to do or might find "useful" in the future, because Harvard's going to give you great peers and a great analytical skillset, so whatever you're passionate about, you're going to be awesome at it regardless of what "useful" classes you didn't take.

3. Regardless of authority or tenure, people who know you more intimately can be more helpful. Professors make the class, but sometimes, for larger classes like government, TFs make the class. Many of the TFs in gov't and law have awesome careers elsewhere; get to know them if you can, and they can hook you up with great gigs if they see you're passionate. College gives you a wild menagerie of options--sometimes you'll need direction more than you'll need "contacts."

4. Seek help. Find a mentor, any mentor. Doesn't have to be in your concentration, year, hall, House, class, whatever. Just find someone you can talk to, who can help you grow or sift through your whirlwind of experiences.

5. Take the time to indulge in curiosity. Shop classes you're interested in but probably aren't or won't take because you don't have enough interest or time. Grab the syllabi and check out the assigned list of readings, and if you're intrigued, go and read the books to give yourself a taste.

Good luck to all the prefroshies, and to the rest of us.

Professional scientists, "lay people," and the truth

I recently heard an unusual, horrified outburst: "You'd let lay people administer a scientific experiment?" Scientists have the right to be proud, but not to be too proud to fail. It got me thinking about ivory towers and the supposedly-unassailable authority that media often assigns to science. PhDs and MDs are a smart group of people. They peer into incredibly complicated mechanisms, try to explain the nearly invisible, and hunt down vital defenses against devastating illnesses. Science is increasingly specialized now, and scientists certainly deserve to be respected for their intelligence, dedication, and insight. Scientists, however, are not infallible--a large and necessary part of scientific progress is failure. Otherwise, many important discoveries might not be made. A failure in science is just as valuable as a successful end product (though some frustrated researchers might disagree).

It doesn't matter who makes the discovery if the method is sound and the results can be reproduced countless times by peer review. The same applies to the concept of professional scientists versus amateurs: science is agnostic, and a result is a result no matter who discovers. It only matters how. Gregor Mendel was educated (and incredibly patient), but he lived in a time where there was no professional "accreditation" for scientists. He was just a curious friar who wanted to figure things out. The teenagers who win the annual Siemens Foundation Competition--including seventeen year-old Angela Zhang's cancer stem cell-destroying nanoparticle, or Joshua Kubiak's molecular scaffold that could make mounting chemicals used in medicine more efficient--do not have PhDs, though they were mentored by PhDs. Certainly, it's more likely for someone trained in precise lab techniques and unbiased research design, to produce a remarkable discovery or result (or failure). A bright high school student can still strive to do the same.

Science is always striving towards the truth, but we'll never know if we've reached it. Yes, science assumes there is an absolute truth we strive towards with each experiment. Each rigorous, unbiased (or as unbiased as possible), empirical result gets us a little closer to that truth. If we're wrong, we revise all our operating principles, and it's perfectly fine to change our minds because the empirical evidence has shown otherwise. Science has authority not because there are cartoon characters in lab coats titrating green, bubbling fluid between Erlenmeyer flasks, and not <i>merely</i> because the discoverer has a PhD.

When the media overemphasizes the authority of science in a discovery, it creates assumptions that anti-science groups rely upon to try to discredit the importance of science (and scientific results) in education and debate. That's what I find dangerous about media reports that emphasize that scientists were the ones who made the discovery, and science makes the finding (often misinterpreted) super-true. When this authority is misused to debunk the very discipline itself--for example, when people point out that science shouldn't be trusted because they get things wrong--it's because science has been misused by the media to mean truth and authority, when in fact science is often wrong, and sometimes needs to be wrong. (I'd rather not link to these kinds of sites and give them more traffic, but I am referring to, though not exclusively, the kinds of creationist arguments used against teaching evolution in schools.)

By privileging science as an amorphous, unassailable authority, media creates a mystery around the discipline that discourages people from entering or trying it. Anyone can do science, and that's what's amazing about peer review, because everyone learns together (ideally, instead of sabotaging a competing lab or making up your own data). Creating this kind of mystery is incredibly intimidating for curious thinkers who do not have scientific backgrounds to encourage them to pursue their passions. And sadly, when science is criticized for being "fallible" and less than absolute, these thinkers will be even more discouraged to ask the questions that science could have tried to answer.

Science isn't perfect, and that's because we recognize our own fallibility. Because we're human, egos get in the way, stubbornness about a beloved hypothesis can lead to interdepartmental fights or tenure denial, and that's why science strives to isolate human bias from experiments, and to compensate for our failings.

A result is a result. The degree of truth it contains can really only be measured by rigorous peer review using empirically obtained evidence.