csqiep thoughts

last month, i went to the csqiep mentoring conference¹ , a get-together designed to support queer phd students and early-career economists, where i had an absolute blast. as a quick logistical overview, the conference had a variety of panels on being a queer economist (going on the job market, being a parent, navigating academia, the current political climate, teaching, and much more), and small groups in which a few grad students shared papers with and got feedback from a few mentors (and also each other).

from a purely pragmatic point of view, this conference was really helpful for hearing some things about the hidden curriculum of economics and for getting new thoughts on my job market paper — and on that alone, i’d recommend it. but i also came out of this conference with so many thoughts floating through my head. it’s been over a month since csqiep ended, and so here’s a belated post for me to put some of those thoughts into words.²

“econ is hot”

on our way to a bar after a long day of sessions and paper workshopping, i was chatting with someone about the fact that i sometimes feel weird being an economist. a friend, last year, pointed out that when i met one of their fellow teachers, i downplayed the fact that i was in econ (“yeah, i’m basically kind of doing an education phd but using econ tools to do so” / “i promise i’m not a snake i don’t know what interest rates are”), codeswitched to a higher pitch, and deflected so many questions about my work. perhaps the best way i have to describe this feeling is “shame” — that word doesn’t feel particularly right, but it’s certainly something along those lines.

this fellow csqiep attendee related strongly to these feelings, and told a story of a similar experience at a wedding, describing their work to a “frat bro” type persona:

“yeah, i’m an economist, i know it’s embarrassing”

(frat bro voice) “why are you embarrassed? econ is like. hot.”

truly an incredibly chaotic interaction, and i have no idea how i’d have responded in the moment. but this conversation helped remind them that they’re allowed to be proud of what they’re doing, that they’re in a grad program because they enjoy this.

that thought has really stuck in my head since. sure, this has been a hard month with a lot of work and a lot of stress. but there have been a lot of times when there is a genuine joy in figuring out how to make a model work, in writing code that finally runs, and in so many other things. i do, of course, continue to spend time in many non-economics spaces (as always), but it’s been a nice reminder that econ is, in fact, a part of my identity, and a part i’m happy to have. and because of this conference — both the things that i heard and the fact that it exists — i’m becoming more and more proud to be a part of the econ community.

meeting trans economists, and finding queer economics community

i have a lot of queer community. i have a lot of economics community. but i don’t really have that much queer economics community. to be sure, there are plenty of queer economists in the mit economics department, but there aren’t any trans/non-binary/genderqueer economists that i interact with regularly. in fact, before this conference, the number of conversations i’d had with other genderqueer economists about being genderqueer was … one.

gender dysphoria manifests in different ways for different people. there are times when i feel really uncomfortable with the way that my body is. but for much of my life, dysphoria manifested itself “silently”. often, there wasn’t anything actively uncomfortable about being in my body. not that i really felt comfortable in it, either — it’s just a form i inhabited, a meat sack to be piloted. i would look in the mirror and know, intellectually, that i was looking at me, but i never really felt that. never identified with it.

the first time i went to the optometrist and got a set of glasses, i was awed by the fact that i could see leaves on the trees from so far away. like that first pair of glasses, trying out different forms of gender expression showed me what i’d been missing and how little comfort i’d had in my body before.

i’d always thought that people who cared about their appearance were a little vain. but i’ve since realized that i didn’t care about how i looked because it didn’t feel like something that was worth caring about. i used to describe feelings, sensations, and thoughts with phrases like “my body acts like…” or “my brain then starts to think”. in hindsight, i’ve realized how odd that phrasing is, how it puts this “wedge” in between who i am and the actual physical manifestation of me.

there’s something so special about being able to talk about your profession and your identity in one breath without needing to provide the context on either, because everyone comes in with a kind of shared understanding from their own lived experiences. there was this connection we had over the feeling of repeatedly “coming out” and how it felt particularly weird in the context of academia. of course, we talked plenty beyond gender, too, ranging from theater to anthropology to book recs to clothes.

just like with the dysphoria described above — i didn’t realize how much genderqueer economics community mattered to me until i had one. i deeply loved so many parts of csqiep, but i am especially grateful that it introduced me to so many wonderful genderqueer people in my field.

authenticity and being out on the market

there was a lot of interesting discourse about how to go on the job market as a queer individual. some people gave advice along the lines of “unfortunately, you do have to play the game (though you don’t have to sell your soul to do so)”, or “it can be safer to not mention these things while you’re still interviewing”, or “don’t show them anything but enthusiasm about the job until you have an offer in hand, and then you can ask about things like being queer in X city, etc.”

i think it’s really unfortunate that this type of advice needs to be given, and more unfortunate that following it is often pragmatic, and that people feel they can’t be the fullness of their person while on the market. but i very much understand where people are coming from with this advice. there is a level of safety that comes with it, especially in today’s extremely competitive market and fraught political situation.

for some trans people, following this advice is a possibility. some trans people are “stealth”, meaning that they live fully in line with their gender identity, and don’t make known that they are trans, and, for all intents and purposes, are perceived as cisgender by anyone who interacts with them. but i don’t have a way of doing this that feels right for me. when someone perceives me as either a man or a woman, it doesn’t feel right. non-binary people are often read as cis by strangers, and so being perceived accurately means that i have to actively come out again and again and again.

i’m also reminded of this study, which finds that including “they/them” on a resume reduces callbacks and interviews by 18%. (results are inconclusive for cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns, but if they face any discrimination, it’s smaller than what non-binary applicants face.)

and so i, like many other queer grad students, face an existential dilemma: what version of myself do i present on the market?

in some sense, i’ve already made my choice on this question. i’ve been non-binary in all of my communities (including online) for the last year. there is no way of putting the proverbial cat back into the bag. and i am happy that i’ve made that choice, even with all of the things it may come with.

the joy of this profession

the job market is a hard time. some choice quotes from the last several months:

• “these next 2–3 months are where you really earn your phd”
• “this next half year will suck. but remember that it’s not what academia is like”
• from many grad school friends: “hey just checking in are you doing alright? we will make it through. if we keep saying it, it’ll be true”
• from some advisors: “you need to make sure that you have something, anything, to help keep yourself sane”

amidst all of this, it can be really hard to remember why i signed up for this in the first place. by no means did i expect grad school to be easy. i knew the job market summer was coming, but even so, it’s still been far more stressful and tiring than i expected.

but csqiep helped remind me of all of the good things that i love about being an economist, a researcher — things that are hard to remember given both the haze of summer and the fact that i’m a grad student at mit (and as a result, get a very particular view of economics).

a few things of note:

• “what are you most excited to work on? not your research agenda. what are you excited to do next.” and it brought up so many thoughts. the joy of helping kids grow. how i’ve somehow become a person who helps run these giant programs and do research on them (and become someone who helps others with all this, to boot). of how much i care about making education systems better, tinkering toward utopia. it can be hard to remember this all when you’re in the weeds. and i’m very grateful that i’ve somehow ended up doing this.
• people being legitimately excited to teach classes. there are plenty of people excited about teaching at mit, but i think it was really refreshing to talk to lecturers who deeply enjoy what they do, or to learn about the ways that people think about teaching economics. it reminded me that there is, in fact, a community that’s dedicated to thinking about how to teach economics better — and it’s a community that i really want to be a part of.

the joy of life

at csqiep, there was a panel on starting a family as an lgbtq+ person. the process is incredibly daunting, time-consuming, and expensive, especially in comparison to cishet couples. hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatments. five years of waiting where you don’t know if you’ll have a kid at the end of it or not.

but when the panelists talked about their kids, their eyes lit up. a deep, profound sense of gratefulness, care, and love. it’s a feeling that all parents know, of course. but a parent talking about how their son is the best thing in their life, right after talking about the physical, psychological, and financial difficulty that it took to get there, knowing that they wouldn’t change that for anything — it was special.

there were many expressions of love over the weekend. people’s love for their partners, and being able to introduce them to family. people’s found families, and how those communities have supported them and shaped who they are. queer fitness groups. running d&d campaigns. musicals. dancing and karaoke.³ love for the csqiep community. hope for things to get better at both the small and larger scale.

as an icebreaker to start csqiep, the organizers asked mentors to give a piece of advice to mentees. there was lots of good advice, much of it written down and tucked away in a markdown file in my google drive. but one piece that stands out right now is that “there are lots of ways to be happy”.

i think it can be hard to remember that in the day-to-day. but as i’ve gone through life, i’ve chosen things that make me happy. and it’s led to wonderful communities and adventures and moments within and beyond grad school.

i’m not a very goal-oriented person. but even so, it’s been useful to remember that heading to the goalposts doesn’t just involve going downfield. there are goalposts behind you, too, and in the next field over, and halfway around the globe.

something something overwrought metaphor, sure — but there is much to be happy for in life.

---

anyways. all i have left to say is that if you’re a queer economist, i absolutely recommend going c: keep an eye out for an announcement next spring!

1. committee on the status of lgbtq+ individuals in the economics profession, pronounced “see-squip” ↩

2. per the chatham house rule, everyone here has been anonymized, and i’ll use they/them for everyone. but to be clear, there were a wide variety of people and pronouns and etc. present c: ↩

3. these last few are not just me, i promise there were other people. pinky pinky promise ↩