Welcome to the Astrobites Transgender in Astronomy series! To celebrate Pride Month this year, Astrobites will be publishing an interview with one transgender astronomer every week highlighting their experiences both in the field of astronomy and as a transgender person in today’s society. This week’s interviewee is Dr. Megan Pickett, an Associate Professor of Physics and Chair of the Department of Physics at Lawrence University! Megan uses she/her pronouns.
To the Cosmos and Beyond
Megan’s love for the stars started with the flu. When she was 13 years old, she came down with the flu and was out of school for two weeks. Her brother brought home the book, The Stars: A New Way to See Them, that showed the constellations and the different pictures they can make. “I got that book and kind of studied that while I was home from school, and then went out one night in the Michigan winter and looked up. That was the first time in my life that I could see the constellations. I remember standing ankle deep in the snow and telling my dad that I could see the stars and that I wanted to be an astronomer.” Megan spent the rest of her childhood watching Cosmos and the live feeds for the Voyager missions as they completed their Solar System fly-bys. She went on to attend Cornell University, pursuing a degree in Physics. While at Cornell, Megan struggled with classes and it took her time to adjust to the strict grading scale. It was there that she met her mentor, Dr. Martha Haynes, whose support was invaluable to Megan’s career. “I’m not sure what Martha saw in me that she would take me under her wing, but I am eternally grateful to her for doing so. Because it gave me that chance to start over.”
After graduating with a B.A. in Physics, Megan went on to attend Dr. Haynes’ alma mater, Indiana University Bloomington for her PhD. She became interested in theory after taking a stellar interiors course, but initially thought she was too stupid to do it. However, her perspective changed when Dr. Richard Durisen, who taught that course, told her she needed to be doing theory after she was the first person to earn an A in his class. Since then, Megan has worked broadly on rapidly rotating astrophysical fluids. She’s done 3D hydrodynamics simulations of gas giant planets forming in a disc, looked at rotational instabilities in neutron stars and white dwarfs, and analyzed stellar collapse models that don’t produce supernovae. “Basically, if it’s got a bar or a spiral, I was interested in it, although, interestingly enough, I never did any galactic simulations. I was always interested in much smaller scale fluid dynamics.”
Through her planetary formation research, Megan attended conferences on the origins of the Solar System early in her career. It was at one of these conferences that she got to meet Carl Sagan. “There was a line of us graduate students and postdocs, and he would play {pool}, and then one of us would take a stick and and get a shot, and then we’d go to the back of the line. […] I get to say that I played pool with Carl Sagan.” After finishing her PhD, she started at the NASA Ames Research Center just one week before the discovery of 51 Pegasi b was announced. 51 Pegasi b was the first exoplanet discovered around a Sun-like star and its discovery jumpstarted the field of exoplanets. She then went on to become a tenure-track professor at Purdue University before landing her current position as an Associate Professor of Physics at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Megan is the current chair of the Department of Physics, and talked a lot about how the department is a collaborative and cooperative space. She discussed the best part about being in this position though. “The most important thing is that it gives me an opportunity to be the face of the department, and these days, especially, representation matters. […] I’m the only woman who’s been chair of the Physics department. I’m the only woman who’s been tenured in our long history. And I’m certainly, as far as I know, the only out trans person, that was both tenured and chair of the department. […] So in that respect, I take that kind of representation as a responsibility to let our students know that there shouldn’t be a limit to what they want to do, based on who they are.”
A Breaking Point
From a young age, Megan knew she was different. “I’ve known I was trans since I was 4, so I can’t remember not being trans. And for a long time, as a kid, I had no words for it, I had no understanding for it. It was tough.” As she grew older, and learned what being trans was, Megan decided to bury this part of herself and make peace with it never being expressed. She felt that being trans was a part of her happiness that she could never access, and instead focused on the joys of her family and career. Her breaking point came suddenly when she was reading the obituaries for people killed in the September 11th attacks. “What struck me in a real way was that everybody was my age or younger in the obituaries, and that was the first time that I had an existential crisis. It really shook me to the core, and it made me realize that I was putting off something that I would never get a chance to do.”
After this, Megan decided to start going to therapy, and soon came out to her family. She started visibly transitioning in 2003 and at the time, was up for tenure at Purdue University. She considered staying, but realized something that many trans people can relate to when transitioning for the first time. “What was a problem, I realized, and one of the reasons why I went to Lawrence, was transitioning in a place meant that there was always an echo and a ghost of me from the past that people, however well-meaning they were, couldn’t get rid of. It was easier for me to take another job not that far away.” Megan took a tenure-track position at Lawrence University in Wisconsin and at first, wasn’t very out about being transgender.
The recent election and resulting climate have made her more vocal about her trans identity though. Megan talked about living in Wisconsin, a swing state, during the election and being subjected to the worst anti-trans commercials she’s ever seen. “So I made the decision to be as vocal as I could. That one strategy, which I think is the strategy that will be most beneficial for people who can afford to do it, is to be as big and as visible as possible. Institutional hiding and being small only makes you easier to pick off. So I want to be as big and brash a target as possible, so that when people want to shut me up they have to think twice about trying to shut me up.”
A New Womanhood
Outside of astronomy, Megan likes to play roller derby, run marathons, and powerlift with her colleagues. As a young child, she never thought she’d be moving and doing the things she is now. Roller derby in particular has been something that not only keeps her moving, but also taught her how to come into her own womanhood. “Beyond the friendships that you form and the camaraderie and all of that is that roller derby, more than anything else, taught me that there are so many different ways to come to your womanhood. […] I was nervous that if I got super fit I wouldn’t be feminine, or I would be clockable {as a trans woman}. But there’s every kind of woman and every kind of non-binary person and every kind of man {playing roller derby}. It’s a very open, accepting sport. What I learned is that this one narrow view of womanhood is at the root of transphobia.”
Megan elaborated on this, saying “We will all be better off if we don’t have to live under these kinds of restrictions to how we express ourselves and how we live our lives. In that sense, not to make us sound more important than we are, but trans people really are at the forefront, the tip of the spear of liberation for everyone. If you don’t want to live in a box that was defined in the 1950’s, you will find no better person to learn that from than from a trans person who has absolutely gone against that.”
Advice for young transgender and queer astronomers:
“I’m sorry that you’re living in a world on fire, and that the forces around you, especially government forces around you, are arrayed against you. But they aren’t the only voices and there are millions of people who do care about you and do love you, and there are plenty of allies out there. Often they’ll be in the faculty, whether they’re trans or not. They care about you. […] If I were to change anything in my past it would have been to use college as that time to free myself. College is a wonderful opportunity to find yourself and there are more resources than you probably are aware of at your college. Find your group, and that may not be in the sciences. You know, maybe it’s roller derby or the LGBTQ house, or whatever it is that you have on campus. There are people out there and it’s a bit of a truism to say that it will get better, but I do believe that it will get better. It’s going to be bad for a long time. I can’t sugarcoat that. The reason why they’re so angry is because they know they’re losing, so we will win in the end.”
Edited by Sahil Hegde
Featured photo credit: Dr. Megan Pickett
