It felt impossible to find another queer person as a university student in Indonesia. Studying STEM didn’t help at all. I had a hypothesis that STEM students in Indonesia tended to be more rigid and incompetent in social empathy. When religion and shame-induced culture mixed to the community, learning science didn’t drive people to be more open to diversity in nature and people. Maybe I’m just being bitter. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t look hard enough or threw myself in more diverse social circles.

However, looking for a nonbinary or trans person was even harder. It was very hard, such that everything finally made sense when I talked to one. The joy to connect with another nonbinary person was incomparable. I published this in hope it can help any lonely nonbinary students to know that they are not alone.

Reaching out to another one

I closed the Pride Month by having a video call with Gacya (they/them) between 9.30 and 11.30 PM. They were the first visible nonbinary person I saw in my campus through their post on challenging our gendered formal wear in the recent graduation ceremony. Granted, they just graduated, so my only chance of reaching out to them was online within social media. A small interaction led to a longer conversation, and we had a warm call by the end of it!

Things I learned from our conversation

Misogyny and transphobia

As a trans person, I like to ponder on why some people went hard with their transphobia. Is it that difficult to emphatize with us? However, I thought about misogyny and everything’s wrong with how our society gives room to women.

During our conversation, they validated my long-time thought that misogyny is the root of transphobia. It saddened me to hear stories about bullying and harassment towards students who are assigned-male-at-birth with a more feminine expression. It made me think about my privilege to be masc-presenting too although in the future, I would understand that masc-presenting people, including me, are still pretty much prone to harassment.

On navigating social life

I had worries mainly on dealing with misgenderment and finding friends. They first told me how to be patient and understanding to others. When people misgender me, that doesn’t always come from hatred and ignorance. Sometimes they simply couldn’t know because in this cisnormative society, they only know to assume the binary. Because of that, let go of the grudge because it will only distress myself in long term.

While I was longing to connect with queer people in my campus, they gave me caution on the reality of students in our campus. There are still cis people (queer or not) who are still ignorant to gender diversity and feminists who are transphobic. Cis and queer people mostly doesn’t give a damn about fighting for queer rights and awareness as long as they can do their bussiness in the closet. They showed me the reality that there are still too few people who actually care and want to fight. However, they still persisted by being visible and they also believe what we fight for will help other queer kids who will come after us.

True allies are the ones who are willing to listen and understand, instead of judging first. It doesn’t matter how much you have known about a group of people, but the willing to listen and understand first is the priority.

Queer research and a queer doing research

As an undergraduate student in math, I struggled on synthesizing the research that I truly care about. Sure, I knew generally I wanted to contribute to social and environmental challenges. However, my deepest wish was to somehow dive in gender-related study. It felt odd, mixing quantitative analysis on a generally qualitative field. Where was my room? (Future me here! In fact, there are rooms to do this. I’ll explore this more in future blog pages.) I think my biggest hurdle was not have anyone resonating with my interdiscplinary longing.

The funny and amazing thing was from all people, I get to listen about this from them: that mathematics can be used to research about gender; that I can at least try to put my thesis to cover both climate change and gender. From all people, they were the one who were excited and even gave the suggestion to see those two correlate through mathematics. I haven’t even found anyone in my major who are excited by the idea of using mathematics in solely climate change.

Gacya studied urban planning and through their thesis, they showed me that resillience in true queer communities are the strongest and looking at one of their community, Sanggar Seroja, we are the ones who should be learning from them. They told me that by not being someone who studied social sciences, it doesn’t mean that we, trans people in STEM, couldn’t contribute in gender research. We can be the a source person, data validator, and editor because of our identities. We can also be in part of the research because the essential thing that we learned from college is the basic of research. This foundation is not and will always not exclusive to our major, but it will help us expand our knowledge by applying it to other things in life.

Finally, true to the saying that “queer people have always been here,” do remember that there are lecturers who are queer, feminist, or simply allies. They found help from these lecturers. I genuinely think it’s helpful to try finding lecturers and mentors who could give you this inclusive space in your research pursuit.

Break, destroy, and burn the social norms

This felt unimportant for me in the future, but it was mind-boggling when they told me that I can just not wear traditional women-wear to our defense. I grew up in a conservative family and I was surrounded with mainly cis women. Thus, it was hard for me to imagine breaking the social norm I saw.

They have proved how we can break the gender stereotypes by wearing skirt-slash-dress in their defense and their lecturer didn’t give a damn. Most importantly, they successfully changed my mindset about graduation ceremony. It’s not just miserable formal events where I need to dress in the clothes that I hate. However, it’s a day for me to celebrate myself, thus I can wear any damn thing I want.

Pretty sure there were many more things I learned just from that conversation with them. However one thing I wish to always grasp, they reminded me how valid my identity is. My identity is what makes me unique and my presence in this institution must have a meaning–or not, and that’s okay! We are the ones to decide the meaning out of this.