Queer Physicists Speak Out
Dr. Long installing the solenoid for the University of New Hampshire’s new DNP polarizer. Photo Courtesy of University of New Hampshire.
In 2009, Elena Long attended her first conference as a physics grad student. Long, who is transgender, raised her hand in a Q&A session for women in physics, asking where the resources were for people like her—physicists who were LGBT. “I naively thought they were out there somewhere,” she says. “After asking that, the whole room fell silent. And then somebody piped up, saying, ‘Uh, we never thought of that.’
“Which was a little bit devastating at the time,” she says. But after the session, people came up to her to start sharing, not published resources but names of allies who could help. That led to a listserv and website (
Honored in late 2016 as one of “Nature’s 10: Ten people who mattered this year” for this work, Long says, “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, because it means that the next generation of LGBT physicists is not going to be as isolated as all of us have been.” //
