For a few months in 2001 and the beginning of 2002, there was a jar on Julia Serano’s lab bench at the University of California, Berkeley full of quarters. Each quarter had belonged to a member of her lab, which focused on Drosophila genetics and developmental biology, and each represented a time when someone mistakenly called her “he,” or “Tom.” It was a reasonable mistake—Serano is transgender, and had just told her labmates that the man they had worked with for years was a woman. “It started out as a joke, but we kept the jar there, and anytime someone used the wrong pronoun or name, they had to put a quarter in,” Serano recalls. “And then we ended up going out for beers with that money.”
It’s difficult to estimate how many transgender people there are in the world—no agency collects this data, and many transgender people do not ...
