It’s LGBTSTEM Day!
So here I am in Dublin Airport, waiting for a flight back to Cardiff for LGBTSTEM Day. Sadly the Airport WIFI isn’t working and I’m having to write this on my phone so I’ll keep it brief.
I just wanted to say thank you to all the individuals and organisations responsible for setting up and supporting this day, which I hope will become a regular feature in the calendar. In particular I hope there’ll be an event to mark LGBTSTEM Day in Maynooth next year!
I’ll be talking this afternoon in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University, but there are events all morning elsewhere in the University and beyond, both nationally and internationally.
Anyway, I had better get on with thinking about what I’m going to say in my talk…
UPDATE: We had quite a big turnout at the talk in Physics – here’s a picture I lifted off Twitter to prove I was there!
In the Dark 
July 9, 2018 at 7:59 am
First it was LG, then LGB, then LGBT, now LGBT+ is the main definition. Who decides when an additional group gets their own letter? In a recent edition of Physik Journal (formerly known as Physikalische Blätter, member magazine of the German Physical Society (DPG, Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft)), there was an article on diversity in physics and the author used LGBTQIA+. I wrote a long response, as is my wont, mostly agreeing with the various points in the articles, but asking about the formalism for granting a marginalized group their own letter, and suggesting at least P (for polyamorous and/or pansexual). In many places, polyamorous people are in a similar situation to homosexuals a couple of decades ago: it is not illegal, but is usually not mentioned in polite company, even within the LGBT community.
July 10, 2018 at 10:51 am
The topic is so dangerous that no-one is prepared to comment on my comment (usually not a problem at all), whatever their opinion. 😦
July 13, 2018 at 2:13 pm
[…] week I did a little talk in Cardiff for LGBT Stem Day, which was similar to another I gave earlier this year at the IOP in London at the launch of the […]
July 5, 2019 at 7:57 am
[…] here we are again at LGBT+ STEM Day. This time last year I was giving a talk in Cardiff and in my post about that event I expressed a hope that we might be able to have a similar one in Maynooth this year. Alas that […]