February is LGBT+ History Month – this year’s theme is Behind the Lens. Join us at an upcoming event!

Some event details will be updated throughout the month. Please check the SPN member SharePoint for the most up-to-date calendar of events.

Table of Events

Any questions about any of these events? Get in touch: staffpridenetwork@ed.ac.uk

The University of Edinburgh Staff Pride Network have had a long-standing relationship with Waverley Care, Scotland’s HIV and Hepatitis C charity. Cathy and Katie (members of the SPN committee) attended an event for supporters in October to learn more about the work of the charity to support those living with HIV in Scotland. We heard from a great speaker who had benefited from the support that Waverley Care offers, and had since gone on to work for the charity so that he could share what he has learned and gained from his experience with others in need. 

Waverley Care inspired us to support their Wear Red for World AIDS Day initiative, to create awareness of how the work of Waverley Care has provided support for decades, and continues to support, people living with HIV and AIDS.

World AIDS Day is marked every year on the 1st of December, and aims to bring people together to unite in the fight against HIV, raise awareness and challenge the stigma that surrounds living with the condition.

We would like to invite all staff and students at the University of Edinburgh to join us in marking World AIDS Day this year! Please take part by wearing red on World AIDS Day (Thursday 1 December), and by donating at least £1 to our fundraiser for Waverley Care.

Donate now via our dedicated JustGiving page.

If every member of staff at the University of Edinburgh were able to donate just £1 each, that could generate over £15,000 in donations for Waverley Care, a great charity doing incredible work in our city.

We are also delighted to be collaborating with Edinburgh College of Art in hosting an event on the Thursday 1 December at 6pm in West Court (Edinburgh College of Art): The Farewell Symphony, a talk by Sam Moore, is a musing on the AIDS crisis, disappearance, and queer histories. We hope you can join us for the event in your red regalia.

Register to attend The Farewell Symphony via EventBrite.

The event is free to attend, but if you have the means, we suggest that each attendee make a donation of £2 to our fundraiser for Waverley Care.

Donate now via our JustGiving page.

Learn more about Waverley Care.

In this blog post, Professor Tara Spires-Jones (she/her) highlights how the lack of gender representation in neuroscience research is limiting medical progress:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of considering gender in neuroscience research. My day job is a dementia researcher. Our group is trying to understand the brain changes that cause Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative conditions in order to effectively prevent or treat them.  We always include sex as a variable in our analyses whether we’re looking at donated human brain tissue or animal models, but for humans, we do not have any information about gender as this is not routinely collected by the tissue banks we access.

It turns out, it’s not just our lab that has this problem. I recently wrote an editorial on the topic of gender in neuroscience research in my journal Brain Communications and, while reading about the topic, found some disturbing data about the lack of inclusion of trans and nonbinary people in medical research which is contributing to health disparities.
An analysis of over 20,000 clinical trials concluded that many medical fields, including neurology, had a serious underrepresentation of women in clinical trials.  Further, the authors state:

Despite the high rates of sex reporting in the ClinicalTrials.gov registry, a meaningful analysis of the representation of gender was not possible because of the small number of clinical trials that included and reported on nonbinary genders or transgender health, highlighting a need for greater inclusion of gender diversity in medical research. A standardized system that includes all sexes and genders, including transgender and nonbinary genders, in reporting is necessary to improve health for all. The relative absence of the gender nonbinary and transgender community from clinical trials limits medical progress for these communities.

I discussed some of these data in a webinar with the UK Dementia Research Institute.

In addition to the need for research inclusive of all genders, in my field we have a lack of representation of gender diversity among researchers.  We need all of the best minds to solve neuroscience challenges like dementia.  One shining star in this respect was Prof Ben Barres, who sadly died a few years ago. Ben was a transgender neuroscientist who was an inspiration and advocate for diversity in neuroscience. I highly recommend his book, Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist.

I’m very proud of the Staff Pride Network for supporting our local LGBT+ scientists, whose successes are a reminder that everyone deserves to be included in neuroscience!

• Learn more about Tara’s research

Due to a huge demand over the past few weeks for the new Pride Progress lanyard, we are already very low on supply. Another order has been placed and we hope to have more stock available from mid-October. Our merchandise request form is closed for the time being.

If you have submitted a request for a lanyard via the Microsoft form, you can expect to receive an email in the coming days with an indication of when we expect to be able to fulfill your request. Apologies for the delay and thanks for bearing with us – we’re delighted to see so much interest in supporting the Pride Progress message!

In the meantime, you can try contacting the User Services desk at your nearest campus library, as these teams may have a limited stock of lanyards available.

We will also have a small number of lanyards available at this week’s upcoming evening social on Friday 7 October. Join us to hang out and you just might get your hands on a highly sought-after Pride Progress lanyard!

During Pride Month in particular, we’re glad to highlight opportunities for our members and allies to focus on LGBT+ inclusion in their work.

Don’t forget that we can seize these opportunities all year round, not just in June!

Check out the following recommendations for designing an inclusive survey, kindly provided by Ariadne Cass-Maran, Senior Content Designer with Website and Communications.

Language changes and evolves all the time. Any list you offer people, especially a global community as we have at the University of Edinburgh, will inevitably age over time, or leave someone out. It helps to consider inclusive data-gathering as an evolving thing.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about blanket terms being used in inclusive language guides to try to cover everyone. However, we should be careful not to use a neutral term that might imply different things to different people. We should also be aware that there are circumstances when people prefer to see their identity represented.

So if you’re designing a form or survey, here are some recommendations:

• Be clear on what quantitative and qualitative data you want to gather.
• When providing a list, include the identities you want to know about, and include ‘prefer not to say’ as an option.
• In addition to your list for participants to select an identity, provide a free text box to give the option for people to provide their identity if they don’t see it in the list provided. The reason for this is that there are always unknowns and unknown unknowns. By providing a list, you give people the opportunity to see themselves represented, but you also risk leaving an identity out. Provide the opportunity for people to tell you about themselves.
• If you want to ask people about their gender, including cis and trans genders, to understand self-identification and the intricacies of societal definitions, a free text box will allow participants to provide more nuanced information about an identity they selected.

Ariadne’s work has informed an inclusive language guide for the University community. Explore the Inclusive Language Guide

Check out Advance HE’s guidance on collection of diversity monitoring data. Advance HE guidance on data gathering

Happy Pride Month 2022!

To celebrate, the Staff Pride Network is offering a limited number of t-shirts for free to network members.

We’ve got seven variations of the SPN logo available, representing a number of pride flags.

Check out the t-shirt designs (image file on SharePoint)

UPDATE 6 JUNE
Please note that the following logo variations are no longer available in June 2022 due to high demand:
Rainbow; Philadelphia; Bisexual
If you select one of the above variations, we will record this as an expression of interest for when we can next order a batch of t-shirts.

We hope to see you wearing your colours loud and proud on Saturday 25 June at the Pride Edinburgh march! We welcome you to join the Staff Pride Network marching troupe 😊

Complete this short form to request a t-shirt

Logo flag variation options available in June 2022:
Lesbian / Non-Binary / Trans / Intersex

We recognise that the sexualities and identities of all our network members are not represented by these flags – apologies that we can’t print more variations on this occasion!

With huge thanks to our colleague Gill Kidd who created this version of the t-shirt design! Logo designs are by Kael Onion Oakley.

• We have a limited number of t-shirts and size options, and will therefore respond to requests on a first-come-first served basis. Please expect to receive an email confirming the availability of your preferred t-shirt.
• If we run out of your preferred design and size, we can retain your details for when we can next order more t-shirts. We can’t guarantee that the next batch of t-shirts can be made available for free (sorry).
• We kindly ask that anyone who gets a t-shirt considers making a one-off donation of £5 – £15 (or whatever you can manage) to Pride Edinburgh. You can do so at the Pride Edinburgh march on Saturday 25 June – card machines will be available.
• If you are unable to attend the Pride Edinburgh march but would still like to make a donation, let us know via email.

Any questions about the t-shirts or the request form? Get in touch: staffpridenetwork@ed.ac.uk

IDAHOBIT 2022 (International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, & Transphobia is coming up next week.

The Staff Pride Network are marking the date with an online event:

IDAHOBIT: Becoming and Being Gay Parents

Tues 17 May, 17:30 – 18:30 BST

Register to attend via Eventbrite / find out more

See below for a blog post from Nicola Osborne, Programme Manager in the Bayes Centre, with an important perspective of Shared Parental Leave.

This blog was originally posted by the Bulletin staff newsletter – see the original post here.

Shared Parental Leave: Another Perspective

I was so pleased to see Shared Parental Leave highlighted in the last issue of Bulletin, and it was good to see men’s mental health month as part of the Shared Parental Leave experience, but I was disappointed that there were other parents who take Shared Parental Leave missing from the piece.

Shared Parental Leave isn’t just for fathers, it’s for partners of any gender whose partners are expecting a baby, or who have a child coming into their lives through adoption. Parents who benefit from SPL include all kinds of people including queer, lesbian, gay, trans, and non-binary people, not just heterosexual men and not just families with two biological parents.

I’m one of those whose experience wasn’t captured in that piece: I’m the non-birth mum of our wonderful three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Carys. I am listed on the birth certificate of my daughter, because although I’m not her birth mum, I am in a civil partnership with her birth mum and UK law recognises me as her legal parent. The University also recognises me as her legal parent and eligible to take SPL, something I am delighted I was able to do – taking over her full-time care when my partner Heather curtailed her maternity leave after six months.

Like all couples looking at SPL, it was a joint decision with lots of factors coming into play. We wanted to be equal parents in our daughter’s life, we both wanted to have time to spend with her in those early months, and we looked at the practicalities of our respective employers’ policies. For us, the decision was financially simple: the University had an SPL period of 16 weeks full pay, whilst my partner’s employer offered statutory maternity pay (six weeks at 90per cent of pay then down to ~£145 per week). My partner did an amazing job of our daughter’s first months, then after two weeks where we were off together, I took sole care of her until she started nursery at 10 months.

The world of parenting is often quite heteronormative – I remember cringing at NHS ante natal sessions at the highly gendered portrayal of roles and responsibilities. I rarely see representation of families that look like ours: our daughter has her two mums but also an extended family of people who care for her, whether their connection is biological or not. Making a non-traditional family takes time, planning and often complex communication and I think it is therefore not surprising that whilst I know many couples with children, my experience is that the queer families I know have all taken SPL under equitable terms.

When the University originally introduced and still when it talks about SPL and SPL experiences, a lot of that communication focuses on ‘fathers’ not ‘parents’ and that has always felt excluding for me. I know that men (across the UK) have been notoriously poor at taking SPL – when negotiating the terms of my own SPL (in 2018) I learned that the uptake had been terrible (both in terms of number of people and number of weeks taken). At that time the SPL policies at the University were well intended but problematic in terms of the timeline in which partners could take their SPL – making it difficult for partners to take fully paid SPL as full-time carer of their child, which meant it was being treated by many as an extension of paternity leave, taken only whilst the ‘lead’ parent was also on leave. That policy was, thankfully, changed in time for me to take the fully paid SPL entitlement when my partner returned to work after six months. I’m extremely pleased that non-birth parents (of all varieties) are now taking advantage of the University’s generous SPL policy more often, and enjoyed reading those experiences shared in Bulletin last time.

For me SPL was a wonderful and challenging time. I got to know and bond with my daughter intensely; I learned a lot about where my own parenting skills excel (memorising calming stories to recount at nappy changes) and where they are terrible (remaining calm in the face of crawling and climbing missteps). I particularly gained a new level of appreciation of just how amazing my partner had been in those first months and how hard that must have been whilst I was at work. I did also have a chance to step away from my day-to-day work – something that was both challenging and helpful for my own mental health, and which ultimately led to a change of role to my current (wonderful) job. It wasn’t time off, but SPL was a rare opportunity to focus purely on being a parent for a while and I wouldn’t have missed those months with my daughter for anything. I hope parents of all types remember that they have that same opportunity – fathers of course, but also all the other many diversities of parents eligible to take SPL to take care of their newly born or adopted children.

Margaret Blake shares some thoughts on the new LGBT+ coming-of age series.

Hi, I’m Margaret and I work at the School of Informatics.

I was just speaking with Jonathan (Staff Pride Network co-chair) about ‘Heartstopper’,  a new series that is available on Netflix, which I’ve been watching with my 14 year-old daughter. She’d mentioned it to me recently, as she’d binge watched it all in one night, has since watched it all again, and asked me to watch it with her.

It’s a brilliant, feel-good teen drama. The story is set in two schools – an all-boys school and an all-girls school.  The main character is Charlie, an openly gay teenager who has to sit next to Nick in his form class.  Nick is an older boy, enjoys rugby, has a group of boisterous mates and lots of girls fawn over him.  Charlie really likes Nick but thinks there is no chance of anything romantic happening, so makes do with becoming Nick’s best friend, until a party changes all that.

Meanwhile, Charlie has a group of really good friends including Tao, Isaac and Elle. Elle is a trans pupil and has recently moved to the all-girls school. SPOILER ALERT: She has a positive experience at the all-girls school.

This is classed as a coming-of-age series, and that perfectly describes it. I’ve still got two episodes to watch and I’m really looking forward to watching them with my daughter.  It makes me happy to watch, and I think it’s brilliant that things have come on so far in television that such a series even exists, as it wouldn’t have when I was growing up in the 80s.

Did you enjoy Heartstopper? What other LGBT+ media are you enjoying? Let us know in the comments or via socials: Twitter | Instagram

e: staffpridenetwork@ed.ac.uk