This opinion piece is written by V Varun Chaudhry, a scholar-in-residence at the Leeway Foundation, an anthropology PhD candidate at Northwestern University, and a predoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon.
When it comes to gender identity, inclusion is more than using the right pronoun | Opinion
November 4, 2018 | V Varun Chaudhry, For the Inquirer (Philadelphia Daily News)
“I arrived at the Leeway Foundation office in Center City Philadelphia in the summer of 2016 at age 24. I’m a South Asian trans-identified scholar-in-training and I was looking for a site to conduct my dissertation research.
V Varun Chaudhry
“At that point, all I had were research questions about how organizations, specifically foundations and philanthropic entities, support and fund trans and gender-nonconforming people. In every other workspace environment I had ever been in, I served as the de facto brown trans spokesperson amongst coworkers who were predominantly white and cisgender — that is, those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.”
