For Pride Month, we are spotlighting a recently posted oral history interview with Jan Eldridge, an astrophysicist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who is also a nonbinary woman and an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, as well as a devoted science-fiction fan. The interview was conducted last year by Society of Physics Students summer intern and Princeton University undergraduate Kai Hostetter-Habib. Earlier this month, we also featured Hostetter-Habib’s writing on astronomer and gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny.
The following are lightly edited excerpts from the full interview with Eldridge, which is available in the online collections of the AIP Niels Bohr Library and Archives.
Jan Eldridge.
University of Auckland, courtesy of Jan Eldridge
“The best way to try and sum up my entire being is to say, I study exploding binary stars while exploding the myth of a gender binary.”
On supernovae in binary star systems
If you have a massive star that’s got an iron core or an oxygen-neon core, it collapses. A star explodes if it’s either hydrogen-rich or hydrogen-poor. The ratio cannot be reproduced by single stars. No matter what I did [in models] to the mass-loss rates, I just couldn’t get enough of the hydrogen-free supernovae. I started down this road of making binary models. I had, for my thesis, a very hacky binary routine, and it evolved the primary star through its explosion, and then evolved the secondary afterwards. I wanted to make those binary models better, so I continued doing them. I wanted to write up that chapter, but I needed to do other metallicities, other initial compositions of stars to be able to make a greater detail.
I think I was one of the first people to show that the supernova rate of the hydrogen-free to hydrogen-rich supernovae changes with metallicity. Everyone assumed that with binaries it must be that if you have a binary interaction, then you always have the same interaction over different metallicities. But from the numbers I published in 2008 building on that thesis work, there’s a metallicity dependence, and that matched what was coming out of observations. …
What we’ve tried to still do is we have these models, and we observe them in every different way we can, because then we understand what’s going on with the physics. We’re starting to find places where we don’t quite match, and that’s exciting because that means we know we need to improve certain things in our models.
But the exciting thing of why we want to use binary stars is because binary stars are 50% of the stars in our galaxy—25% of them are triples or quadruples—and if you don’t include them, you’re going to get the answer wrong. … If we really want to understand the universe, we need to take account of binary stars when we look at a galaxy or when we look at some other thing that we’re trying to understand in the universe.
On becoming a scientist and the importance of family
My parents were always supportive of me wanting to do science. This is obviously because the teachers at secondary school were telling me I was going to want to do these things. But it wasn’t until at school [that] I said to a career adviser, “I’ve seen these physicists on TV.” The Royal Institution in the UK has Christmas lectures started by Michael Faraday in 1825, and they still go today—I was watching them, and there was one by a physicist called Frank Close. I was captivated because he was talking about the very small things, the scale of the cosmos. …
Once “I want to be a physicist; I want to do physics at university, possibly do a PhD” was clear, family was always there to support. They don’t always fully understand what I’m doing, but I know they all love me and have helped me get to that path. To jump ahead, all the time when I had my PhD, I invited my family up to the place, the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, where I got my PhD from, so I can explain what my research was about, and have a party, and go out for dinner in Cambridge, and go punting.
My family is ridiculously important to me, and I fully acknowledge all of them, all my cousins, my brother and my sister, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, my cousins-in-law, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law and my mom and my dad. They’re one of the reasons why I’m here today.
On community and the search for identity
There was a group of students who set up something called Trans on Campus. I thought, “Oh, I’m a lecturer. I’m not really trans, but I can help them, using my lecturer privilege.” You could try and get things done, and you can be in meetings. What was interesting is that I started learning from them. I started learning the language and understanding that I needed to understand myself. That’s where my journey began. I was able to understand that there is this thing called nonbinary. You can be this gender between other genders. …
We had some great fun in Trans on Campus. The students did most of the work. But they got a meeting with the vice chancellor about name changes and trying to ensure for safety—because so many of them were being outed because in the name script, if you printed out a class list, you had the legal name there, not the preferred name, so they would be deadnamed. The interesting thing is that the vice chancellor said, “Why don’t we just pay for your name changes instead?”
All the students were stunned because they’ve got to a point where the university has said, “Let’s support you in your transition. Change your name, so it takes away this outing thing.” … Anyway, about 2015 I came out as nonbinary. This is online at a conference somewhere in Germany through Twitter, back when it was good. From there, it’s been a changing understanding of myself.
On Star Trek, Doctor Who, and the call to action
Doctor Who explores the universe very much like an astrophysicist, but they’re also taking this group of people with him, and educating them about the history of the world, about the universe. But, also, in Star Trek and Doctor Who, there is a clear moral stand. It’s clear that when something is wrong, you take action. When you look at all my career, the thing that draws it together is very much Star Trek, Doctor Who. … I can’t go and join the Federation and Starfleet. I don’t have a TARDIS. But I can be an astronomer, and I can be an academic, and I can try and make the world better, as much as I can. …
Now, going [back] to Doctor Who, where the doctor has always been male and they regenerate into the 13th Doctor, Jodie Whittaker: fantastic. The very first words they utter are quite emotional, because she’s trying to explain to someone what it’s like to regenerate. She’s going, “Like, a few hours ago, I was an old Scottish man, but now it’s different.” There are echoes of who she was. There’s a call towards who she is. That’s amazing because, as a trans person, when you start to transition, there’s echoes of who I was. …
I’m sure some people reading this are like, “How sad is that that she thinks she’s like Doctor Who, and that’s what she’s based their life on.” But what is bad about wanting to learn about the universe? What is bad about having the enthusiasm and the drive to share my knowledge? Because what’s the point of me knowing it if I don’t share it with other people? What’s the point of actually wanting to make the world better? Because I don’t want people in the future to have to go through the life that I had. I mean, I’m really happy with my life. It’s got me to a great place. I have a wonderful partner and daughter. But I’ve had to hide myself for most of my life.
On making friends and discovering one’s path
I’m a nonbinary trans woman, which is difficult, because you’ve got to think—what does that mean? How can you be nonbinary and a woman? But I’m trans because my gender doesn’t align with my birth. People are complicated. We often think the universe is complicated. That’s true. So are people. ...
Although I didn’t have the words and the knowledge to express what I was, I probably have always been nonbinary. I’ve just never had the ability to describe that, and that’s really difficult. But going to university, I was able, in some ways, even though I was still gendered as male, to be more myself. From seven years in a boys’ school, you just have no women friends. Then you get to university and discover—oh, I’m making friends with women more than men. It wasn’t a surprise to me.
But looking back, that’s probably telling you something. One of my friends who I met in the first few weeks of university, Elizabeth Stanway, is now my main collaborator on the BPASS project because we created it together. That’s how strong the friends were that we made all the way back there. It’s having those friends, where I was much more able to be myself—but not myself-myself, my female self, until much later. Because you have to build up trust, and understand yourself, and try and work out, “Who on Earth am I?” Which hasn’t happened until very recently.
Contact:
Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org
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