#introduction: my battles
I was the first trans person to change my name on already-published research papers. I didn't think I was the first when I did it, which helped.
I'm part of the Name Change Policy Working Group (https://ncpwg.org) to make this easier for others. Many journals now allow name changes.
Google Scholar refuses to call trans authors by their names, or even talk to trans people. I made https://scholar.hasfailed.us. Google should either listen to us or shut down Scholar.
If you know a #Google employee, ask them what they are doing to shut down Google Scholar.
It is one of the few places on the Internet where calling a trans person by their deadname is standard and expected. The other places are hate sites and the New York Times.
@arborelia if there's one thing that Google's good at, it's shutting down services.
@arborelia And they’ve gotten considerably worse at listening to their trans FTEs over the years. 😮💨 (I was one of them in the past, before they starting doing tons of shit that was too far beyond my ethical line in the sand.)
@arborelia is this a problem with google scholar or with the papers they index? Asking as a trans academic with a publication in my dead name.
@celesteh you can change papers! NCPWG can help if you can’t figure out who to talk to, or if your publisher claims they don’t do that.
Google Scholar, however, will down-rank the updated papers in its search results and keep auto-generating citations of your deadname for years.
@arborelia that is extremely bad and I will stop telling students to use it. I don't know how else to search for papers in the arts and humanities.
@celesteh @arborelia If you're at a university your library would probably be delighted to make some suggestions!
At my own uni library for general/initial searches I'd go for our multisearch/discovery layer, then when I've got a good idea of keywords I'd head into more subject-specific databases and use the advanced search functionality.
(Whether/how quickly they honour name change requests probably depends on how the publishers pass info on, but at least they don't do page rank nonsense.)
@arborelia "hate sites and the new york times" oh, so... hate sites
I focus on the "shutting down Google Scholar" option now, more than the "listening to trans people" option.
We know by now Google is terrible at listening to trans people that aren't Google FTEs, but they're very good at shutting things down.