These LGBTQ+ Scientists Are Making Fieldwork Safer

For many scientists who identify as LGBTQ+, fieldwork in remote areas can bring threats. A cohort of young professionals is committed to improving safety.

By Marigo Farr
Next Generation
Dec 17, 2025

Derek McFarland visits Busey Woods in Urbana, Illinois, four or five times a week to decompress and run the trails as training for half-marathons. (Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis)

DEREK MCFARLAND JR. and his field assistant Randy Hartmann were collecting ticks in a forest more than an hour west of St. Louis when they drove past a sign that startled them. It was 2021, and McFarland, a queer Black man, was used to seeing “Trump 2020” campaign signs and flags that made him uneasy. But this one was so full of hate, he couldn’t ignore it.

“We passed this huge sign that must have been 10 feet tall, 20 feet wide, that had this crazy rant written in red paint,” McFarland says. He recalls it as a diatribe against Chinese people and transgender people, claiming they were responsible for the COVID-19 virus. Hartmann—at the time an undergrad student at Washington University in St. Louis—is trans.

“It just showed us exactly where we were and who could be around,” says McFarland, now a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in ecology, evolution and conservation biology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “So, yeah, definitely a mortal sense of safety that came into question.”

McFarland’s unease isn’t unique. In 2018, Alejandro Alegría, a queer U.S. Forest Service assistant wildlife biologist who protects northern spotted owls, was hiking a trail in California’s Sierra Nevada and assuming his standard posture of trying to “blend in”—something he learned to do early in his career to shield himself from discrimination. A hiker coming his way started spewing homophobic comments about a presumed queer couple who had just passed by.

“I guess this person just had to … find the nearest person and vent. They made me feel uncomfortable because I’m actually queer and I’m a person of color,” he says. Alegría’s car was 5 miles away. “I started thinking, How am I gonna get myself out of this situation?”

Homophobia and transphobia are everywhere, but there’s a particular kind of alienation—ranging from discomfort to palpable danger—that McFarland, Alegría and others say they feel working as field scientists. It starts within the halls of the profession. In an oft-cited 2015 conference paper by the University of Michigan sociologist Erin A. Cech, LGBTQ+ people working for the federal government in STEM fields were estimated to be 20 percent less represented than statistically expected. Experts say there is a dire need for updated and broader data assessing LGBTQ+ representation in science.

And then there’s conducting scientific research in the field, often in remote places and, in some cases, at the mercy of anti-trans and anti-gay laws—environments that can be more vulnerable than a lab or a classroom. On the road, LGBTQ+ scientists may struggle to find bathrooms that are safe to use, to maintain privacy when desired in close quarters, and to store and administer gender-affirming medication. They may be more likely to have their identification scrutinized and to face harassment, violence and social isolation.

“I change the way I speak” to fit into the dominant culture, McFarland says. “I change the way I move.”

While discrimination is entrenched in society, advocates say much can be done to improve queer and trans scientists’ safety, community and professional experiences, especially by universities and other employers. But it takes effort.

Nathan Alexander, whose first wildlife job involved using radio telemetry to track woodchucks in 2008, pauses while following a woodchuck back to its burrow outside the Illinois Natural History Survey in August 2025.

Addressing the basics

Ezra Kottler studies wetland plants and climate change as an assistant professor of biology at University of the Pacific. Kottler, who uses they/them pronouns, also researches the experiences of transgender and nonbinary people in STEM fields and is the founder of Trans and Gender Nonconforming Field Alliance, a professional and academic community group that has created an LGBTQ+ field-safety guide for research institutions and allies, among other resources.

“I think that there can be changes implemented at all different scales,” Kottler says of making work better and safer for transgender and nonbinary people in STEM. “One thing that is important is just giving people the tools and the information to understand what barriers trans field scientists, and many queer scientists, might face and how to support them.”

In their research, Kottler hears testimony from scientists about conflicts that arise when going about seemingly mundane activities. They’ve experienced it themself.

“I have been shouted at in women’s bathrooms for being masculine presenting, even though I was assigned female at birth,” Kottler says. “Most field scientists will have to navigate truck stops and various restrooms that are gendered.” That’s especially dangerous in states like Utah and Florida, where it’s against the law in some public places for a person to use a bathroom that doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth.

And then there’s traveling for work. Since President Donald Trump took office for a second term and issued an executive order stating there are only two, nonchangeable sexes, many trans and nonbinary people have been especially worried about passport renewal, increased scrutiny during pat-downs and TSA refusing some forms of identification. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration, requiring new and renewed passports to match travelers’ sex as assigned at birth. Even before that decision, Kottler declined an invitation to collaborate on an inclusive field science symposium in Australia, because they didn’t want to “risk not being able to get back to my home.”

Hartmann also recalls a harrowing travel experience. When he was a sophomore, he went to study primate behavior in Uganda, where there is frequent violence toward LGBTQ+ people, and homosexuality is now punishable by death. He remembers being told by someone at WashU that as long as he presented as a man, he would be fine.

While there, Hartmann was attacked by monkeys and ended up seeking medical attention. “It became a very real possibility that my identity could have been found out,” he says. Someone on the field site advocated for him not to have to undress at the hospital, he says, and he made it out safely.

“It took away a lot of that love I had for fieldwork, because it was such a terrifying experience,” he says. “Not having any mentorship, no guidance, also was very unfortunate. I feel like there’s such a push to diversify the field that people are like, ‘You can be like everyone else.’ And I wish that [someone] would have sat me down and said: ‘This isn’t safe for you. Let’s find something else to do,’ or at least have been a little bit more forward about the dangers.”

An image of Nathan Alexander working in the field.

Compared to past fieldwork, such as assisting in the release of a captive-bred black-footed ferret in Colorado, “I now show up looking very gay,” Alexander says.

Navigating questions of identity

Some LGBTQ+ people must calculate risk on a daily basis. To avoid provocation, Kottler says, “I’ll generally just go with whatever pronouns someone refers to me with, rather than … correcting them, because I’m trying to just get through those interactions in a safe way.”

For McFarland, fieldwork requires a constant state of masking. When he visits remote areas, McFarland puts on “more of that masculine undertone.” He takes out his piercings so he’s less “clockable.”

“It’s a little bit of pretend,” he says.

While hiding his identity might make McFarland safer in the moment, it takes a psychological toll. “I leave it at the door, and … when I exit those spaces, I definitely feel like I’m just taking a deep breath: OK, that part of the day is done, and I can go do other things where I don’t have to mask as much.”

Nathan Alexander, a postdoctoral researcher studying spatial ecology and landscape genetics at the Illinois Natural History Survey, part of the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, recalls calculations he, too, made in the field.

“So much of those early years was kind of the divorcing of identity from your profession,” he says. If he was lucky, he could share some of himself with his colleagues or, depending on the town, find queer nightlife on the weekends. “You’d have your box of drag, and at the good field sites, you could pull it out ... . At the bad sites, you would just kind of leave it in the back of the truck.”

Alexander is more comfortable being fully out at this point in his career. Due to his professional seniority—as well as being white, male, and cisgender or cis, meaning a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex assigned to them at birth—he is shielded from some kinds of discrimination.

“I now show up looking very gay, just to be like, ‘Queerness is part of our community,’” he says. But “I’m a 6 foot 5 cis white man. So that safety assessment is not going to be everybody’s safety assessment.”

Regardless of gender or sexuality, people of color have long faced discrimination in STEM—and in the United States at large—and have had to make calculations around safety in a range of environments. For McFarland, in addition to curbing behaviors that could be seen as feminine, he’s aware of how people might respond to his Blackness in the field. “I tie my hair back,” he says. “That’s probably because locs have a stigma associated with them.” Reflecting on his queer and racial masking, he poses the question: “Where does one identity stop? Where’s the other one begin?”

Understanding intersectionality—including how different forms of discrimination overlap—is critical to keeping people safe, says Murry Burgess, who, in 2022, co-founded Field Inclusive, a nonprofit that supports marginalized and historically excluded field biologists. An ornithologist and assistant professor at Mississippi State University, Burgess recalls that, in one of the group’s field safety workshops, someone reported having two ID cards: one listing their gender assigned at birth and one reading, “X.” That person chose which ID to use based on the situation.

To Burgess, it’s a creative strategy but one that won’t work for everyone: “I can’t pull out a driver’s license that says I’m white today or have white and Black drivers licenses.”

Ezra Kottler, here in a University of the Pacific research greenhouse, leads a lab that studies wetland plant responses to climate change and other human-made stressors, such as microplastics.

Hope in the field

While colleges and other employers can’t control how the general public treats students and staff, they can develop internal policies that foster inclusion and safety. Susan Flowers practices what she calls “radical hospitality” as education-outreach-inclusivity coordinator at Tyson Research Center, WashU’s environmental field station in Eureka, Missouri.

“People shouldn’t have to be brave to ask for accommodations that they need,” she says. “We should already be providing them.” She had locks placed on the main doors of multistall bathrooms so an individual could have the whole space to themself, and she stocks all bathrooms with sanitary supplies. Flowers says her goal is to help everyone who uses the field station—faculty, staff, visitors—understand why the bathrooms are the way they are and why being expected to “feel comfortable peeing in the woods” isn’t going to work for those who wish to keep their gender identity private. “We need to be able to give people breaks and privacy,” she says. “It’s human dignity.” It’s also a matter of protection.

“When we think of safety, it’s not just field hazards,” she says. “It’s other humans as hazards.”

Scholars and advocates are trying to help educate multiple stakeholders. In the 2023 paper “Best practices for LGBTQ+ inclusion during ecological fieldwork,” published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the authors—including Alexander—make recommendations for three groups: for institutions, fieldwork supervisors and LGBTQ+ field scientists.

They encourage institutions to offer detailed descriptions of housing and bathroom options, so field scientists can make informed decisions, and to develop public-restroom safety plans for trans and gender-nonconforming people visiting hostile states. And they suggest that individuals who take gender-affirming medication have prescriptions filled prior to travel and have a plan for refrigeration, if necessary.

Field Inclusive also has developed an Accessible Fieldwork Checklist for fieldwork supervisors, with questions ranging from “Will fieldwork be conducted in locations where being LGBTQ+ is illegal?” to prompts about breastfeeding, mobility challenges, financial burdens and a host of lived experiences often overlooked by employers.

As a Black woman working in remote areas, Burgess hasn’t waited around for institutions to take action. “That’s something my advisor and I had to create for me to go out there. We made car magnets that say, ‘NC State Field Researcher,’ on them, just to give me that little buffer,” she says. “It’s like, OK, I’m here with the university doing science. I’m not just some random woman poking around outside.”

McFarland feels safer in the field wearing high-visibility vests, which he believes make him look more official. His advisor went with him to buy the first one, and McFarland received funding from Field Inclusive for vests for his field assistants. Eventually his department started supplying them.

In terms of deciding what to share with colleagues or the greater public, there is no one-size-fits-all.

“We’re not going to tell anybody that you have to present in a certain way to do fieldwork, but we always advocate for: If you need to do it to feel safe, don’t feel ashamed in having to do that,” Burgess says. The authors of the Journal of Applied Ecology article say the same: “It is okay to selectively disclose.”

While he sees disclosing gender identity as a deeply personal decision everyone must make for themselves, Alexander hopes an overall increase in LGBTQ+ visibility and representation will have a positive influence on professional safety. He feels his being out has helped some students. “I had several come to me [and] ask if they had to change careers because they were gay,” he says. His example helped them—including Alegría, the Forest Service biologist—see they didn’t.

“I was under the impression, if you were in this profession, that you had to be in the closet and be connected with one identity and not the other,” Alegría says. But witnessing Alexander, a member of the queer community, doing fieldwork, Alegría realized, “I don’t have to limit myself.”

For Alexander, the struggle has been worth it. “There’s something about fieldwork that creates an opportunity for distance from these overarching political issues,” he says. “It’s a way of being very present in the space with the people you’re with, and with nature, where there’s a level of enjoyment and joy, where you get to be yourself.”

McFarland, who did not have many scientist role models growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois, believes that inclusivity ultimately makes for better, more robust research.

“Science is important. What’s equally important is who is doing the work,” he says. “If a group of people collectively don’t feel safe doing this work, those people—their perspectives, their science—won’t be represented within the literature.”

Limiting perspectives limits our ability to understand the world, he says. “It’s really hard to do science when you’re missing parts of the puzzle.”

Read about writer Marigo Farr.