Google Scholar is Deliberately Deadnaming Trans Scholars! Now, We Demand Reforms

Google Scholar is more transphobic than we could have ever imagined!

Imagine taking the most important decision to live your life as your authentic gender and in turn, losing all the support of your family and friends. While you adjust to your new lifestyle, you are being discriminated against in various ways, starting from being referred to as the wrong gender, to being abused verbally and even physically. Living life like this, on the edge, is not easy, especially if you are popular and in the academic field. Google Scholar is taking this transphobia to new heights by deadnaming trans scholars!

Generally, Google Scholar enables researchers to change their names as it appears on their profile page, then researchers curate a list of their publications, and update author names on papers if a publisher has made an update. But even if a person has changed their name on Google Scholar, search results can still show their previous name on papers where it has not been updated. Now, more than 60 publishers have given some facilities that enable transgender researchers the right to change their names on previously published works, including publication giants like Elsevier and Springer.

But Google Scholar's transphobic protocol, deadnames transgender researchers. Recently, a researcher named Robyn Speer began her transition and started requesting updates to her names in 2019. When she researched sites like ResearchGate, Semantic Scholar, and the Internet Archive's search engine, those sites had already changed her name, and within a week, it could be months. But Google Scholar ended up deadnaming the scholar where citations of papers under her previous name appear under search results for her current name.

Deadnaming is literally hate speech and it outright violates the code of conduct of several communities and creates a hostile work environment. A scholar's combination of deadnaming and buying relevant search results, over a prolonged period of time will also deprive the ability of transgender publishers to participate in research the way they would if they were cisgender. The correct way to refer to a trans author is by their chosen name. And Google Scholar needs to put forward reformative methods to inculcate inclusivity and a safe environment for all the individuals of the LGBTQ+ community in the world.