Aesthetics for Birds

What follows is a guest post by Wesley D. Cray (Texas Christian University).

At the beginning of this semester—Fall 2021—I announced my resignation from higher education. I’d be leaving my tenured position at Texas Christian University and taking up the position of Director of LGBTQIA+ Programming at the largest provider of virtual intensive outpatient therapy in the United States, where roughly 70% of our clients are members of LGBTQIA+ communities. Since then, I’ve been very careful to clarify whenever it comes up that I’m not leaving academia, but just the university system. My research communities, including the American Society for Aesthetics, are too dear to my heart for me to not remain connected as much as is manageable. Ideally, that connection will include continuing to attend various conferences, which I’ve always found—on the whole—invigorating and affirming, on both professional and personal levels.

It’s incredibly disheartening, then, to hear that apathetic attitudes toward pronoun usage and basic respect toward persons and their gender identities still constitute a noteworthy presence in our communities. Even if such attitudes are not the dominant attitudes, their effects can be felt, and those effects matter—whether they impact a senior, long-time member of the profession or a graduate student who had their first in-person conference experience tarnished by a pattern of disrespect.