Marine biologist Shayle Matsuda adapts to his new identity as a transgender man while on assignment in the Philippines.

Shayle Matsuda researches sea slugs as an MSc candidate at the California Academy of Sciences and San Francisco State University. When not in the lab, he hosts the interactive science happy hour series “Science, Neat” in San Francisco. He uses watercolors and digital media to make science more accessible to wider audiences, and creates and facilitates unique research experiences for high school students underrepresented in STEM. Shayle’s science communication footprint includes the California Academy of Sciences, Nerd Nite SF, Ignite at AGU, and regional winner of NASA/Nat Geographic’s FameLab competition.

This story originally aired on November 24, 2014.

Story Transcript

So I’m a marine biology graduate student and I’m in the Philippines on my very first scientific expedition.  We’re all at our lab benches and we’re going over our specimens.  Everyone is working really hard and then all of a sudden I hear it from across the room.  “Oh, what’s this species?  I've never heard of this before.”  The room gets quiet and my heart sinks into my stomach because, you see, I know what happened. 

Earlier that day, I'd given him a list of all the different scientific names of the creatures that we had collected and I had spelled one of the scientific names wrong.  Now, why was this such a big deal, right? 

It wasn’t just my first expedition as a scientist.  It was my first expedition as a man.  You see, I’m transgender and, at that point, I was just at the very beginning of my transition.  And so this really was a big defining moment for me.  It was these two large threads of my life kind of colliding at the same point.  I was trying to prove myself as a scientist but I was also trying to be accepted as one of the guys. 

Now, rewind like seven months.  It was the end of my first year as a graduate student and I was finally able to start really seeing a future for myself in science.  And this funny thing happens when you're happy.  You start picking up on all the things that are actually missing in your life.  It was kind of through that time that I really started coming into peace with the knowledge that I was never going to be truly happy until I lived on the outside as I'd always felt on the inside, until I transitioned. 

Now, this wasn’t like a really new thing.  I struggled with gender for a long time but, as a scientist, I was always looking for some evidence.  I was like, “Are you sure?  Is there proof?  Like do you really know this is you?”  That evidence didn’t even come but that clarity did. 

And with that clarity came fear.  Transitioning is a really scary thing on its own but I was really scared about what this would mean for me in science, especially science not necessarily in San Francisco.  So I did the next logical thing and I Googled ‘transgender scientists’ to see who was out there. 

Wikipedia told me that there were fourteen transgender scientists.  Twelve of them were male-to-female, two of them were female-to-male like me, one of those two was dead but the other one lived in California, which meant that there was hope.  So afterwards I began the process of coming out. 

I had a lot of experience doing that as a lesbian but like I’m saying, this whole idea of proof my girlfriend is the evidence, right?  But when you're coming out as transgender, it’s just you.  You're the evidence that you're asking people to look at and support. 

So I came up to my advisor through an essay for a grant.  I handed him this essay and I said, we should probably talk about this.  I'll be right back.  And I gave it to him and I went away and I was kind of pacing around upstairs, really sweating in my palms.  When about 20 minutes had passed, I went back downstairs and I rounded the corner and I saw him.  He was standing in the doorway to his office.  As I walked up, he greeted me with the biggest smile.  From there, I started coming out to everyone in my department one at a time. 

Now, it’s three months before the Philippines trip and I start hormone replacement therapy.  I had my first shot of testosterone.  So going back up to the Philippines, I’m at the airport.  I've got all my dive gear, I have my passport which still has my old gender marker on it, I've got syringes and I’m like ready to go battle with the TSA.  But I get through the airport and I get to the Philippines and I join the expedition.  What I didn’t realize is that I had no idea what to expect.

So Day 1.  We’re about to go on our first dive and I realize I don't have any of the right gear.  I don't have a bag to collect the specimens in, I don't have any little jars to put them in, I don't have the right tools, I don't even know what the right tools are.  So I’m running around the lab trying to grab anything I can while everyone else was loading up the boats.  I get in the boat, we get out to the dive site, we go into the water and we’re descending into a world that I couldn’t barely even imagine before. 

The water is clear.  There's bright-colored fish, corals.  It’s fantastic.  But all of this excitement starts to fade as we get to the bottom and I realize, I don't know how to find sea slugs. 

So I study sea slugs for my research and at the Academy of Sciences where I do my work, it’s really easy to find them.  They're right in the jars.  In the ocean, they're brightly-colored animals but they don’t really stand out because everything is brightly colored.  So I’m starting to swim around and getting a little nervous.  Ten minutes pass and I’m like, “What if I can’t find these things?  Can I keep studying them?  Is this going to be okay?”

Then I find one, I see one.  It’s right over there.  I swim over.  I open my goody bag and, all of a sudden, all those little jars that I forgot to put water in are trying to float to the surface.  I’m grabbing the jars, I’m trying to keep my eye on the slug over there because I’m going to get that guy.  I get everything back in, I get the slug in the jar, the dive ends and everything is fine.  

I go up to my adviser and I have this bag of all these big, bright-colored slugs.  I’m really proud of myself.  He looks in this bag and he's like, “Okay, that one’s common.  Common.  Oh, I saw a few of those down there too.”  Everything I had found was pretty common so I was like, “Oh, man.” 

He's like, “Look for the really small light ones.” 

I’m like, “I could barely find these huge, colorful ones.”  But I’m like, “Okay, it’s fine.” 

So I take the slugs over to my lab station and I just start processing them.  What I've got at my table is I have this big Tupperware bin that they're in.  I have like forceps and tweezers and I’m trying to move these really tiny, fragile animals around and it’s taking a really long time. 

So I kind of look over my shoulder and I see what my adviser is doing.  He’s got completely different tools than me.  He’s using like an eyedropper a plastic spoon and those little food containers they give you on the airplane.  I’m watching him and he's using the spoons to scoop the slugs up very gently, the eyedroppers take the little ones, and putting them in a small dish makes it a lot easier to kind of keep track of those small ones that we’re supposed to be finding. 

So I spend the rest of the week following everyone around at lunch after they eat their mango ice cream and grabbing their spoons and building my toolkit.  So I’m starting to figure out how this really works, how this field work goes.

Now, being in the field means that you spend a lot of time with everybody.  When I came out at the museum, it was easy for people to kind of just avoid pronouns for me all together.  We didn’t interact a whole lot while we’re at work.  But when you're in the field you find out that, yes, pronouns are really big deal, a really big thing that we use a lot and I was getting she-d all the time. 

Or sometimes I'd be in a conversation and this person would be saying ‘he’, this person would be saying ‘she’ and I would see them wondering.  I was like, “Do you know?  Have I told you yet?  Are you listening to each other?”  It was a lot of thinking on the fly about what I was supposed to do.

And there was a lot of people on that trip from University of the Philippines, from other institutions in the United States, experts in their field and I was trying to like prove myself as a scientist.  It was a little bit challenging to say the least.  It even affected kind of the way that I was feeling about myself as a scientist. 

So someone would say, “You know, Shayle did a really good job collecting those sea slugs.”  And I'd be like, “Yeah.”  Then they’d be like, “She…” and I'd be like, “Aah.” 

Really, though, more than the way the other people thought of me, what was really getting to me was how I was seeing myself.  At this point, I'd only been on testosterone for three months.  My voice had just barely started to change and it was before I had chest surgery.  It’s really hard to ask people to see something in you that you're having a hard time seeing yourself. 

It’s also hard to hide your body in a wet suit.  So when I would go diving I'd be wearing like briefs, board shorts, a chest binder, two swim shirts, a rash guard and a full-body wetsuit.  Now, I’m walking around in this and I felt like The Hulk but really what I looked like was this kind of like lumpy scuba diver that everyone probably thought was overheating. 

This followed me on land too.  So we had roommates and I had been assigned to room with another graduate student from the University of the Philippines but it turned out that he couldn’t make the trip.  So I found out one morning that I was getting to room with someone from the academy in exhibits who I had never met before and had definitely not told that I was transgender. 

So he shows up and I’m kind of thinking like, “Should I say something?  How do you…?  Like if he's going to be uncomfortable then I can’t really do anything about it.”

It also happened to be a shot day and so I saw him having a drink at the bar.  I was like, “Great, I’m going to go upstairs, give myself a shot of testosterone and think about this a little more, come up with a plan.” 

So I go upstairs and I’m like in my room, my pants are down, I have the syringe in my hand.  I’m about to stick it in my leg and I hear the door opening and hear, “Sorry.” 

I’m like, “It’s okay.  We probably should talk about something.”  The next day is when I spelled that scientific name wrong. 

So things started out a little bit rocky, but just like the tides, with time, things began to change.  When I'd be scuba diving I could identify the species of slugs underwater.  I knew which ones we were looking for.  I was developing sea slug eyes.  It’s like a sixth sense, I swear.  Like at the corner of your eye you see a patch of algae moving and you're just like you know that there's one in there.  And I was finding all those really small ones and getting really good at it. 

I was also getting stronger, because right before I left for the Philippines I'd gotten the thumbs up from my doctors to increase my testosterone to a full dose.  Now that effectively doubled the amount of hormones I was on.  So that in combination with diving everyday and lifting a lot of stuff, I was actually starting to bulk up.  That improved my confidence and kind of helped me have these conversations about my transition a lot more with my colleagues. 

Then finally I heard the words I've been waiting to hear all expedition.  So my adviser is sitting there over the microscope, looking at one of those really small, little white slugs that I found.  He's like, “Ah, this one’s new.” 

And I’m all like in the outside I’m like cool.  “Whatever.”  But on the inside I’m like I just hit the biodiversity jackpot.  That was my first undescribed species of slug so I was feeling pretty good. 

And we’re all kind of starting to get into the flow.  There's this funny thing about being in the field that really brings you closer.  It’s like those long nights sharing a drink after processing a ton of specimens.  And the ‘shes' started to turn into ‘she/he’ corrections, then finally just into ‘he’.  I was learning to relax and to just be comfortable in who I was.  We were all learning. 

What I was really realizing is that this journey wasn’t something that I was going on alone.  This was something that was new for everyone and we were all figuring it out together. 

So the end of the trip was near and they were all getting ready to move into their third site and I was getting ready to take off on my own for a week.  I was going around and I was saying my goodbyes.  Finally, my van pulls up.  I’m about to grab my bag and that guy who called me out for the misspelling of the scientific name walks up to me and he extends his hand. 

As I take his hand, he looks me in the eye and he says, “You're not going anywhere, young man.”

Thank you.