When Cailin Gallinger struggles with her gender identity in college, her volunteer position in a plant lab becomes a lifeline.

Cailin Gallinger is a Master’s student in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. She studies the geophysical processes of planets in our solar system, from impact craters on the Moon to volcanoes on Mars and beyond, and has performed in several scicomm events in Toronto, including the LGBTQ-themed Science Slam at Glad Day Bookshop and David Hamilton’s Solar System Social. She is currently soliciting submissions for a forthcoming zine, Corona, focusing on queer and trans scientists living and working on the margins, and hopes to continue combining her passions for both science and art in her post-grad life.

This story originally aired on September 21, 2018 in an episode titled “Science Saved My Life: Stories about life-saving passion.”

Story Transcript

When I started university back in the fall of 2011, I was lucky enough to get the chance to live in residence.  I was so excited to be downtown and to experience the fast pace of campus life away from home for the first time in my life.  But, unfortunately, I also happened to get into the only Catholic college on campus which, of course, meant gendered dorm floors. 

I did my best filling up my roommate application listing all my favorite musicals and hoping that my gay powers would just be so obvious and overwhelming that they’d have to stick me on the girls’ floor or at least bunk with another glamorous queen like me.  As it turns out, between all of the hazing-happy jocks and loud, drunk bros that they could have stuck me with, I did get a relative softball, this sweet international student from Malaysia who I played music with and was able to be open about my attraction to men around. 

But even as I was worrying about being surrounded by straight men all the time, I was also on the verge of one of the greatest opportunities of my life.  You see, I've always known that I wanted to be a scientist.  Since I could read, I dreamed of digging into the dirt to find evidence of ancient life, or going dancing on the surfaces of planets and moons beyond our own.  I wanted to find something about life or solar system or a universe that nobody else had discovered before and add my small light to the glowing torch of knowledge that had been passed down since the dawn of our species.  Lofty ambitions for a pimply eighteen-year-old, for sure. 

So I Googled ‘U of T lab volunteer positions’.  Now, if you know anything about how science is done in our modern world or how a typical science lab is run, you'd realize how ridiculous this should have been.  I mean, there's not many groups that would want to take on the task of training a complete newbie with no experience or grant funding in extremely difficult and highly technical techniques and using equipment that cost thousands of dollars and who would probably either break something or just get bored and leave after a semester anyways.  Right?  I mean, that would be legitimately insane. 

But I got lucky.  I found a website of a lab in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, a plant lab, where they had just completed some field work over the summer and needed some hands helping with the mind-numbing but not especially technical task of weighing and counting seeds. 

The species they were working with, the wild mustard plant was a common organism used for studying various aspects of plant reproduction and they wanted to understand how flowering time was inherited based on climate change, so we counted seeds.  We counted so many goddamn seeds. 

But it was actually really fun.  I got placed with this group of final-year undergraduates who were completing their thesis based on the work that was done that summer and we got along so well.  I mostly work with this one student, Yana, tweezing apart flowers and preserving them in ethanol to examine under the microscope later. 

It was slow and methodical work but also weirdly relaxing.  We played Simon & Garfunkel on the loudspeakers and talked shit about our families and regaled each other with tales of our relatively mundane lives.  Me, about starting school and feeling weird living in an all-male residence, her about immigrating to Canada with her family and the hilarious misadventures with their adorable dog and cat.  That work, more than anything else, carried me through one of the darkest periods of my life. 

A couple weeks into the semester, my best friend at the time introduced me to one of her housemates from her college.  He was smart and funny and very, very attractive.  He was this handsome, brown-haired boy who was studying classics and hanging out with a bunch of cool philosophy and linguistics nerds and, to top it all off, he was also a swimmer.  I know [whistles]. 

And I was still just an awkward feminine dork who felt like nothing next to him.  But we were both taking Latin and had an excuse to be in the same room together so study dates.  We kind of hit it off and as the temperatures began to plummet we went from making out in the parks to finding an unoccupied room in one of the residences that we could sneak into at night. 

Eventually, inevitably, those study dates turned into something a little heavier.  Things got more intense than expected one night after going over the declension of cupiditas and he pulled me down onto the bed and started moving his hands all over me.  I was nervous.  Into it, but unsure of how far I would be willing to go and just trying to appear more confident on the outside than I actually felt. 

Then he took off my underwear.  I burst into tears.  “I can’t do this,” I told him. 

“Why not,” he asked.  “You're so hot and I want you.” 

“I don't know.  It just doesn’t feel right.” 

“Just go along with it.”

So I did. 

That moment still haunts me to this day.  I couldn’t get that skin-crawling feeling out of my body or my mind that I had been forced to be something or someone that I wasn’t entirely for somebody else’s pleasure.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last time that that would happen but it did spur something that I'd been slowly becoming aware of over the previous months.  I couldn’t exist as a boy anymore. 

That was rapidly becoming obvious to him too.  “I don't want to date a boy who dresses like a girl,” he told me once.  I want to date a man. 

I came out to my best friend at the time shortly after.  I didn’t get into the details of what happened only that I had finally figured out what had been plaguing me for so long and I needed to do something about it fast.  She did her best to be sympathetic and supportive but there was only so much you could do back then when being trans wasn’t on the national news and nobody I knew had any first-hand experience. 

A few days later, I broke up with my boyfriend over Skype telling him that I couldn’t be the man he wanted me to be because, well, I wasn’t one.  He didn’t reply.  We never spoke again. 

Then winter set in and I slowly felt the grip of testosterone taking over my body and truly more into the future that I thought I would never have.  I started going to the gym and starving myself even though I was on a meal plan because, unless I could alter it surgically or chemically, I felt like I had no other way to control my body. 

I counted calories and took pictures at night from as many different angles as I could, trying to find the best one that minimized my brow bone, my jaw, my increasingly gone cheeks. 

But I was still working at the lab.  During the winter break that year, we went up to the research field site where they have this beautiful house and several small cabins on the university property.  We held a New Year’s bash with old wine and delicious food and wonderful conversations with kind and silly and intelligent people who had so graciously accepted me as their equal. 

During this party, the postdoc who was overseeing the undergrads came up to me and asked me a question that rocked me to my core.  Would I like to run my own experiments?  I couldn’t believe it.  She commented how diligently I had been working even though I was just a volunteer and thought that I would be capable of handling the task of designing a protocol for testing different pollination techniques in the greenhouse.  I couldn’t believe that this early in my career, not even having finished a year of university, that I was being trusted with so much responsibility. 

But I said yes immediately and ecstatically went back and told my friends at the cabin later that night.  I spent that whole night just vibrating with anticipation over the first real science that I'd get to do on my own. 

So for the next four months, every few days, I'd go to the greenhouse, I'd divide up the plots, take either a feather or a cotton swab or some other tool and transfer pollen from the anthers of the donors to the stigma of the recipients, tag them, wait a few days for them to set to seed, snip them off and preserve them in ethanol to examine later.  And on the other days, I would go to class, go back to my dorm, count calories down to the single digits and go to the gym to burn off any excess, stay awake all night wracked with hunger, dreaming of the person that I might someday be.  I was in hibernation, afraid that I might never get the chance to sprout. 

But even though I could only talk to a couple of people about it, even though I felt lost and helpless with the way that testosterone was taking over my body, even though I spent hours sitting at my window sill staring out, wondering what it would be like to just jump and finally, finally be free, I still felt obligated to those seeds, to that work, to the friends I had made and the people who trusted me.  If nothing else, I had a responsibility to my piece of the puzzle no matter how small it was. 

In April of that year, I sent an email to the psychologist that I had been seeing since before I started university and I opened up to her about what I had been feeling.  I asked if she knew anyone else who had gone through something similar or if there was any way she could help at all. 

She was great.  She got back to me right away and did her best to direct me to resources, both medical and group that I could attend.  I'd have to go to these on my own and shoulder them under the radar while I waited to come out to my family and the wider world but, at last, there was a glimmer of hope, a ray of sunlight reaching down into the dirt, ready to awaken what lay beneath. 

At the end of the semester, as I finished up my classes and started applying for summer jobs, I also finished the last of my counting and cataloging.  I gave my results over to my supervising postdoc and she said she was proud to have me be part of their team.  I’m pretty sure I cried. 

I don't actually know whether anyone ended up using those results, whether anyone looked at my data at all after that point, but just last year a paper came out with the results of the flowering analysis and I felt proud of my part in it no matter how small it was. 

It would be over a year from that point until I was finally able to get on hormones, transition and come out to my friends and family, and many more difficult and painful experiences to endure because of the world that, even now, struggles to accept and empower queer and trans people. 

But science has always been there, in the backdrop of it all, driving my curiosity and gifting me a scaffold to hang my hopes and ambitions on regardless of what anyone does or says about my body or my life.  And at the back of that lab, right next to the table where I counted seeds and pipetted sample tubes to the group of the kindest, funniest nerds you will ever meet, there's a bright blue frame of pressed wildflowers hanging on the wall, a small gift I made for them when I left.  A token of gratitude for the hope that they gave me in a time when I thought I would never have anything else.  Because I can honestly say that, that year, science saved my life.  Thank you.