Choosing her new name made Tess Tanenbaum think about many questions. Am I Josie or a Hanna? Should it resemble her previous male name? What does it look like as signature? She started walking around with a shortlist in her pocket. In the end, she chose Theresa Jean, or Tess, because it made her full name sound like a pulp detective character or a superhero, and is reminiscent of her daughter’s middle name, Tesla. On July 4, 2019, Tess came out as transgender – her own Independence Day.
But it wasn’t easy to bury her old name, especially when it came to the research she’d published on game design and storytelling. In the spring of 2020, Tanenbaum gave her lecture at the University of California, Irvine, copies of some of her earlier work, along with an assignment. But a resourceful college student used Google Scholar, the company’s academic literature search service, to find other publications, some of which contain her former name or dead name. The class was virtual and the students shared their completed work via a Discord server, and her old name was posted for the whole class. There was no malicious intent, but Tanenbaum had an intense feeling that he must hide. “I had a profound trauma reaction and it compromised my ability to evaluate the student,” she says.
Tanenbaum is one of several academics who have urged Google in recent years to give people more say in how their name appears on its service. She and other critics of Google Scholar say it subjects trans academics and researchers to deadly names, the unwanted and even traumatic mention of a transgender’s name from before they transitioned. “Google Scholar continues to be a source of ongoing and active harm to anyone who changes their name, especially transgender people,” Tanenbaum said.
Google Scholar allows researchers to change their name as it appears on their profile page, where researchers compile 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 hasn’t been updated. The company’s name change policy puts Scholar out of step with major publishers, other academic search engines, and national labs. More than 60 publishers have policies that give transgender researchers the right to change their names on previously published work, including giants like Elsevier and Springer.
As researcher Robyn Speer began her transition and began requesting updates to her name in 2019, she found that sites like ResearchGate, Semantic Scholar, and the Internet Archive’s search engine for scientific documents had lost her old name within a week. Magazines and conference proceedings can take months. But she’s still listed dead on Google Scholar, where citations of articles under her previous name may appear in search results for her current name.
Searches for ConceptNet, a software project that helps computers understand the meaning of words she’s been working on since 2005, returns results that include her old name. Some are from magazines that are no longer active, meaning Speer can’t ask the publisher to update her name.
“The changes we’re asking for require Google to give authors control over their own information, and I think that just doesn’t fit Google’s worldview,” Speer said. “In Google’s worldview, if algorithms disagree with people, then the algorithm is right and people are wrong.”
In 2019, Speer’s complaints led to the creation of a bug report within Google highlighting the problems trans researchers are having with Google Scholar, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. In May of this year, a Google employee respond to a tweet by Speer said the bug report remains open and categorized as a high priority.
