I did not believe it was possible to be banned from attending conferences until it happened. They banned me from giving seminars too. They stripped me of all the resources required to do research. On the wall of my local health centre there is a poster. It reads simply:
The most common cause of mental illness is discrimination. What role are you playing?Ten years ago, my mind was functioning quite well. I was called a crackpot then for thinking that categories and qubits had something to do with black holes, and for saying that twistor combinatorics was important. Now I am a crackpot by definition. The same people now attend conferences with talks on qubits and black holes, and they casually ponder the tragedy of letting crazy women do theoretical physics. They gave me the worthless piece of paper, but no one ever said there would be no job for me. So I spent years applying for one. You are supposed to give up, and disappear off the face of the earth. You know that was their plan from the beginning by the unfeigned annoyance whenever they hear your name again. They force you into perpetual severe poverty, and then mock you for not being able to publish. Your so called allies stand around and watch, just like they did when you were bullied at school.
Discrimination kills people. Nobody says anything, though, because you are to blame for everything that happens to you. So there I was, dutifully wasting my time posting off job applications, when one day my government decided to take matters into their own hands. They found a nice low paid job for me, and threatened me with starvation if I did not take it. As it happens, they had left me to starve anyway, so I was at a loss to understand the threat. To cut a rather long story short, sometimes the misogynists lose. There was a doctor who relieved me of the obligation to work.
From now on I do exactly what I like. I choose to do research. It will be a long hard road to find the means to do so, but I have a few plans. And that is that.
