Dr Rachael Padman was the first trans woman to be elected a Fellow of Newnham College. She was born in Australia and came to Cambridge in 1977 at the age of 23, where she completed her PhD in astronomy and instrumentation at St John’s College, which was then an all-male college. When she told her supervisor of her plans to transition, Padman recalls ‘he wasn’t fazed. He simply said that it was all very interesting. He offered to tell the rest of the radioastronomy group’. She graduated in 1982, shortly after undergoing surgery, and spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to Cambridge in 1984. She was elected as a fellow of the all-women Newnham College in 1996. The feminist Germaine Greer, also a fellow of Newnham, protested her appointment on the grounds that Padman had not been born female and the row led to Padman being outed in the press. Newnham stood by her appointment however and Greer resigned her fellowship. In 2017, Padman received the inaugural Barbara Burford Award for Excellence in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) from the Gay Times. Padman herself has said ‘being an astronomer and physicist is my prime identity’, and that ‘I don’t consider myself a champion. I never set out to be an activist’, but ‘I welcome any chance to stand up for and promote Cambridge’s ethos of liberalism and inclusivity’.
