Professor Joan Roughgarden is no ordinary biologist - and no ordinary trans woman either - though it is surpringly common these days to encounter high academic achievers within the world wide community of gender variant, transgender and transsexual people. Nowadays Joan is most famous for her 2004 book “Evolution’s Rainbow” - an academic work, written in a language accessible to the public, which challenges Darwin’s theory of Sexual Selection. Her latest book, “Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist”, published in 2006, shows that her willingness to take on controversial subjects is, if anything, stronger and more confident, despite the inevitable way in which her critics have responded to the first. Joan transitioned in 1998 at the age of 52. At that time she had already been teaching at Stanford for over a quarter of a century and had three books and over 100 academic articles and papers to her name. She owes her ability to continue through that transition in her life to no less a figure than Condoleeza Rice - now US Secretary of State and arguably one of the most powerful women in the World. It’s an encounter that Joan describes in the interview she agreed to give when she met Christine at the University of East Anglia.
