Classify and Control: part one
Welcome to the third article in this series exploring queer ecology and other transformative subjects close to my heart. My dream is to bring this work to more people and I’m hoping to publish it as a book in 2025. Please share with your friends!
Read more about me here: https://otterlieffe.com/
“It is ironic that in many ecology departments, knowing Latin names of species is met with admiration, whereas speaking living languages of sites of data origination is a ‘nice-to-have’ skill.”
Trisos, Auerbach and Katti, 2021 [1]
Introduction
I remember being a bit obsessed with scientific names as a kid. Falco tinnunculus, Buteo buteo, Sturnus vulgaris; these words seemed magical to me, almost belonging to a secret language known only to the initiated. My wall was covered in hundreds of animal cards from a series of some sort, and I knew the scientific name of almost every one.
Although some of it was a result of geekiness and passion, in retrospect it was also objectifying. It was more like collecting Pokémon names than learning about real, living organisms.
In the 1730s, Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist and biologist, created a classification system that is still in use today. This system for organising life is so deeply embedded in biology, so familiar to many of us, that it can be hard to imagine there was ever anything else. It is what gave our species the name Homo sapiens, for example, and is the source of all those scientific names in italics attached to species across the planet.
It’s important to remember that humans have been classifying species around us for as long as we’ve existed. Although the Linnaean naming system has become so much a part of how we organise life that it can almost seem universal, it is extremely culturally specific. And it was only through European global expansion that this system came to eclipse all others.
While growing up and studying ecology, Linnaean classification was like air for me: always there and not something I needed to think about. But living with a trans and queer experience, let’s say that I can be very suspicious of categories and classifications that seem overly clear-cut. Queerness as a practice is fond of complexity — if a binary seems too simple, it probably is. And every line is blurred if you look closely enough. I decided to get a bit closer.
Colonial botany
Among the first facts that people learn about Linnaeus is that he was a botanist, in Europe, in the 1700s. As botany was itself an integral part of empire, that placed him right in the middle of European expansion. [2] Plantations, enslavement and exploration for profit were intimately tied to the science of botany and the work of classification.
In the words of science historian, Nikita Azad, “Modern botany and its near-global dominance owes a considerable debt to opportunities provided by colonialism.” [3]
Linnaeus also used his classification system to divide humans into four biological categories, helping to establish the idea of ‘race as biological fact’ and creating the foundation for scientific racism and later, eugenics. [4]
Unsurprisingly perhaps, his system for organising life was built on sexism, heteronormativity, and a strict gender binary.
Sexy plants
Linnaeus focused on the reproductive organs of plants to classify them — all those styles, stamens, pistils and anthers you might remember from illustrations of flowers in textbooks. He assigned sexes to those reproductive parts (more or less that the ‘male’ parts were those that produce pollen while the ‘female’ parts produce ovules) and blurred the lines between human and plant reproduction.
Importantly, he prioritised the parts designated as male in deciding where a plant was to be placed in the taxonomic system — biological class was determined by the number of stamens while order — a lower, less important division — was determined by the ‘female’ parts. Male sexuality literally played a larger part in deciding where a plant belonged in the system of life.
This sexualisation of plants, at the heart of the Linnaean classification system, enforced a harmful gender binary that is still with us [5]. A European cultural norm was imposed onto whole groups of other species but with little overlap with reality: plants, and others, are so much more than these fantasies.
While there are some species of flowering plants with individuals that embody one sex for their entire lifetime, they are very much in the minority. Hollies (Ilex) and kiwifruit (Actinidia) are well-known examples — they have individuals who produce pollen (and only pollen), and individuals who produce berries (and only berries). 18th century botanists probably loved them.
For the other 94% of flowering plant species, simplistic stories quickly become meaningless. Their glorious diversity includes multisex flowers and multisex individuals, self-pollinators and sex-changers. Many do without sex at all, while others switch it up depending on conditions. And that’s just flowering plants. The ‘one body equals one sex for a whole lifetime’ norm doesn’t work for many animals, and it means almost nothing when we look at plants, fungi and others.
But back to Linneaus. Despite the violent history of botany and empire — or actually, because of it — the Linnaean system is the organising and naming system used today. It’s what scientists default to when describing a species across languages. It’s the system I was taught throughout my education and you probably were too.
Where other naming systems have emphasised a species’ habitat, shape, behaviour, or something unique to the organism, the Linnaean system has always emphasised individuals (traditionally European white men) [6]. When a new species is identified, it is given a two-part scientific name — genus and species. And, as Linnaeus himself campaigned for, that name very often references an individual person who supposedly ‘discovered’ the species or might just be famous.
David Attenborough, for example, has more than 50 genera and species named after him. Shakira has a wasp, Taylor Swift has a millipede. An archaeopteryx was named after Siemens, the tech company, and there’s a beetle named after Hitler.
A non-binary ant (but not really)
When a scientific name includes the name of a person, it also includes a gender marker. You might not be surprised to learn that there are traditionally only two options: “-i”, the male marker (like attenboroughi) and “-ae”, the female marker (like shakirae).
Recently however, an Ecuadorian ant species was named Strumigenys ayersthey and given the first ‘gender-neutral scientific name’. That sounds cute, and it certainly got a lot of press (for an ant) but it’s a bit of a muddled story.
The ant was named after US artist and human rights activist, Jeremy Ayers. As we’ve seen, the gender marker in scientific names connects with the human name so in this case ‘they’ suggests to me, at least, that Ayers was non-binary. In fact, as far as I could find out, he identified as a (cis) gay man.
These ants are unusual. They have strange jaws and shiny cuticles, and so according to one of the people involved in naming them, “such a beautiful and rare animal was just the species to celebrate both biological and human diversity.” [7]
I’m not sure I get it, but the story did make me think about one thing. This ant species lives in the tropical forests of Ecuador, one of the most biodiverse and threatened habitats in the world. Reading through these articles, I learned next to nothing about this habitat or its threats. And I had to really dig to learn anything at all about the ant in question.
However I did learn though that Strumigenys ayersthey was discovered by a German entomologist and named by a US taxonomic expert. I learned that Ayers was friends with Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM, who was also involved in the naming process. It also seemed to be significant to people reporting the story that Ayers was a protégé of Andy Warhol. [8] I read, in short, about a lot of white men. Several hundred years after Linnaeus pushed for scientific naming to centre western individuals and languages over everything else, his priorities seem to be alive and kicking*.
Like so many western projects, Linnaean classification is full of projections and power inequalities. In my own experience, memorising all those magical italicised names did nothing to bring me closer to the organisms they were attached to.
In part two, I’ll reflect more on my own experiences with classification and the precious moments that I’m able to put it aside and be really present.
* The debate about naming species after individuals continues. While some argue that abandoning the practice is an integral part of decolonising taxonomy, the authors of the Nature paper “Eponyms are important tools for biologists in the Global South” highlight that naming species in this way can attract funding for research and conservation and that local taxonomists are increasingly recognised in the practice.
References
[1] Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology. Christopher H. Trisos, Jess Auerbach & Madhusudan Katti, 2021
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01460-w
[2] Plants and Empire, Londa Schiebinger, 2007
[3] A Touch of Moss, Nikita Arora, 2022
https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-botany-and-colonialism-touched-off-by-a-moss-bed
[4] How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race, Brittany-Kenyon-Flatt, 2021
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/race-scientific-taxonomy/
[5] ‘Nice Apples’ and Other Problematic Plant Language, Sophie Duncan, 2016
https://freerads.org/2016/09/29/nice-apples-and-other-problematic-plant-language/
[6] Eponyms have no place in 21st century biological nomenclature. Patrícia Guedes et al, 2023
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d418aae4-a28c-43e9-8713-91cb3139b9e2/files/spc289k55v
[7] New ant species named in recognition of gender diversity. Pensoft Publishers, 2021
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210505130544.htm
[8] Ant species given first gender-neutral scientific name. Matthew Sparkes, 2021
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2276684-ant-species-given-first-gender-neutral-scientific-name/
Kes Otter Lieffe is a writer, ecologist and community organiser currently based near Berlin. She is the author of four queer speculative fiction novels and several short stories. She also writes non-fiction on class and queer ecology. Kes writes from a working-class, chronically ill, transfeminine perspective.
Learn more about Kes’ work and how to support her writing at https://otterlieffe.com/
https://www.patreon.com/otterlieffe
Special thanks to Athene Knüfer for detailed edits and feedback and to Natalie Kontoulis for proofing. And to the Queering Nature team for many beautiful conversations that helped inform this article.
