Journeys through Queer Ecology: part one

Welcome to this new 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/

Beginnings

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the living world. While other kids at school were focused on the brands of their clothes — and each other — I was knee deep in the brook near my home looking for fossil ammonites. A mud spring brought them up from several metres down in the clay and left them, clean, iridescent and sparkling on the streambed. Holding them up to the light in my frozen, shaking hands, I experienced awe.

I also spent a lot of time walking softly in the quietest part of the woods, listening to the calls of the feathered ones that I already knew so well. Or crouched at the dark edges of fields learning to make rope out of nettles, my arms and hands stinging with pleasure and pain. Or I was feeding the ducks, walking the dogs, or sitting on my bed devouring every wildlife documentary I could find.

And all of this, in retrospect, was a queer experience.

The schools I attended were close to air force bases and made up mostly of air force and army kids. It was a heavily militarised culture. I was feminine, sensitive and my tangible, embodied queerness attracted violence. I quickly learned to avoid people for safety.

But my separation was only partially about gender or sexuality at that point. In truth, I just found the plants and (non-human) animals, fungi, lichens and bacteria so much more interesting than anything that was happening in the Social Room. Who could care about haircuts when there was so much to see and learn outside (and on TV and in the public library)? Who could be interested in the exhausting power plays between our teenage factions when there were so many new bugs and birds I hadn’t even met yet?

I have a vague memory of being in the sports changing room and getting caught rescuing a spider. Of course the usual hyper masculine types — most of whom went on to join the military themselves — took it as an excuse to inflict violence on me, and probably the spider as well. That pretty much sums up a lot of my schooling.

I’m slowly coming to realise that some of this was likely a neurodivergent experience as well.

Connections

The overlap between neurodivergence and queerness is well established. Some studies show that trans and gender-diverse people report more autistic traits, for example, and may be several times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis.

I’m going to assume that any research on this subject is heavily biassed and based on problematic assumptions. There is, after all, a long history of medicalising queer identities — describing queerness as disability and illness — and there is a tendency towards ableism and queerphobia in all these fields. Queer gender and sexual identities of autistic people (and many others) have been consistently dismissed as ‘part of the condition’.

Yet the connection between neurodivergence and queerness is made frequently from within our communities as well, and frameworks like neuroqueer theory [1] exist specifically to examine the intersections of neurodiversity and queerness. The overlap of these realms is very much a thing and I seem to be in it.

I’m a bit cautious about using neurodivergent as an identity for myself. Bioessentialism feels like an ever-present danger and in another place and another time, I know that my acutely sensitive nervous system — which can bring me into such close connection with the living environment — would have held very different meanings. Like everything else in my bodily understanding, this particular experience is defined as much by its changing and complex nature as by any individualist medical diagnosis.

And still, just exploring this part of myself, even in these lines, has felt like a massive step of empowerment.

Keeping zoos and sustaining development

But back to ecology.

Science seemed to promise me a way out of all the confusing and stressful social dynamics at school and a way to gain a deeper understanding of the world.

Inside the classroom, I crammed my brain with elements and waves and organelles. Outside, I continued to touch flowers and hold my breath while images of distant ducks bounced around in my shaking binoculars. It was a kind of seduction.

At school one day, we took tests to find out what our future careers would be. It was like an analogue multiple-choice horoscope: mark your answers on a paper and a few weeks later, you could find out your destiny. My fate was ‘zookeeper’ or ‘wildlife photographer’. I took the test twice: still a zookeeper.

I didn’t actually want to be a zookeeper. Zoos were a special place to go for family treats — and I liked the penguins — but my dream was to sit in tropical forests counting species with the intention of protecting them. *

I only had a vague idea of what ecologists did, but I decided with all my heart that that was the plan. And when I do something, I do it hard. I applied myself to studying, while also being a carer for my mum and holding down a minimum-wage job in the evenings. I saved all the money I could and went on sponsored walks at the weekend to save the humpbacks, or something.

Although I had grown up with barely any books in the house, a military brat of generations of other military brats (and cleaners and cooks), I was going to university to become a scientist. And finally, through some kind of miracle, I started an undergraduate Bachelor of Science course in Ecology (and, ostensibly, Conservation). I was ready to live the dream!

As these things turn out sometimes, there was a huge space between the dream and reality.

The more the course developed — and my own awareness with it — I understood that it was steeped in a culture that was conservative (pro-fox hunting professors), corporate (”GM crops will save the world”) and colonial as all hell.

Despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, we were told that the solutions to environmental problems lay in the hands of rich governments, NGOs and corporations. We were told that what we needed were more parks, with bigger fences and maybe a few more anti-poaching laws to protect the elephants. There was a hint of a suggestion that some of the people who had lived on the land in question for tens of thousands of years should be consulted — but it was pretty symbolic. It was very top down, very euro-centric. Zoos were a part of it; the land struggles of Indigenous people, not so much.

The point was clearly made — sustainable development meant sustaining development i.e. global capitalism, for as long as possible. The living world be damned.

It’s important to remember that this was an undergraduate Bachelors’ degree in science. I was told repeatedly that there wasn’t space for politics or debates in our conversations, while colonial bioprospecting, land grabs and corporations making laws — and animal prisons — were evidently not considered to be political at all. On a field trip, when I questioned the methodology of collecting thousands of invertebrates and killing them just so we could learn how to collect them and kill them, my tutor called me irrational, immature and irresponsible. I don’t even have a very good memory, but those words are still with me.

It all felt so far from my burning desire to protect life that it took me years to be able to come back to that part of myself. Industrial science had hurt me and, honestly, there wasn’t even that much science in it.

Between the chairs

I wasn’t entirely alone. The other students on my course all considered themselves a bit alternative — at least compared to the biologists and geneticists we studied with, many of whom went on to work for pharmaceutical companies. The university was a bus ride from Brighton, ‘the gay capital’, with one of the largest queer populations in the UK. I definitely wasn’t the only queer (or even working-class queer) on the course. We all leaned more towards tree-hugging than animal testing.

Yet still, in terms of my analysis of Big Conservation (and, increasingly, capitalism), I felt pretty isolated.

Which is when I entered a new stage.

Possibly the greatest gift of my short-lived academic career was that it got me out of my tiny military town and exposed me to a new world of potential. As environmental activism drew me to radical left spaces, I met a new kind of politics. In my early twenties, between trying to earn enough with my new, not terribly helpful, degree, I embarked on a journey of social centres, squats and queer spaces, of gatherings, protest camps and uprisings.

I came out again and again and again, and I gathered a long list of identities I had never even heard of growing up. I was moving through a new, radical, queer urban world and I was inspired.

But, to my surprise, many of the beautiful people I met along the way couldn’t have been less interested in the environment or biology, the surprising crispiness of arboreal lichens or the magical call of a wryneck. If it came up at all, the environment was a campaign that started and ended with humans and our movements, with maybe a bit of climate change or abstract ideas of ‘land’ mixed in.

For a while, queerness and ecology (and nature connection) seemed to exist for me in two different worlds. And while I was used to experiencing the living world mostly by myself**, I was falling between the chairs, and I was lonely.

I learned that my nature connection, politics, science, queerness, class, community and spirituality couldn’t all exist in the same room: I always had to leave something out in order to get in.

But then as now, I found a few special humans with both queer/trans experience and love for land. Even before I heard the term Queer Ecology, and before it took over my life in so many beautiful, confusing ways, I started to find those magical people who allowed me to bring all my weirdness into the room because they were also so deeply complex.

Most importantly of all, I had the opportunity to live for years in places outside the alienated, industrial culture I grew up in. I had the privilege of being invited into liberation struggles where land and non-humans were deeply woven into people’s lives and politics. I learned from others who held nature in their hearts.

The awkward tension between ecology and queerness is still there for me sometimes and it comes up often in conversations and workshops. There are very good reasons for it which I’ll explore more in part two.

* and often enough, zoos are corporate, profit-driven prisons, antithetical to their stated aims of conservation. But no-one I knew was talking about that and these realisations take time.

* * with exceptions. During my teenage years, as often as I could, I went on binocular-heavy walks with people sometimes sixty years older than me to the sacred grounds of bird hides, nature reserves and scruffy public parks. I owe these elders everything and their passion lives on in me.

[1] “The Disability Rights Community was Never Mine”: Neuroqueer Disidentification. Justine E. Egner, 2018
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243218803284

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 it 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!