Journeys through Queer Ecology: part two
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/
You can read part one here
Despite a degree in ecology nearly killing my passion, decades later I am as obsessed with learning about this living world as I have ever been.
It has taken a long time to repair that relationship and it’s still a work in progress. Listening to the birds has helped — and taking long walks in the shadows of cliffs. I’ve also gotten to meet people along the way who can hold both the rigours of evidence-based analysis and passion to protect the living earth.
I benefit in so many ways from having a scientific education. I felt this more intensely than ever during the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic when my social circles were suddenly flooded with science (and pseudoscience) and friends came to me for help disentangling it all. I have little practical knowledge about epidemiology, yet having even just a bit of awareness of how science works set me a world apart from the anti-science / anti-vaxx hippies who are always somehow just a few degrees of separation away.
At the same time it’s complicated. Ecology — at least how it often looks in the west — has some formidable access problems.
Barriers
Firstly, to work as an ecologist you might need a degree, ideally a doctorate PhD — which is a lot harder if you’re queer. Accessing advanced education at all is a barrier. People marginalised by gender, sex and sexuality tend towards unstable families, housing and employment — a phenomenon so common that it has a name: queer precarity [1].
I was one of the lucky few who got to university, and I still had to work three jobs while studying. With only a Bachelor’s to my name, I often question if I have any right to be calling myself an ecologist at all.
I also believe that identities are what we make of them. Each day that I go off into the woods to poke around under leaves or sit in a field watching a group of song birds mobbing a goshawk, I know that I’m studying ‘relationships among living organisms’ in my own way.
Another important factor in ecology is that working in the field brings unique safety risks and isolation to people who are LGBTQIA+ [2]. Right off the bat, the queer — ecology relationship is a strained one.
…and bias
It’s also important to remember that biologists are humans and humans are biassed.
Avoiding bias is an important part of the scientific method. Medicine uses ‘blinding’ for example — intentionally withholding information that could influence a study. But ecology sometimes lacks these precautions and is considered especially biassed among scientific disciplines. During three years of study, I can’t recall a single lesson on bias, or how to avoid it, and I’ve heard the same from others. We also didn’t talk about colonialism.
In the Nature paper, “Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology” [3], researchers Christopher H. Trisos, Jess Auerbach & Madhusudan Katti describe how the growth of ecology as a discipline formed part of European colonialism and is thus built on systemic inequalities of power — including those related to sexuality and gender. The authors go on to suggest several ways to actively decolonise ecology, including deconstructing bias and empowering historically marginalised groups to set research agendas. If my education had included knowledge like this, it could have been so very different.
In some ways, ecology continues to have problems and as in many areas of life, its power balances go largely unchallenged. While marginalised people (including queer people) are excluded on many levels, we shouldn’t be too surprised at the skewed results — and stories — we end up with.
The stories we tell
Anyone who has ever watched a mainstream wildlife documentary, or animated movie about animals, will have a sense of what these stories might look like:
- Individual organisms embody one sex for their whole life, which determines their life path.
- Partnerships of animals are heterosexual and they are monogamous. (This template is often enough projected onto other groups, such as plants, as well)
- Sexuality is for reproduction. The passing of genes from parents to offspring is the driving force of natural selection. Producing babies is a primary goal of life.
These are stories of a natural world that conveniently line up with conservative family values and sexuality. Despite a few exceptions, they have very little overlap with reality for most species, including our own. Forcing nature to conform to these stories has taken centuries of systematic data fudging, creative reframing and sometimes explicit cover-ups.
To some extent, science has moved forward from this. Homosexual behaviour has been demonstrated in thousands of animal species and scientific consensus has destabilised many myths about sex, gender and sexuality. Although popular understandings of science nearly always have a lag, I have the sense that this knowledge has also become more widespread. In the last few years I’ve published a colouring book series on queerness in non-human nature, consulted on a queer tour at a natural history museum and run regular workshops on these subjects. I’m not sure how much of that would have been possible even just a few decades ago.
Queerbashing as research
While some of us are thrilled to learn about “gay penguins”, “lesbian lizards”, and sex-changing clownfish, we shouldn’t forget that a lot of this knowledge has come from research and colonial science. For anyone familiar with the history of science — especially science investigating queerness — it might not come as a great surprise that this is a story of violence.
In Biological Exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl lays out some of the research methods used over the last two centuries of scientists researching homosexual behaviour in non-human animals.
One method used has been forced separation, to ‘free’ animals from their same-sex partners, to coerce them into heterosexual relations, or just to see what happens. Bagemihl also lists several other techniques including implanting electrodes in the uteri of female stumptail macaques (to study their orgasms during homosexual encounters), hormone injections, castrations, lobotomies and killing and dissecting individuals showing homosexual behaviour to study their internal organs.
As Bagemihl himself puts it: “Although intended ostensibly to reveal important behavioral and developmental effects, the “treatments” applied to animals have in some cases been disturbingly similar to those administered to homosexual people in an attempt to “cure” them.” [4]
Of course, not all our knowledge of queer biology has come from these violent research methods. And queerphobic, masculinised, western, industrial science is far from the only source of knowledge of what we might call queerness in non-human nature. There exist countless ways of learning about our non-human family. As it so often does, the history of how researchers have observed and behaved towards non-humans can tell us a lot about the society and industries that funded their work.
In central Europe, where I currently live, queerness and ecology (including biophilia or land connection or however we want to frame it) have been separated from each other for a long time and the same is true for much of the west. Ours is a culture of schisms, dichotomies (human/nature, mind/body, me/you) and disconnections. But, fortunately, the west is not the world.
In many traditional and Indigenous cultures, complex connections of sex, gender and sexuality have been lived and understood for countless generations. Across the world, strictly binary gender roles, Victorian sexual norms and related projections on non-humans were imposed as a part of the violence of colonialism. Colonial science played a huge role in this (which I’ll come back to later in this series).
Western biology and ecology have a problematic history, with barriers and bias against queer folk that are rarely challenged. No wonder so many queers still sit uncomfortably with these disciplines…
…and we haven’t touched on biological essentialism yet.
Queer biology
Let’s hear from biologist and trans activist, Julia Serano:
“…a lot of feminists have historically associated people who talk about biology as automatically being gender essentialists. That’s because usually in mainstream society, people will point to biology to make the case that there are essential differences between the genders. I don’t do that. I actually argue that biology, culture, and environment all come together in an unfathomably complex way to create the gender diversity that we see all around us.” Julia Serano [5]
And finally from ecologist and evolutionary biologist, Joan Roughgarden [6]
“Biology need not be a purveyor of essentialism, of rigid universals. Biology need not limit our potential. Nature offers a smorgasbord of possibilities for how to live, and an endless list of solutions for every context, some of which we’ll wish to reject, and others to adopt or modify. The true story of nature is profoundly empowering for peoples of minority gender expressions and sexualities.”
I find these quotes, from two scientifically trained trans women, extremely important. As she does through much of her work, Serano encourages us to embrace complexity while Roughgarden finds empowerment in the ‘true story of nature’.
As I continue my own journey, I feel blessed to have spent all those hours ‘alone’ outside, touching bark and ammonites. These days I spend as much time out of the city as I can, and I’m once again more often in the presence of non-humans than humans. Sometimes life works in cycles and I find myself returning to a path, abandoned years ago, which I now realise was home all along.
I still fall between the chairs sometimes, and in some way I’ll always be navigating these tensions between different parts of myself — the ecologist and the queer activist among them.
Science, as I’ve been raised in it, allows no space at all for the spiritual dimensions that are a huge part of my life and which I come back to again and again in the evening song of a thrush or the resonance of thunder. And yet, I’m not sure where I would be without learning to think critically, to consider evidence and to test hypotheses before jumping to conclusions — these fundamentally useful ways of approaching the world. I have a lot to be grateful for, and that includes my education.
The tensions are there and they are real, but maybe I can learn to embrace these very different parts of myself. In-between, it turns out, can be a good place for perceiving connections that might get missed.
After all, as every ecologist knows, the edge is where life gets really interesting.
References
[1] More here: My Gender is Precarity. Kes Otter Lieffe. 2018
https://otterlieffe.medium.com/my-gender-is-precarity-8621e98075bc
[2] Best practices for LGBTQ+ inclusion during ecological fieldwork: Considering safety, cis/heteronormativity and structural barriers. Jaime J. Coon and Nathan B. Alexander. 2023
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14339
[3] 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
[4] Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. Bruce Bagemihl, 2000
[5] Gender as Non-Fiction. A Q&A with Julia Serano, author of Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive. Noah Berlatsky, 2013
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/gender-as-non-fiction/279962/
[6] Evolution’s Rainbow. Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Joan Roughgarden, 2013
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!
