IMAGINING A LIBERATED FUTURE WITH QUEER ECOLOGY

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Identifier
Thesis_MES_2022Su_HillK
Title
IMAGINING A LIBERATED FUTURE WITH QUEER ECOLOGY
Date
September 2022
Creator
Hill, Kris
extracted text
IMAGINING A LIBERATED FUTURE
WITH QUEER ECOLOGY

by
Kris Moon Hill

A Thesis
Submitted in partial fulfillment
Of the requirements for the degree
Master of Environmental Studies
The Evergreen State College
September 2022

©2022 by Kris Moon Hill. All rights reserved.

This Thesis for the Master of Environmental Studies Degree
by
Kris Moon Hill

has been approved for
The Evergreen State College
by

_______________________________
Frederica Bowcutt, Ph.D.
Member of Faculty

_______________________________
Date

ABSTRACT
Imagining a Liberated Future with Queer Ecology

Kris Moon Hill
As an emerging and expansive transdisciplinary field of study, queer ecology brings queer theory
together with ecology. Drawing from diverse disciplines, through this transformative framework,
the meaning of “queer” is twofold in that it centers non-heterosexual and transgender organisms
in ecological studies as well as centering the perspectives of LGBTQ+ humans, and it seeks to
“queer” environmental perspectives by challenges dominant notions of “naturalness” and
“normality” grounded in heteronormative ideas of sex, gender, and Nature. Imagining a
Liberated Future with Queer Ecology explores the potential of queer ecology to first disrupt
heterosexist and unscientific charges of “unnaturalness” against LGBTQ+ identities, secondly, it
extends our understanding of the historical context in which American anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments
became institutionalized in Western science, and lastly, it sheds light on how queer ecology’s
goals of transformative justice offer new ways of collaboration, solidarity, kinship/familial
relations, and care systems across cultures and species. Throughout my work, I explored
literature on queer ecology as well as works that are interconnected with queer ecology,
especially ecofeminism, Critical Race Theory, decolonization, and Emergent Strategy. I propose
that queer ecologies offers LGBTQ+ identities empowerment through the exploration of queer
and transness among non-human species, along with offering possibilities in expanding our
ability to imagine individually and collectively other potentials for our present and futures. Queer
ecologies is crucial for creating alternative models for humans to exist in the world as well as for
organizing together in order to address large-scale issues, such as climate change, that threaten
life in all its expressions.

Table of Contents
List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................v
List of Tables .................................................................................................................................. vi
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ vii
Preface ............................................................................................................................................ 1
Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 5
What is Queer Ecology? ......................................................................................................................... 11
A Note on Terms .................................................................................................................................... 16
Queerness & the Master Model .............................................................................................................. 17
Imagination ............................................................................................................................................. 20
Why Queer Ecology?.............................................................................................................................. 23
Queer Futurity and Expanding Possibilities ........................................................................................... 26

Disruption (queering Nature) ....................................................................................................... 31
A Natural Nature .................................................................................................................................... 31
Sex Versus Gender ................................................................................................................................. 40
Sexual Selection Theory Undone ........................................................................................................... 41
Myths busted .......................................................................................................................................... 46
Reimagining Possibilities ....................................................................................................................... 65
Indigenous Perspectives in Queer Ecology ............................................................................................ 68

Pathologizing Queerness & Creating The White Wilderness ....................................................... 77
American Anxieties of Moral Decay ...................................................................................................... 80
Pathologizing the Queer ......................................................................................................................... 84
Social Darwinism and Conservation ...................................................................................................... 92
The Progressive Era and the Conservation Movement........................................................................... 99

Discussion—Transformation ...................................................................................................... 105
Through the Lens of Queer Ecology .................................................................................................... 105
Transformation ..................................................................................................................................... 121
Concluding Thoughts ........................................................................................................................... 125

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 129

iv

List of Figures
Figure 1. The World of Animal Homosexuality. .......................................................................... 47
Figure 2. Barnacles. ...................................................................................................................... 49
Figure 3. Reef Fish. ....................................................................................................................... 50
Figure 4. Whiptail Lizard. ............................................................................................................. 51
Figure 5. Ruffs. ............................................................................................................................. 53
Figure 6. Transgendered Hooded Warbler.................................................................................... 54
Figure 7. Spotted Hyena. .............................................................................................................. 55
Figure 8. Cotton-Top Tamarin. ..................................................................................................... 59
Figure 9. Bonobo. ......................................................................................................................... 62
Figure 10. Bonobo communication............................................................................................... 64
Figure 11. Portrait of Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle. ................................................................ 88
Figure 12. Hydrotherapy. .............................................................................................................. 90
Figure 13. Who was more likely to be sterilized in North Carolina? ........................................... 96
Figure 14. Sterilization rates per 1000 institutionalized patients. ................................................. 98

v

List of Tables
Table 1. The Master Model ........................................................................................................... 19

vi

Acknowledgements
This work would not be possible without the love and support of my partner who has provided
the care and stability in my life in order to achieve my academic goals, come into my queerness,
and work towards being in a healthy relationship with myself and those around me. This work is
dedicated to those who have had to survive (and to those who haven’t survived) in a society that
actively tries to harm and erase them simply for the bodies and identities they live in. This work
is only the beginning.
I also acknowledge the support of my learning community at The Evergreen State College.
Without this interdisciplinary liberal arts college, I would never have continued my academic
pursuits. I especially want to acknowledge my mentor Frederica Bowcutt, whose wealth of
botanical knowledge and ability to bring history, feminism, and natural studies together has been
a continual inspiration for me as a student. I am eternally grateful to have had the support from a
mentor who has challenged my learning in ways that I have grown from, and a mentor that
encourages her students to think critically and embrace the wonder of the Natural world.

vii

Preface
I couldn’t find myself in history. No one like me seemed to have ever existed. But I had to know
why I was so hated for being “different.” What was the root cause of bigotry, and what was its
driving force?
-Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors1

In 2015 I was attending a large, traditional university majoring in Natural Resources
where I had big dreams in finding a path that would allow me to direct my passions and desires
to help create large-scale societal changes. Having spent the majority of my early formative
years involved with community service, activism, and being a part of radical communities, I had
envisioned that social justice work would fold neatly in with environmental work. However,
what I actually found was a culture of hostility towards the notion of intersecting social issues
with environmental issues, classrooms dominated by White men who confidently expressed
misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and racist opinions (typically going unchallenged by
instructors or students), anthropocentric dualisms such as humans being separate from Nature,
and lessons conveying doomed messages that we were in end times in the Anthropocene. When I
challenged these ideologies, tried to engage with alternative ideas that broke with colonial
conservationist narratives, or even called attention to the lack of interdisciplinary understandings
of environmental issues, I was often met with dismissiveness and condescension. I was told by
my instructors and peers that I needed to narrow my studies to either environmental sciences or
change majors to the humanities or social sciences—the “soft” sciences that were conveyed to
me as less valuable an area of study than the “hard” sciences. As for the rampant misogyny and
White, Eurocentric culture of the college, I was told to simply just accept it because that was just

1

Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 11.

1

the way things are and will always be, so don’t rock the boat. The isolation and alienation I felt
in those classrooms was palpable.
It wasn’t until I took an Environmental Racism course taught by a gay Chicano Ethnic
Studies teacher’s aide, where White students didn’t dominate the class demographics and were
openly challenged about their ideas in productive ways, and where I was finally able to gain an
interdisciplinary understanding of racism, environmentalism, and environmental justice. I felt as
though I had finally found some unseen thing pulling me towards it.
Yet with the rigid compartmentalizing of majors and minors, outside of double majoring
in Natural Resources and one of the humanities majors, I had no clear or easy path to the
interdisciplinary knowledge I was seeking. With the impending presidential election a year away,
classrooms became intolerable—I angerly outed myself as bisexual in several classes to disrupt
homophobic students going unchecked. The culture of the classroom also followed me to my
student staff position at the college’s research forest. Simply put, it was an “old-boys club,” who
were completely inept at handling the situation that arose when I had finally reached my limit of
sexual harassment and came forward to put an end to it. What ensued was a poorly facilitated
sexual harassment training by a Women’s studies teacher who didn’t understand intersectionality
even in her own class or how to engage with male forestry workers. Ultimately, I was made to
feel that I was the problem as some of my male coworkers were now afraid to work with me as
they feared getting into trouble for saying something sexist. Yet privately, the other two female
staff members expressed their own frustrations of the workplace misogyny (the 50+ year old
secretary constantly being referred to as the office “girl”), and one of them even telling me how
they didn’t identify as a woman. At this point in time I still identified myself as a woman, yet
without having the language I have now, I didn’t fully understand what they meant that they

2

didn’t identify as a woman, and yet, even without that understanding it still resonated with me
deeply.
It only took a year and a half before the alienation and frustration trying to exist and
thrive in this place hit a boiling point and I realized I had to reckon with the reality that there
simply was no place for me at this institution if I wanted to explore the intertwining of
environmental issues as social justice issues. At this time I was also in a toxic relationship with a
man who I didn’t know how to leave. I felt like I was being pushed back into the closet and
forced into a gender role that I couldn’t perform. I was failing miserably at compulsory
heteronormativity2 and it was taking a toll on my mental health in very frightening and
debilitating ways. It wasn’t until after I had transferred to a liberal arts college that had a safer
culture to come into my queerness and my relationship had abruptly ended that I came to the
realization that I had a lot of healing work in front of me. I was finally walking a path towards
finding myself and what role I wanted to play in my community—my own ecological niche.
I cannot overstate how grateful and privileged I am to have access to a non-traditional
college that teaches through interdisciplinarity. Although still an institution that has many
systemic issues of its own to address, is filled with individuals passionately dedicated to
transformative change that I have worked in collaboration with, drawn hope and inspiration
from, and have grown immensely from their mentorship. It was in this community of learning
that I finally began to feel safe to reject and shed the rigid dominant normative belief systems
that I know deep down can never hold me, nor define me. I have witnessed and survived in
systems that will never accommodate my needs, were never intended for me to thrive in—
systems that I was never meant to exist in at all. Some of these systems have caused me harm

2

Often shortened to comphet, refers to notion that heterosexuality is the assumed normal sexuality, assumes the
gender binary, and enforced through a patriarchal social structure where women are subordinate to men.

3

both directly and indirectly, only to treat my harm as necessary for the system to continue-simply collateral damage. And yet here I still am.
This work has been born from my desire to not only transform myself, but to also
transform the systems we live in. It is a response to the intentional erasure of queer and trans
education by academia, the escalating violence and criminalization of those marked as “other” in
our society, and to be accountable to those struggling and fighting in our current social
movements of abolition and solidarity. Like so many others that I have had the privilege of being
in learning with and learning from, we are dreaming of a world that is no longer centered on
violence, domination, separation, toxic individualism, and exploitation, but rather a world where
we see and deeply feel our interconnectedness through kinship with each other, and all other
living beings we share our lives with. That dreaming is coming to life through the creation of
different systems of care, in spaces held by those working collaboratively to bring transformative
justice theory to practices, and from those who continue to share their stories and histories that
have been withheld from our systems of knowledge. This work is an offering towards the
growing area of scholarship working to queer and decolonize academia, towards the unlearning
of harm in our social structures, and towards the shaping of our collective imagination of our
present and futures through the context of remembering our buried histories. As a queer,
trans/non-binary person working across the nexus of gender, sexuality, and the environment, this
work is meant to be in conversation with the current discourses of disrupting harmful dominant
ideas that work to uphold rigid hierarchies and unsustainable practices and make space for
radically different ways of understanding, relating, and becoming more fluid and adaptable. In
the wake of climate crisis our survival may depend upon it.

4

Introduction
All of our lives we have experienced ourselves as queer, as not belonging, as the essence of
queer… queer not as being about who you’re having sex with–that can be a dimension of it–but
queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create
and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live. And I think that is where we are going towards
in trying to find [sexual freedom]. And I think it’s so crucial trans people are so at the forefront of
that because that is where, among trans people, that the imagination is called forth in the
reconstructing and the reinvisioning of self and possibility.
-bell hooks, from 2014 panel discussion hosted by the New School in NYC Are You Still A
Slave?3
We are seeding the future, including our next systems of justice, with every action we take; the
fractal nature of our sacred design teaches us that our smallest choices today will become our next
norms.
-adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us4

What is normal? Writing this thesis during the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022
the sentiment of wanting to return to normal has become quite common, however what “normal”
looks like after the virus has run its course is shifting. Although many large-scale issues such as
climate change, accessible healthcare, affordable housing, and civil rights issues were already
visible in the arena of public discourse, the pandemic magnified these problems. With the
pandemic making visible the gross inequities of our economy, labor systems, healthcare, justice
systems, and housing, political polarization has also deepened. Emboldened by overtly bigoted
political leaders, conservative politics have made moves to ban books representing diverse
narratives and identities, suppress voter rights, restrict access to affordable and safe abortions
and reproductive care, and have fought to keep lessons on Critical Race Theory (CRT), gender,
and sexuality out of classrooms5. In the wake of escalating anti-trans politics, such as anti-trans

hooks, “Are You Still a Slave?”
brown, We Will Not Cancel Us:and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, 3.
5
Hernandez, “Florida house Passes Controversial measure Dubbed The 'Don't Say Gay' Bill by Critics.”
3
4

5

bathroom bills, excluding trans athletes from sports, and restricting transgender healthcare, the
year of 2021 became the deadliest year on record for transgender people, with the majority of
murdered transgender people being either Black or Latinx.6 Throughout the past few years it has
been a challenge for me to want to read the news as the headlines have become so saturated with
suffering that the present has become to feel like a true dystopia—or at least that is where our
future is headed as a new “normal.”
However grim this piece of our history might seem, there is still hope because there is still
resistance and signs that times are changing. More organizations have formed to provide
advocacy, legal assistance, research and public education, as well as healthcare support for
LGBTQ+7 individuals and communities. LGBTQ+ activists have come together to stage protests,
create safer spaces for their communities to thrive in, and create content to expand the visibility
and representation of LGBTQ+ identities. Yet, individuals simply coming out and presenting
their existence is still seen by some as a radical act. However, Generation Z8 is being recognized
not only the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in American history,9 but also having
around 21% adults (one out of five) identifying as LGBTQ+.10 According to Gallup’s 2022
survey report, the current percentage of U.S. adults that self-identify as LGBTQ+ has doubled
since their first report in 2012, with 7.1% of U.S. adults who consider themselves as LGBTQ+
based on 2021 aggregated data from more than 12,000 interviews. With the number of young

Rummler and Sosin, “2021 is now the deadliest year on record for transgender people.” See also Trans Lives
Matter, “Remembering Our Dead” as an additional source for data and details of transgender people who were
murdered or took their own lives and is a space to memorialize these individuals during Transgender Day of
Remembrance.
7
LGBTQ+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, with a + to be inclusive towards the everexpanding identities that do not align with “normative” identities of heterosexual or cisgender categorization.
8
Gen Z are those born roughly between 1996 and 2003 or 2010, as no consensus has been reached on this
generational timeframe
9
Fry and Parker, “Early Benchmarks Show ‘Post-Millennials’ on Track to Be Most Diverse, Best-Educated
Generation Yet 2020.”
10
Jones, “LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%.”
6

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adults identifying as LGBTQ+ continuing to increase, Gallup’s report concludes that many have
been able to better navigate their gender identity and sexuality due to the rising acceptance and
legal protections for LGBTQ+ communities and individuals. So even though there is currently
much opposition to overcome in securing the rights, acceptability, and celebration of those who
identify as LGBTQ+ in the U.S., there still has been a significant enough cultural shift in the past
few decades which has allowed more adults (and youths) to feel safe and able to come out,
alongside the decreasing acceptance of queer- and transphobia.
As a queer, non-binary/transgender individual assigned female at birth (AFAB) unwilling to
be silent or complicit in the active harm against myself and those in the LGBTQ+ community, I
have sought ways to use the privileges I have as a White environmental studies student to
understand and engage in queer resistance. Understanding the importance of intersectionality11
and that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,”12 I sought out frameworks that
could address both environmental issues together with social issues and support radically
different ways of thinking and problem solving. Thanks to another queer/trans student in my
learning community also bringing LGBTQ+ issues into the realm of environmental studies, I was
introduced to queer ecology, a relatively new discipline that blends queer theory with ecology
with the intention of transforming discourse and politics around queerness and the environment.
In writing this thesis, I wanted to take an experimental approach of writing a non-traditional
style of thesis by being visible in my research, placing my own experiences and perceptions
alongside scientific and historic literature. As I will discuss throughout my work, LGBTQ+

Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination
Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Credited with coining the term “intersectionality” in her 1989
paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine,
Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, constructs intersectionality as the ways that systems of oppression overlap
and create different experiences of discrimination for people with multiple social identity categories.
12
King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
11

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identities are rarely discussed in public discourse or scientific literature in unbiased or
unemotional ways, even when those expressing negative views claim to be using cold, rational
objectivity. The intention behind making myself visible within my work was to create a narrative
around LGBTQ+ issues by a person who identifies as a part of the LGBTQ+ community. Too
often narratives are formed around LGBTQ+ identities without the insights from LGBTQ+
individuals, often resulting in bad or even harmful portrayals. Additionally, I want to note that
throughout my writing, some language or concepts may appear clunky or outdated. This is
because language and social constructs are constantly in flux and some terminology I use may
not have a better alternative yet, or as an individual continually learning, I may not have been
introduced to yet. I will be using the term “queerphobia” as an alternative to “homophobia” as
“queer” has become an umbrella term for non-heterosexual identities, and I find “queerphobia”
to be more inclusive than “homophobia.” Throughout this work I also capitalize “Nature” to lend
the natural world agency as an entity, as well as to prevent the confusion from “nature” being
used as a noun. Queer ecology, as a growing discipline has a vast variety of topics in which I
could have delved. However in desiring ultimately to understand how to address intersecting and
urgent present day social and environmental problems, I worked to understand the history of how
we got here and the theoretical lenses in which we can shape potential futures. This work was not
only done with the intention of educating myself, but also to be able to educate, invite, and
inspire others to examine their personal and cultural understandings of sex, gender, and Nature.
Throughout the introduction section, I work to define queer ecology as an emerging field and
examine what a queer ecological framework looks like. Being a transdisciplinary field of study,
queer ecology draws from many other frameworks, especially intersectional ecofeminism, and
seeks to center queerness in ecological narratives. I discuss how queer ecology works in three

8

parts, which is to disrupt heterosexist understandings of sex, gender, and Nature, extend upon
these notions by first understanding the history of how these notions developed and what other
knowledges were erased in the construction of dominant normatives, and lastly, how queer
ecology seeks to transform our current models of relating to one another and the more-thanhuman world.
In the second section, “Disruption (queering Nature)” I engage with the idea of who and what
is categorized as “natural” as well as how charges of “unnaturalness” have been launched against
LGBTQ+ identities. In essence, this section is a model for queering Nature. I work to disrupt the
concept that if a behavior occurs in animals, it is then “natural” and thus acceptable for humans.
Drawing from scientific literature, this section covers the difference between the social
construction of gender and the biological understanding of sex, as well as arguments for the need
to reinterpret and update the sexual selection theory. In this section I also offer a variety of plant
and non-human examples of sexual and gender variety to demonstrate the need for biological
models that can account for the vast diversity of sexualities and gender variation that exist in our
world. Expanding our understanding of the importance of the inclusion of diverse ecological life
histories in both humans and non-human species opens “the potential to learn from the behavior
of plant [and non-human animal] life in order to formulate better models of human collectivity
and communicative cooperation.”13In a period of time when there is a need for radically different
ways of thinking and structuring our societies, looking to Nature through a queer ecological lens
presents an opportunity to reimagine a more collective and sustainable future in which to work
towards.

13

Gibson and Gagliano, “The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily,” 126.

9

Throughout the section “Pathologizing Queerness & Creating The White Wilderness,” I dig
into the history of American medical science’s role in pathologizing LGBTQ+ identities, along
with the historical entanglement of White supremacy, settler-colonialism, nationalism, and
heteronormativity with the modern American environmentalism. Here, for the sake of time, I
restrict the boundaries of this research to the late 1800s and early 1900s, as this was a crucial
period of time in history when many ideas around LGBTQ+ identities were being
institutionalized and disseminated into the public imagination, as well as a dominant “universal”
American national identity being formed and solidified. In the present day when how and what
history gets taught is being debated, it is crucial that even the dark and difficult parts of our
histories are learned in order to understand the foundational values of modern-day institutions
and correct the mistakes from the past.
In the final section “Discussion—Transformation,” I explore the potential of queer ecology
to invigorate liberatory imaginings for our pasts, present, and futures, as the first step to creating
new practices lies first in being able to imagine. As queer ecology has a goal of transformation,
in this section I consider how the transformative justice framework of Emergent Strategy used in
social justice activism, can blend seamlessly into queer ecologies. Both Emergent Strategy and
queer ecology advocate looking to Nature as a teacher in order to understand how humans can
integrate diversity and multiculturalism into our social structures as well as reimagine humans as
a part of Nature and having an ecological niche. This work is only the beginning of my
investigation into queer ecology, and as a developing field I anticipate there is still so much more
for me to discover and eventually share, as it is my hope that others will be just as excited by the
possibilities that queer ecology works to open us up to.

10

What is Queer Ecology?
Queer ecology is a transdisciplinary field that doesn’t quite seem to exist yet and is lacking
any distinct methods14—rather it is a developing field that emerged from intersectional
ecofeminist writers15 merging queer theory with ecocritism and seems to recently be blooming.
While the origins of queer ecology are a bit ambiguous, late 1800s to early 1900s influential
thinkers such as sexologist Havelock Ellis, activists Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward
Carpenter, as well as authors Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, have been considered the roots of
queer ecology as these were important figures in developing early queer identities and
establishing links between the newly “discovered” homosexuals and nature. Michel Foucault’s
four-volume study, The History of Sexuality, has also been given much credit for laying the
groundwork for queer ecology. However it was from the mid-1990’s to around 2010 that a
distinct body of queer ecological scholarship became visible, with contemporary queer ecology
experiencing an expansion of scholarship, interest, and relevance. With the combination of queer
theory studies and ecology expanding across a multitude of academic fields, queer ecology
appears to be quite nebulous and lacking any boundaries as it intersects and draws from more
established frameworks such as (eco)feminist studies, geography, natural history, ecocriticism,
biology, environmental justice (EJ), CRT, decolonization, political economy, and social justice
movements. In this research I have limited my scope to the United States and will not be
covering queer ecology’s frameworks exhaustively, as this work is intended as an offering for a
starting point for further conversations.

14

Wölfe Hazard, Underflows: Queer and Trans Ecologies and River Justice, 22.
Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist
Environmentalism,” 27.
15

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As a blossoming field of study, many people it seems still have not heard of queer ecology or
are just beginning to engage with related research that has yet to be identified as queer ecology.
So what is queer ecology? Greta Gaard, a crucial ecofeminist writer on queer ecology, interprets
queer ecology as lacking a “single orthodox perspective,” functioning to queer environmentalism
and green queer theory.16 To queer environmentalism, as an example, queer identities and
struggles within environmental advocacy need to be visible and uplifted, rather than dismissed
and pushed to the side, forcing LGBTQ+ people to “to put one’s sexual identity ‘on hold’ in
order to work on environmental issues.17” When environmentalist organizations fail to
understand the need for diversity and inclusivity of members and priorities, they damage
opportunities for coalition building and resource sharing. Hegemonic single-issue environmental
organizations lose opportunities to address interconnecting issues, often over-prioritizing White,
middle-class concerns (which sometimes in turn causes direct harm to other communities—think
Not in My Backyard campaigns) and alienate oppressed individuals and communities from
joining their cause.18
In a greener queer theory, the ways in which gender plays out in our interactions with Nature
can be more thoroughly examined. Although ecofeminist writers have long made connections
between the oppression of both women and the environment, ecofeminism has unfortunately
become entangled and misrepresented by cultural feminists who essentially flipped patriarchy on
its head, positioning women as closer to nature due to their ability to give birth and ultimately as
the superior and natural caretakers of Nature. Unfortunately ecofeminism has been dismissed as
useful due to surrounding stereotypes of being “socialist, ethnocentric, anti-intellectual goddess-

Gaard, “Green, Pink, and Lavender: Banishing Ecophobia through Queer Ecologies,” 117.
Gaard, “Green, Pink, and Lavender,” 116.
18
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors.
16
17

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worshippers who mistakenly portray the earth as female or issued totalizing and ahistorical
mandates for worldwide veganism,”19 despite the diverse variety of methods and perspectives.
As a result of cultural feminists who feminized Nature and categorize “women” as a biological
category rather than a cultural category (e.g. gender essentialism), writers engaging with the
intersecting issues of feminism and ecology have chosen to distance themselves from
ecofeminism, preferring to use the terms “ecological feminism,” “feminist environmentalism,”
“critical feminist eco-socialism,” or even just “gender and the environment.”20 Queer ecology
presents an opportunity to more deeply engage in the work ecofeminists had already begun, but
from a field that starts in intersectionality and provides a fuller examination with the inclusion
and centering of “queered” bodies, identities, and notions of Nature. For example, while a
prominent depiction of Nature in the U.S. is often of a bountiful, beautiful, caring mother
(Mother Nature)21, ecophilosophy professor Tim Morton instead argues that Western
environmentalism depicts a heteronormative and masculine Nature. Morton writes through a
queer ecological lens of masculine Nature being “rugged, bleak…defin[ing] itself through
contrasts: outdoorsy and extroverted, heterosexual, able-bodied—disability is nowhere to be
seen,” and of masculine environmentalism’s fixation with Nature being “untouched”—concerned
for Nature’s “virginity.”22 When Nature is defined and valued for its “purity” or
“untouchedness,” such as landscapes deemed as wilderness areas, other types of landscapes and
ecosystems become devalued and seen as unworthy of protection (e.g. urban and agricultural
areas). On the flipside, the fixation with “untouched” and unpeopled “wilderness” areas are
guarded through exclusionary practices—allowing only those privileged few that can afford to

Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited,” 32.
Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited,” 27.
21
Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 2.
22
Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” 279.
19
20

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access and recreate in these remote areas, while criminalizing Indigenous communities’ access to
cultural resources located in wilderness areas and parks systems. Fortunately, some federal
policies have been rewritten as a step in reconciliation to allow tribal members to harvest
culturally significant plants from protected lands in national parks.23 However, despite steps
being taken to create inclusion in the National Parks Systems (NPS) there is still a long legacy
for many that managed ecosystems like the NPS convey a message (whether directly or
indirectly) of “stay away,” “not for you,” and “keep out!” When environmentalism is enacted
through this idea of a White, able-bodied, heteronormative, masculine Nature, what other
environmental issues go unattended when the organizations with the most resources focus on
such a narrow idea of what kind of Nature is worth protecting? Who gets excluded and alienated
from Nature when predominantly White, able-bodied men are seen as having claim to these
spaces?
As one of the foremost writers on queer ecology, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands defines
queer ecology as

a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt
prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and
also to reimagine evolutionary process, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in
light of queer theory.24
Queer theory examines the constructions of “normality” and how certain sexualities are assigned
“deviant,” as well as challenging ideas of essentialism that make claims of biologically
determined gender roles as “natural.” Essentialism, also referred to as gender essentialism or
biological determinism, is the notion that all material objects and beings have inherent or inborn

23
24

Henion, “Cherokee Indians Can Now Harvest Sochan within a National Park.”
Mortimer-Sandilands, “Queer Ecology.”

14

qualities that are universal, that there are intrinsic (read as natural or inborn) qualities that make
up “real” men and women. Gender essentialism claims that the categorization of “men” and
“woman” are biological—naturally occurring, alongside the patriarchal gender roles that are
assigned to those categorizations, and any mixing or crossing of these roles or categories is an
error or “against nature.” The logic gender essentialism follows is that “if you changed the
essential characteristics of a male then you didn’t have a male anymore; the same holds true for a
female.”25 The mistake of this logic that makes it unscientific is that it equates sex, a biologic
category, with gender, a socially constructed categorization.26 Those who claim to be using the
science of biological determinism or gender essentialism to justify sexism, as well as queer- and
transphobia, are evoking essentialist views that “real” men and women are so because they
express natural “maleness” or “femaleness” that is determined by biology. In this view, anyone
that presents outside the rigid two-gender binary of masculine man or feminine woman is
perceived as unnatural, a deviant, or inhuman. Through this logic, cisgender27 men, whether
heterosexual or otherwise are not supposed to have “feminine” traits nor are cisgender women
supposed to be “masculine,” transwomen cannot be perceived as women who just happen to be
born with a penis or transmen as men born with womb, and non-binary and intersex people are
erased altogether. However, it is through the queer theory of queer ecology that seeks to disrupt
and question the ways gender essentialism has been naturalized and explore ways of normalizing
the reality of gender and sexual variation.

25

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 3.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People.
27
Cisgender is a gender categorization relating to a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned
at birth. For example someone assigned female at birth that identifies as a woman, which differs from transgender,
whose gender expression/identity differs from the sex they had or were identified at birth.
26

15

In engaging with the “normativity of heterosexuality,” queer theory explores how
heteronormativity interacts with race/ethnicity, dis/ability, and nationality.28 Queer theory within
the context of queer ecology, asks us to examine what we consider “natural” and how these
understandings impact our relationships with the environment and each other—specifically
drawing attention to the ways that these perceptions have been formed through White settlercolonial Western hetero-patriarchy.

A Note on Terms
Throughout this research the terms heterosexist/heterosexism, heterocentric,
heteronormativity, hetero-patriarchy, and compulsory-heterosexuality (comp-het) will be used
interchangeably. These terms refer to the ways dominant settler-colonial Western culture has
naturalized heterosexuality as the superior sexuality and is performed through rigid cisgender
binary gender roles, and therefore cast queer and trans bodies and identities as “unnatural.” Here,
the use of the term “Western” refers primarily to the United States and the dominant settlercolonial culture that is formed by values of predominantly hegemonic, White, middle-class
sociopolitical values. Additionally, settler-colonialism is a theoretical framework that describes
the particular practices of colonizers of previously inhabited lands who intend to stay and do so
through the erasure and elimination of Indigenous inhabitants in order to legitimize settlers and
their future generations as the rightful inheritors of the land. In Kari Norgaard’s Salmon and
Acorns Feed Our People, Norgaard argues that “that North American colonialism is an ongoing
structure rather than a past event,” which structures “state relationships [and individual
interactions] with Indigenous peoples in terms of elimination and replacement” by transforming
“the ecology, laws, policies, mythology and education to make settlers feel as though they are

28

Kaishian and Hasmik,” The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline,” 5.

16

‘Indigenous.’”29 In other words, we are still living in a settler-colonial system which seeks to
make non-Natives feel that they belong and are entitled to the ownership of the land, as well as
innocent from addressing past and current erasure and violence against Indigenous individuals,
communities, histories, and cultural practices. This idea stems from the notion that Indigenous
culture has long gone extinct or been assimilated, therefore making (White) non-Natives feel as
they are now “native” to the land and the natural inheritors and stewards. Fortunately because of
the tireless work of Indigenous activists and their allies, this narrative of cultural extinction is
being shattered through better representations of modern and historical Indigeneity in the media,
coalition building between tribes and non-Native conservationists, and educators sharing historic
and contemporary narratives of Indigenous struggle, resistance, resilience, and prosperity. Within
the context of settler-colonialism, queer ecology presents an opportunity to consider who is given
power to manage and alter ecosystems, who gets to be considered a “natural” part of the
American identity and landscape, and how American identity shapes the way we interact with
ecosystems and non-humans. Additionally, I refer to Nature/non-human species as the “morethan-human” as well as animals as “non-human animals” to disrupt human exceptualism and the
notion of humans being separate from Nature or superior to animals.

Queerness and the Master Model
So what is so “queer” about queer ecology? While the term “queer” was at one point
primarily used as a hateful slur towards gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals, in the past few
decades it has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community and now serves as an umbrella term
for those who do not identify as heterosexual and/or cisgender. Additionally serving a dual

29

Norgaard, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature and Social Action, 85.

17

purpose, the use of “queer” relates back to its older use in describing something as peculiar,
strange, or even other-worldly. As defined in Queer Ecologies,

Queer, then is both noun and verb in this project: ours is an ecology that may begin in the
experiences and perceptions of non-heterosexual individuals and communities, but is even
more importantly one that calls into question heteronormativity itself as part of its advocacy
around issues of nature and environment—and vice versa.30
Queer, here, relates both to ecological understandings from queer individuals and communities’
perspectives, as well as challenging the heteronormativity of environmentalism and ecological
understandings—essentially working to make the normal abnormal and the abnormal normal.
Queer can also encompass the “identities, bodies, and behaviors pushed to the margins of
Western, hegemonic, heteronormative life.”31 Where ecology recognizes the importance of
interconnected relationships between an individual organism and its system, valuing how all
parts of a system work together, queer ecology challenges outdated and inaccurate heterosexist
ecological narratives that rely on rigid binaries of essentialism and rugged individualism that
ultimately frame humans as separate from Nature.
In Gaard’s examination of heteronormative binaries through a queered ecofeminism, she
argues how dominant Western culture can be characterized by its “value-hierarchical thinking,
and the logic of domination,” in which normative dualisms “conceptually organiz[e] the world in
binaries.”32 Arguing that this line of logic has close ties to the “institution of Christianity,
coupled with the imperialist drives of militarist nation-states,” Gaard examines how despite
“20th-century western industrialized nations purport to be largely secular, those countries with

Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies,” 5.
Kaishian and Hasmik, “The Science Underground,” 5.
32
Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” 22-23.
30
31

18

Christian and colonial origins retain the ideology of divinely inspired domination [through
heterosexism, racism, classism and the oppression of the Natural world] nonetheless.”33 These
dualisms construct binaries as oppositional instead of complementary, exclusionary rather than
inclusionary, with one side of the binary being valued as superior and the other side as devalued
and inferior. Gaard extends upon Val Plumwood’s “master model,”34 in which Plumwood argues
that the master model is at the heart of Western culture, and is “the identity…that has initiated,
Culture
Human
Male
Master
Universal
Civilized
Public
Reason (rationality)
Self
White
Financially
empowered
Heterosexual
Reason
Man (Masculine)
Citizen/“Native”
Cisgender
Competition
Individual
Control
Domination
Sameness
Normal
Healthy

Nature
Nature(nonhuman)
Female
Slave
Particular
Primitive
Private
Emotion (intuition)
Other
Non-White
Impoverished

perpetuated, and benefitted from Western

Queer
The Erotic
Woman (Feminine)
Immigrant/Invasive
Transgender
Cooperation
Communal
Consent
Reciprocity
Diversity
Deviance
Diseased/Disabled

Nature. In Figure 1, I have listed some key

culture’s alienation from and domination of
nature.” 36 Queer ecology utilizes this master
model to explore how Western culture values
the masculine and “civilized” human society
as superior to the devalued feminine and

elements of the master model, with
Plumwood’s dualized pairs in plain text,
Gaard’s additions in bold, and my own in
italicized, however this list is in no way
complete.
This master model places valued elements

Table 1. The Master Model
The Master Model of dominant Western culture valuehierarchal normative dualisms.35

on the left and devalued elements in

Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” 122.
Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 43.
35
Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” 23.
36
Gaard. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” 23.
33
34

19

opposition on the right side, creating a “dualized structure of otherness and negation.”37 This
model is meant to demonstrate how claims of certain identities or qualities being superior rely on
differences between the self and the other, along with upholding this claim to superiority
(“Master”) through the subordination of the other (“Slave”). Additionally with this model, the
conceptual linkages between inferiority are made more visible, for example, the vertical linking
of Nature and women, impoverishment with non-White, or queer with the erotic. One subversion
that is worth noting here, however, is the linkage between queer and Nature. Although both the
queer and Nature are devalued, queer sexuality is often framed as unnatural, rather than as
something closer to Nature. This is something I will discuss later on, as linkages of queerness
and transness to deviance, disease, and as something unnatural (or even a crime against nature) is
a primary focus in queer ecology. Where do queer and trans bodies and identities fit into
heterocentric ecological narratives then, if they are framed as unnatural or even against Nature
itself? Queer ecology attempts to present a different ecological narrative that recognizes the
reality of sexual and gender variations among humans, plants, and non-human animals, as well
as how “ideas and practices of nature, including both bodies and landscapes, are located in
particular productions of sexuality, and sex is, both historically and in the present, located in
particular formations of nature.”38

Imagination
Mortimer-Sandilands argues that it is queer ecologies’ “task to interrogate that relationship
[between sex and nature] in order to arrive at a more nuanced and effective sexual and
environmental understanding,”39 going beyond “simply… add[ing] ‘heterosexism’ to the long

37

Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 42.
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 4.
39
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 5.
38

20

list of dominations that shape our relations to nature, to pretend that we can just ‘add queers and
stir.’”40 Ultimately, queer ecology is a socially transformative framework that seeks to disrupt
heteronormative constructions of sexuality and gender that are entangled with popular
understandings of Nature/environment and extend the collective imaginings of both queerness
and naturalness. Imagination is a powerful thing from individual to a whole country, because as
adrienne maree brown explains, “imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to
a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns brown bombers into
terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us
superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability.”41 Collective imagination, the imagination
of “truth” and future possibilities formed within a community or nation, are often formed by the
stories we are told growing up and the stories we continue to tell each other.
From my experience growing up in the U.S., there tends to be a pattern of making our stories
around national identity one of universality. Historical stories and contemporary media are
oversaturated with representations of “normality” through individualistic, White, able-bodied,
heteronormative narratives. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with these types of
stories and representations. However presenting one type of narrative as the “true” experience of
everyone not only stifles our collective ability to empathize and understand others from different
life experiences, but also limits our ability to imagine and enact other ways of being. Universal
narratives sanitize the nuance of diverse stories and erases the reality of living within an
oppressive social structure experienced by different individuals. Gendered violence arises when
we can only imagine our relationships in terms of patriarchy and the masculine domination over
the feminine. Transphobia arises when we can only imagine a world with only two genders that

40
41

Sandilands, “Lavender's Green? Some Thoughts on Queer(y)ing Environmental Politics,” 21.
brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 18.

21

correlate to genitalia and anyone outside that binary as unnatural. Queerphobia arises when we
can only imagine a world where only heterosexual love is valid. What if we could imagine
something different, a world where categorization of identity didn’t result in or rely on harm of
the “other”? What if we could imagine our society as one with unending variation, where
difference was seen as a strength rather than as divisive? What kind of world could we create if
we could shift the imagination of Nature as an infinite resource meant only to be used by
humans, to imagining humans as a part of and having no separation from Nature as well as
something we have a familial relationship with?42
Rather than simply being an academic theory, queer ecology has a political agenda calling
“for a re-imagining of what is ‘natural,’ for greater inclusivity of marginalized groups as subjects
rather than objects, and ecological concern for variability…[and] for mobilizing on behalf of
important issues, such as climate change, that threaten life in all its expressions.”43 A simplified
way that I have come to understand queer ecology is that queer ecology has three crucial
elements: 1) it works to disrupt heteronormative dualisms of sex and Nature (e.g. reductive,
socially constructed binaries, such as man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, natural/unnatural,
etc.) as well as Western-centric universalized knowledge and narratives, 2) seeks to extend the
scientific and cultural imagination of history and for possibilities of more resilient cooperation,
interrelatedness, and interdependence between humans and Nature in the present and future, and
3) provides frameworks for transformative coalition building toward justice-centered futurity in
which queerness and life in all its varied forms are valued. Queer ecology thus disrupts

This is the notion of “kincentricity” which will be discussed later on.
Schnabel, “The Question of Subjectivity in Three Emerging Feminist Science Studies Frameworks: Feminist
Postcolonial Science Studies, New Feminist Materialisms, and Queer Ecologies,” 14.
42
43

22

heteronormativity in ecological narratives, extends possibilities of our pasts, presents, and
futures, and seeks to transform our relationships and interdependence.

Why Queer Ecology?
As a queer transgender person, I have survived gendered violence, felt exclusion and
alienation in environmental organizations and learning spaces, and witnessed the active erasure
and discrimination against LGBTQ+ identities and narratives. As an academic, my research has
been done in the pursuit to fulfill my desire to shape a less harmful world—one where those with
oppressed identities fighting for the basic rights and protections aren’t seen as having a
dangerous, radical political agenda. In my search for an intersectional and transformative
framework, I realized that “what we imagine queer ecology to be emerges in tandem with what
we hope it contributes to the world.”44 Guiding my research on queer ecology I focused on two
questions: 1) how can queer theory be used to deconstruct and disrupt dominant gendered
perspectives and understanding of the environment/Nature in order to create a more nuanced
understanding of gender, sexuality, and Nature; and 2) how can queer ecology be used to
enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) in environmental perspectives and
practices as well as aid in the creation of a more just and equitable future in the collective
imagination?
During this period in history I have observed and experienced LGBTQ+ people having to
constantly justify their existence and defend against supposedly “scientifically” supported claims
of LGBTQ+ people being a trend or unnatural, and therefore underserving of having rights or to
be treated with dignity. In this regard, queer ecology can intervene by naming and addressing
institutional heteronormative scientific methods and discourses. Queer ecology recognizes how

44

Azzarello, et al., “Queer Ecology: A Rountable Discussion,” 84.

23

some Western scientists’ perceptions are influenced and shaped by cultural values. In Kaishian
and Hasmik’s article calling for blending of queer theory in mycology, they explain that

The history of modern science has been disproportionately written by white, often
Christian, men from Western Europe, excluding other voices. Consequently, dominant
cultural lenses—heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ableism, and binaries inherent to
them—have influenced scientific understandings.45
Even when scientists don’t consider themselves to have biases and believe they are conducting
research through pure objectivity, without the recognition of how heteronormative and
hegemonic perceptions of “truth” and “reality” have informed the institution of science,
scientists will continue to limit potential scientific findings, or worse, serve to justify the harms
committed against devalued bodies and identities. In a podcast interview, Dr. Patricia Kaishian
calls on scientists to engage with their research and the discourses they participate in with a
greater awareness of the institutions they are a part of, and how the knowledge they impart
impacts politics.46 Some scientists are heeding this call, writing more articles for the general
public along with using social media platforms to explain how sex is a biological category,
whereas gender is a social construction, in attempts to dispel essentialist claims against queer and
trans human identities. 47 More and more scientists are writing about queer and transgender
animals, the multitude of mating systems among plants and fungi, as well as the variety of
animal “family” structures and cooperative relationships.48 When scientific literature is able to

Kaishian and Hasmik, “The Science Underground,” 2.
Springer, “Queendom Fungi: Mycology as a Queer Discipline.”
47
Sun, “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia.” See also Editors, “The New Science of Sex and Gender:
Why the New Science of Sex and Gender Matters for Everyone.”
48
Imbler, “Female Hummingbirds Avoid Harassment By Looking Like Males.” See also Prager, “Four Flowering
Plants That Have Been Decidedly Queered: The Queer History of the Pansy and Other Flowers,” and Schrefer,
“Queer Animals Are Everywhere. Science is Finally Catching On.”
45
46

24

explore the “emergent possibilities” of the Natural world’s queerness and interdependencies, our
systems of knowledge become more open to different ways of theorizing Nature.49
While this type of information works to naturalize/normalize human queer and trans
identities, understanding plant and non-human animal relationships free from heteronormative
understandings could have massive implications for conservation practices. When
conservationist practices are filtered through heteronormative biases, the whole picture of how
non-human species interact with each other becomes incomplete. When animals’ behaviors don’t
fit compulsory-heterosexual or anthropocentric ideas about what we want to see about ourselves
reflected in nature, information gets ignored or misinterpreted in order to serve a heterosexist
narrative. This has the potential to lead to practices which hinder our ability to heal the damages
human activity created in the first place. At its worse, Western conservation has at times adopted
dangerous rhetoric from Deep Ecology or Ecofascist frameworks in which humans are framed as
a disease upon the planet or placing the blame of climate crisis upon overpopulation—ignoring
the consequences of overconsumption by the wealthiest nations.50 More often than not, these
discourses come from those whose identities hold the most biopolitical power, pointing the
finger of blame upon non-White, Global South nations, calling for control over the bodies of
those able to give birth. In order to resist heteronormative science which places limitations on
Western conservation, more arguments are being made for coalition building with Indigenous
communities. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Indigenous Science) has a significantly longer
history and deeper understanding of ecology than Western science, has been formed outside of
the influence of capitalism, embraces the responsibility of care for human and non-human
communities, and has the ability to envision and incorporate humans—regardless of sexuality or

49
50

Gibson and Gagliano, “The Feminist Plant,” 138.
Dyett and Thomas, “Overpopulation Discourse: Patriarchy, Racism, and the Specter of Ecofascism,” 217.

25

gender expression—into ecological narratives. If Western conservation is truly dedicated to
protecting our world from further loss of biodiversity, then now is the time to embrace the
diversity of knowledge production and intellect of resilient, adaptable communities and cultures.

Queer Futurity and Expanding Possibilities
As more people begin to express a desire for change and recognize the need to take
responsibility for the restructuring of our broken systems, queer ecologies seek to offer hope and
provide permission to dream of utopia. Not a utopia of hegemonic, assimilated, pre-industrial
communities, but one that is diverse, multicultural, socially just and ecologically sustainable.
Although utopianism is usually academically dismissed or even shouted down as idealistic,
naïve, or impractical, how can we start to work towards a future we would want to live in if we
can’t even imagine it in the first place? From my own personal experiences in transformative
justice communities, charges of utopian thinking as naivety are actually quite unfounded. Many
people exhaustively working to effectively transform their communities are far from naïve, fully
understand that the causes they are working on may never be achieved in their lifetimes—or
ever—however, even with this understanding they continue to fight with the hope that maybe
one day a future generation will be liberated because of the work that has been done in the past.
In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz explores queer utopianism and queer futurity through
the understanding of queerness as the future’s domain, writing that

The here and now is a prison house … we must dream and enact new and better pleasures,
other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds … Queerness is that thing that
lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing…Queerness is
essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete
possibility for another world.51

51

Muñoz, Crusing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 1.

26

When living within systems that ultimately reject queerness and transness, being able to imagine
other worlds and create alternative systems has become not only a crucial survival tactic, but also
a strength of LGBTQ+ communities working towards collective liberation. Without queer
utopianism or even simply the ability to imagine different possibilities for a future world, many
future imaginings fall into the trap of nihilism. Too often are dark apocalyptic narratives
produced, centering an individualistic story of one person’s (usually a White man) tooth-andclaw struggle to survive in a world where modernity has collapsed, Nature is hostile, and every
other human a potential enemy. These narratives are at the heart of Western anxieties—the fear
of Nature destroying and conquering the civilized, the threat of the stranger/other, and the
concern over the survivance of White heteronormative masculinity. However, through the use of
queer futurity, narratives responding to climate crisis could convey stories of collective survival,
building understanding of how humans, as social animals, can rebuild our relations to each other
through a sense of interdependence, cooperation, and care. Maybe this sounds too optimistic to
envision right here, right now, however LGBTQ+ communities holding onto potential futures are
already working to create these alternative care systems within their own communities through
mutual aid, bringing those utopian dreams to life.
Queer ecology not only has much to offer up towards the validation of LGBTQ+ identities,
but also demonstrates that the lived experiences of queer and trans people offers a different way
of looking at the world for everyone— and that this different perspective is actually a gift. Cleo
Wölfe Hazard’s Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, examines how
queer/trans theory presents significant opportunities in ecology, as “queer and trans people’s
experiences of grieving premature death… can stoke collective action on extinction and

27

ecological repair.”52 Moreover, Wölfe Hazard points out how “trans people’s experiences of
transfiguring our bodies and social relations model a new way for cis straight people to embrace
dynamism and unpredictability,” especially in an effort to disrupt normative dystopian narratives
which “too often breed inaction and dissociation among white settlers, who have long avoided
responsibility for the dystopian presents our policies have created in Native, Black, and
immigrant communities.” Not dissimilar to other communities that experience identity-based
oppression, LGBTQ+ people have had to develop their own systems of care, often creating
connections among “found family” after being rejected by our own families.
We work to unlearn our own internalized oppressions and to break the cycle toxic behaviors,
uplift and celebrate each other, build networks for mutual aid53, mourn the losses of our rights
and our lives together, and create spaces for our community to be safe, heal, and thrive in. These
queer kinships and solidarity networks offer a “model for caring for other species and damaged
places”54 that dominant structures of heteronormativity, nuclear family, individualism, and
capitalistic systems of care currently cannot conceive. Queer kinship offers a reimaging of our
ways of relating to one another, especially those whom we share no blood ties to. Within queer
ecologies, queer kinship is expanded upon through Indigenous world views of “kincentricity,” or
the “view of humans and nature as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and
origins.”55 Through the lens of kincentricity, “a healthy environment is achievable only when
humans regard life around them as kin” as the idea of having familial responsibilities to plants,
non-human animals, the land, air, and water, allows humans to see ourselves as “a legitimate part

52

Wölfe Hazard, Underflows, 5.
Mutual aid is the support or aid provided by collective effort within a community, especially in an emergency or
to help those in need.
54
Wölfe Hazard, Underflows, 17.
55
Senos, et al. “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Restoration Practice,” 397.
53

28

of nature, that we have responsibilities within nature, and that in exercising those responsibilities
we are as ‘ecological’ or ‘natural’ as any other species.”56 So in taking kincentricity into account,
queering kinship not only has the “power to denaturalize heterosexist norms…[and] shift away
from an idea of kinship rooted in procreation and lineal descent,”57 but also reshape our
relational responsibilities toward the natural world. Wölfle Hazard illustrates how to
conceptualize queer relational methodologies within the practices of environmental science by
asking:

If salmon could be kin—if ecologists could, through caring for and closely observing and
working to improve the life chances for a given organism, come to feel a kind of queer
kinship with the fish—what would that mean, and how would it happen? ... Perhaps if
queer ecologists theorize more-than-human kinship, we can replace such mechanistic
models of ecosystem function, rooted in control and extraction, with queerly anarchistic
models of how to live together.58

Queer ecologies offers us an escape from the logics of human exceptualism in which humans are
separate from and the controllers of Nature and opens the potentiality of envisioning an
ecological niche for humanity. Western constructions of categories has far too long upheld a
dichotomy of “us” vs. “them,” and it is time to unlearn and rethink our relations not just to other
humans, but the more-than-human lives upon which we depend for our own health and survival.
Queer ecology invites us to reconsider and embrace the messiness of a queered Nature, to see a
complex, interconnected, interdependent wholeness of the world around us—and to see
ourselves as a part of that wholeness. During this time of great isolation from the ongoing

Senos, et al., “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Restoration Practice,” 397.
Wölfe Hazard, Underflows, 155-156.
58
Wölfe Hazard, Underflows, 155-156.
56
57

29

pandemic, rethinking and re-feeling our relations and responsibilities may be a beginning place
for reconnecting and reimagining what we want “normal” to look and feel like.

30

Disruption (Queering Nature)
Biological Exuberance, is, above all, an affirmation of life’s vitality and infinite possibilities: a
worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities
are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable. A world, in short,
exactly like the one we inhabit.
-Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity59

A Natural Nature
What comes to mind when you think about what is “natural?” Even when the dominant
culture devalues Nature, or at least only values certain types of ecosystems and environments
over other kinds (e.g. “wilderness”), labeling something as “natural” tends to be interpreted as
something positive. We seek out places with natural beauty, we pay more for food and home care
products labeled natural, and we place value judgments upon people for their natural talents. But
how do we decide what is “natural” for humans? The default logic seems to be that if something
occurs in Nature/non-human animals, then “naturalness” can be claimed. By this logic, in
determining what is “natural,” or even “unnatural” for humans, we arrive at the equation of
occurs in animals = natural = acceptable in humans.60 However, this line of thinking is flawed
as it functions more to serve moral judgements rather than scientific reality. We tend to ignore
behaviors in animals we don’t want reflected in human behaviors and potentially misinterpret
behaviors when we anthropomorphize animals. There are plenty of behaviors that humans
participate in, and non-human animals do not, such as wearing clothing or reading a book, yet
these types of behaviors typically aren’t deemed “unnatural” for humans. On the flipside, there
are behaviors that animals engage in, such as infanticide, coercive sex (rape), incest, and

59
60

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 262.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 76.

31

cannibalism, which are not often seen as desirable or “natural” for most humans. It would seem
then that “when animals do something that we like, we call it natural. When they do something
that we don't like, we call it animalistic.”61 In Biological Exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl adds to
this argument by pointing out how even when a characteristic of a human population is
biologically determined (“born this way”), such as non-White racial groups for example, having
a “biological basis for their difference…has done little to eliminate racial prejudice,” whereas
religious groups “can claim no such biological prerogative, and yet this does not invalidate the
“entitlement of such groups to freedom from discrimination.”62 In other words, just because a
body was born a certain way does not guarantee that individual will have equal rights.
While there still isn’t a consensus if LGBTQ+ identities are biologically determined
(“nature”) or culturally created (“nurture)—or maybe a blend of both, many of the arguments
justifying discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals and communities deploy the claim of
these identities being “unnatural.” Although calling those with LGBTQ+ identities unnatural is
nothing new, I have observed that in previous decades anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments seemed to be
expressed largely through religious arguments, whereas recently, I have observed anti-LGBTQ+
sentiments claiming to be backed by science.63 A prime example of conservatives attempting to
weaponize science in pursuit of legal LGBTQ+ discrimination was in February 2021, when
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a video on the social media platform Twitter, of
her hanging an anti-trans sign reading “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE ‘Trust the
Science!’”64 in response to Representative Marie Newman displaying a transgender pride flag

Weinrich. “Is Homosexuality Biologically Natural?” 77.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 77.
63
Sun, “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia.”
64
Quotations around “Trust the Science!” were from original text on sign. If Rep. Greene is quoting a source, no
citation on what “science” we should trust is given. See GLAAD, “Marjorie Taylor Greene - GLAAD
Accountability Project.”
61
62

32

outside her office. Unfortunately this type of political display emboldens opponents of LGBTQ+
rights and protections, and as we saw in 2021, increases violent acts against queer and trans
individuals. While Rep. Greene is on the extreme end of the spectrum of anti-LGBTQ+
expression, this sentiment has not arisen out of a vacuum. There are still many people that are
unaware that there are non-human animals that engage in same-sex sexual activity or that there
are plants and non-human animals that do not neatly fit into binary categorizations of
male/masculine and female/feminine. Even though there is an ever-growing body of research on
queer non-humans and bodies expressing what humans might consider as “gender” outside of a
binary, academic and scientific institutions continue to push a heterosexist master narrative for
Nature. Many writers such as Stacy Alaimo, Bruce Bagemihl, Noël Sturgeon, and Joan
Roughgarden have explored how in this master narrative animals are conceived as having no
culture of their own65 (since culture is viewed as uniquely belonging to humans and animals are
thus pure “Nature”) and promotes a reprocentric understanding of non-human animal sexuality.
Reprocentricism is the privileging of reproduction/procreation—it is the view that presumes that
all animals are heterosexual and that all heterosexual sex is intended for the purpose of
reproducing only,66 and ultimately that reproduction is the goal of life.
However, as Sturgeon points out, while this reprocentric view of biology serves to
normalize heterosexuality “as natural and therefore right because it is a form of sexuality that is
reproductive,” there is also an underlying logic that goes beyond sex simply being about having
babies, and is rather “about preserving and reproducing particular forms of family, social power,
and economic principle.”67 Framing reproduction as the only reason for sex ultimately denies the

Alaimo, “Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of ‘Queer’ Animals,” 57.
Sturgeon, “Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Enviornmental Reproductive Justice,” 106.
67
Sturgeon, “Penguin Family Values,” 106.
65
66

33

reality that people have sex for other reasons, erasing the relevance of pleasure and desire, the
existence of non-penetrative (read as penis-in-vagina) forms of sex, same-sex sexual activity,
people who are unable to conceive children having sex, as well as the reality that some people
with the ability to bear children chose to terminate their pregnancies—regardless of the legality
or access to safe and affordable abortions. Reprocentric understandings of sex seem less about
scientific realities and more about preserving a conservative worldview of who is superior and
how those with valued identities should present and perform. As both LGBTQ+ rights and
reproductive justice are simultaneously under attack currently, Sturgeon looks at how
conservatives have mobilized around the fear of the collapse of heteronormativity. Within prolife and pro-family campaigns, there is an intense fear of allowing women to have autonomy
over their bodies through their own decisions about their gender expression, sexuality, and
pregnancies. Women’s autonomy undermines politically conservative Christian views of a
divinely-created family structure—which is understood as “natural,” with “a father who is the
authority; a mother who is the helpmate and chief childcare provider; and several children living
in a framework that is Christian, religious, patriarchal, heterosexual, nationalistic, U.S., and
nuclear—that is, right- wing.”68 This narrow imagining of what a family can and should look like
limits personal freedoms, but when “this particular family form…[is] located within a [White]
suburban, consumer economy dependent on extremes of global inequity,” we limit our
imagination for a more just world. We prevent ourselves from being able to imagine and accept
other forms of family structures or alternative economic systems that do not rely on the
subjugation and exploitation of Global South nations, or for human societies to thrive without
causing so much damage to our environments.

68

Sturgeon, ““Penguin Family Values,” 102.

34

Although Western science is hailed as superior for its objectivity, and sometimes viewed
as a different “belief” system to religion, writers such as Rachel Stein and Dr. Patricia Kaishian,
have argued that the “culture of institutional Science”69 has a history of being shaped by
Christianity. Kaishian examines how early influential scientists “such as Descartes, Euler, and
Newton, often were loyal to the Church in their supposedly objective pursuits of knowledge,”
and introduces the concept of agro-heterosexuality, in which the Christian heterosexual family
structure was connected with scientific agriculture. With agriculture serving as a metaphor,
“Christian thinkers compared human sexual actions to planting a field and only those activities
that corresponded to ‘seeding,’ or procreation, were accepted as natural.”70 Here, any form of sex
that wasn’t intended for or resulted in procreation—both same-sex and opposite-sex—was seen
as unreproductive and thus unnatural, or even against nature. Kaishian, alongside many other
feminist scholars, call for challenging the idea of Western science as the arbiters of truth and to
question who these ideas are really meant to serve.
Two primary ways in which Western science’s objectivity can be challenged is in the
ways scientists anthropomorphize animal behaviors to fit a comphet master narrative, as well as
in the ways behaviors outside this narrative are erased. In Bagemihl’s research, he finds that in
scientific discourse around queer animals often mirrors that of discussions on human sexualities.
Looking back to the late 1800s, Bagemihl describes how a “litany of derogatory terms…such as
strange, bizarre, perverse, aberrant, deviant, abnormal, anomalous, and unnatural” have and
continue to this day to be “used routinely in ‘objective’ scientific descriptions.”71 Alongside
homophobic sentiments, derogatory language toward (assumed) heterosexual animals is also

Kaishian and Hasmik, “The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline,” 6.
Stein, “The Place, Promised, That Has Not Yet Been,” 286.
71
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 89.
69
70

35

used when behaviors don’t uphold the master narrative of monogamy and the nuclear family as
the “natural” family structure. Female birds who lay eggs in other birds’ nests are called
“parasites,” male animals that resemble females or females that look similar to males of the same
species are labeled as “mimics” or even “sexual parasites,” and female animals that mate with
multiple males are referred to as “promiscuous.” These types of outright biases not only destroy
the credibility of supposedly objective scientific findings, but also promotes the notion that most
“fit” animals survive through means of manipulation, deceit, and competition (violence). In one
example that Roughgarden explores, it was discovered that in Wattled jacana (Jacana jacana)
populations females reversed “traditional” gender roles by being larger, spending “their days
jousting with one another,” and controlling territories with harems of smaller males who tended
the eggs. When the male researchers discovered that the males cared for the eggs even though
the “eggs were fathered by males outside the harem,” the researchers were outraged, “asserting
that male jacanas were being ‘cuckolded.’”72 When these sorts of scientific narratives are
transferred to humans, other forms of family structures are seen as invalid, women who engage
in non-monogamous sexual relationships are labeled as lacking morals, trans people—especially
transwomen—are seen trying to trick everyone for some malicious motive or are
attacked/murdered and blamed for their attackers’ actions under the legal defense of “trans
panic,”73 and cooperation is devalued in comparison to competition or is seen as rare among nonhuman animals.

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, 47.
Holden, “The Gay/Trans Panic Defense: What It Is, and How to End It.” The gay/trans panic legal defense
legitimizes and excuses violent and lethal behavior against members of the LGBTQ+ community. The defense is
defined by the LGBT Bar as "a legal strategy which asks a jury to find that a victim's sexual orientation or gender
identity is to blame for the defendant's violent reaction, including murder."
72
73

36

When same-sex sexual activity in non-human animals is acknowledged by scientists,
alongside pejorative descriptions of queer sexual behaviors, same-sex sexual activity is often
framed as being an “error”—that one animal is too unintelligent to tell the difference between a
male and female or was tricked through “mimicry.” In other accounts, narratives are created to
essentially “explain the gay away” by framing same-sex sexual activity as functioning to
“stimulate” or “contribute to” heterosexual reproduction.74 More often than not, however,
scientists either fail to report on same-sex sexual activity because of biases or fear that they will
either be accused of being queer, or their work simply will not be published. As Bagemihl points
out, in some cases scientific reports that originally included discussion on queer animal
behaviors are republished with those discussions removed, or “homosexuality is discussed but is
buried in unpublished dissertations, obscure technical reports, foreign language journals, or
articles whose titles give no clues as to their contents.”75 When research on queer animal
behaviors is incomplete or inaccessible, scientists who are working in conservation or even
zoology go uninformed about the reality of queer animal sexualities, along with the important
roles queer animals may play in assuring the survival of that population. When scientists believe
that same-sex sexual activity among non-human animals is either unnatural, unimportant, rare, or
doesn’t happen at all, not only are understandings of these species incomplete, but
misinformation then gets disseminated to the public who absorb these animal narratives and then
transfer these ideas into human narratives.
Non-human animals have always been important in human stories. We tell stories about
animals as allegory for our own struggles, often times in the form of stories for children to learn
important lessons about social norms. Sometimes we use stories about non-human animals to

74
75

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 89.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 104.

37

mobilize people into action around environmental issues, especially around the extinction of
charismatic species impacted by climate change, or we use non-human animals as symbols, such
as the Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) as an emblem for American freedom and
democracy. However, other times we tell stories about non-human animals as mirrors for
humans—anthropomorphizing animal behavior as direct reflections to human behaviors, and
thus creating the logic of exists in animals = “natural” = acceptable in humans.
Anthropomorphizing animals is not innately “bad” or necessarily problematic, after all, much
Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is taught through the tradition of oral story telling with
animal ancestors being front and center. However, problems arise when stories created from
scientific observations are imbued with biases and moral judgements that don’t reflect the
diverse realities of animal cultures, or have a hidden agenda of promoting social injustices. What
many authors in the field of queer ecologies suggest is not to try to directly compare humans to
non-human animals and vice versa, but rather to be open to drawing parallels “between how
people behave and how animals behave, as though animals offered biological cultures
resembling ours.” 76 In other words, we can learn how “the vast majority of other creatures have
an approach to sexual and gender variance that is decidedly humane, rather than human--and
they might even offer us models of how societies could integrate differently oriented or
ambiguously gendered individuals into the fabric of social life.”77 One way to illustrate this
framework would be to look at some of our contemporary primate ancestors—Chimpanzees
(Pan troglodytes) and Bonobos (Pan paniscus). In both of these species, male and female samesex sexual activity, pair-bonding (a close relationship formed through courtship or sexual
activity), and affectionate behaviors have been observed in the wild and in captivity.

76
77

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 4.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 59.

38

Primatologist Paul L. Vasey suggests “that homosexual behavior in primates is characterized by
a noticeable lack of hostility and segregation from the animals around them.”78 The lack of
aggression towards non-human animals that exhibit homosexual behavior shows that these close
relatives of ours live in a culture that doesn’t “other” or alienate members who are queer, or in
other words, non-human animals generally don’t engage in homophobic behaviors. However, an
interesting and important difference between Chimpanzee and Bonobo culture is how males
interact with females. Male Chimpanzees are often aggressive towards females, using violence
and intimidation to sexually coerce females into matings, whereas with Bonobos, sometimes
referred to as peaceful primates, male aggression and sexual coercion towards females is rare.
Between these two closely related species we can see a contrast in how Chimpanzees socially
organize around male domination, whereas Bonobos have a more “female-centered society.”79 In
this example, Roughgarden explains that “no explanation exists for why some societies develop
coercive power relations between the sexes, whereas others form equitable power relations,”
however, we need to understand that “how power relates to sex is not a biological universal. We
may choose to live like some species and not others.”80 How we treat others around us and what
behaviors we are willing to accept as a “normal” part of our culture is ultimately our choice. We
can chose to live in a world where we devalue certain identities and bodies which ultimately
justifies gendered and racial violence, or we can chose to live in a world where all life has value,
and that value is reflected in our systems and interactions with one another.

78

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 54.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 150.
80
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 53.
79

39

Sex Versus Gender
In the wake of supposedly scientifically justified claims that there are “only two genders:
male and female” or that queer sexualities are “unnatural,” one might wonder what science
actually has to say about sex and gender. Fortunately, these claims are more of a reflection of
heterosexist bias than actual science, and many scientists have begun to be more outspoken
around the issue of sex being a biological categorization and gender being one of social
construction. American evolutionary biologist and ecologist Joan Roughgarden’s work
Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, takes explaining
this difference in categorization to task. Roughgarden explains that there needs to be an
understanding between biological (female/male) and social categories (woman/man), and that the
criteria for social categories are open to change. To clarify how the biological categorization of
male and female are understood by biologists, Roughgarden explains that

to a biologist, ‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large
gametes. Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the
larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don’t recognize any other universal difference
between male and female.81

Even though there are some indirect markers of gamete size existing in some species, claims that
rely on a universal binary outside of gamete size are often easy to pick a part. For instance, the
claim that all males have a Y chromosome and therefore a Y chromosome makes a body male is
inaccurate, as not all animal species have a Y-chromosome at all (e.g. amphibians, reptiles, and
birds), and not all human males are born with a Y-chromosome—in fact, even some female
humans are born with a Y-chromosome! It would seem that the only concrete universal binary

81

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 23.

40

that we can currently say truly exists is simply that of large (egg) and small (sperm) gametes—
from there the diversity begins to unfold.
Although a true binary between gamete size exists and a body is categorized and “sexed”
in relation to which gametes that body produces, gender is typically considered belonging solely
to humans. However with the increasing amount of research being conducted on animals that
exhibit sexual polymorphism (having more than one or two types of males or females among
their populations), the term “gender” would seem to be applicable in non-human animal studies.
In defining gender, Roughgarden explains that “gender is appearance plus action, how an
organism uses morphology, including color and shape, plus behavior to carry out a sexual
role.”82 Note how there isn’t any language connecting to sex, procreation, or reproductive organs
to gender. This way of defining gender allows for the great variation to be recognized and
validated without having to deny the universal biological binary between male and female.

Sexual Selection Theory Undone
While many anti-LGBTQ+ arguments are rooted in bias and a lack of scientific
education, much of this bias and misinformation stems from the continued teaching and
validation of the sexual selection theory. Although most queer ecologies scholars support
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through common descent, it is Darwin’s sexual selection
theory that many authors argue needs to be reexamined, redefined, or even thrown out
altogether.83 Darwin’s sexual selection theory is one of the first attempts to apply a universal
theory of gender and explain through evolutionary biology why males and females should obey a
universal template. Basing his claims on his empirical studies, Darwin wrote on how “males of

82
83

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 27.
Roughgarden. Evolution’s Rainbow, 164.

41

almost all animals have stronger passions than females,” and that “the female... with the rarest of
exceptions is less eager than the male... she is coy.”84 In other words, males are supposed to be
eager for sex, whereas females are more reserved or timid. Darwin also proposes in this theory
that when females are open to sex, they choose the most “vigorous and well-armed…the
strongest and most vigorous males, or those provided with the best weapons…” which “have led
to the improvement of the…species.” 85In observing peacocks, Darwin also argues that female
animals have beauty standards in their mate selection as “many female progenitors of the
peacock must…by the continued preference of the most beautiful males, [have] rendered the
peacock the most splendid of living birds.”86 Here, Darwin is arguing that males are universally
the way they are because they are ultimately fulfilling what females universally want in a mate—
the strongest and the most attractive males—which in turn creates offspring that moves the
species towards a state of “perfectibility.”
Attempting to explain the differences between human men and women, Darwin applies
sexual selection theory to argue that besides reproductive differences, there are also biological
differences in mental capabilities, writing that

woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and
less selfishness … Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition and this leads to
ambition which passes too easily into selfishness … the chief distinction in the intellectual
powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he
takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination or
merely the use of the senses and hands.87

84

Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, 218-222.
Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, 228-235.
86
Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, 449.
87
Darwin, Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, 873.
85

42

Extending his theory to explain racial differences, Darwin also argued that innate differences
exist as a result of sexual selection and that these differences create a hierarchal structure
between the “higher” and “lower” races, with White, Western European races being more
“evolved,” and non-White races existing on a spectrum of being less evolved or “primitive”.88
Although Darwin seems to have been forward-thinking for a scientist of his time in
considering female choice in his theory, he unfortunately contradicts this female-centeredness in
mate selection by adopting Thomas Malthus’ theory of “struggle for existence.” Malthus’s
theory emphasizes a tooth-and-claw struggle for survival narrative, wherein violence and
competition are at the core of evolution and ultimately all life. Even though Darwin argues that
female choice in male mate selection plays a role in natural selection, he also argues for the
universal template of male domination of females, proposing that

it is certain that amongst almost all animals there is a struggle between males for the
possession of the female…the strongest, and … best armed of the males … unite with the
more vigorous and better-nourished females … [and] surely rear a larger number of offspring
than the retarded females, which would be compelled to unite with the conquered and less
powerful males.89
In Darwin’s work, expanding upon Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomical classification system, he views
diversity as hierarchy, placing “higher” species as superior—closer to perfectness—down to the
“lower”—“less evolved/primitive”—and therefore, inferior species, where he stresses “a
weeding out of the weak and sickly and naturalizing male domination of females.”90 The notion
that a value-hierarchy exists between species, human races, and the sexes (male and female), that
the females seek to breed with the “best” males (e.g. the most attractive, virile, and aggressive)

88

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 39-42.
Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, 498-499.
90
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 165.
89

43

and males actively seek to possess the healthiest females—continues to be taught as the universal
narrative even today. This narrative has not only been used to justify racism and sexism but has
also pitted abled bodies against “disabled” bodies. Those with differences from a “perfectly fit”
bodily ideal are framed as diseased or even degenerate, and therefore are less than human,
undeserving of accommodation, and at the most extreme end, deserving of eradication.
Even worse still, the contemporary version of sexual selection theory takes the narrative
of the “naturally” aggressive and possessive male template a step further by endorsing coercive
sex. Roughgarden discusses how the modern notion of sexual selection theory has not been
improved upon, but rather has become an even worse reflection of “male hubris”:

According to today’s version, males are supposed to be more promiscuous than females
because sperm are cheap, and hence males are continually roaming around looking for
females to fertilize. Conversely, females are supposed to be choosy because their eggs are
expensive, and hence they must guard their investment from being diluted with bad genes
from an inferior male. A male is naturally entitled to overpower a female's reluctance lest
reproduction cease, extinguishing the species.91
The theory of “expensive-egg-cheap-sperm” and the naturalization of rape was originated by
Darwin’s contemporaries, rather than Darwin himself. They proposed that males unable to
reproduce through “the ‘usual way’ can reproduce through rape,”92 and thus spreading the
“genes for rape.” Ultimately contemporary sexual selection theory argues that “all men are
therefore potential rapists.”93 While this theory should be alarming and offensive (especially to
men), there isn’t enough evidence to support this theory as “so many rapes are non-reproductive
that rape can't possibly be viewed as a means of sperm transfer for disadvantaged men to

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 167-168.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 173.
93
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 173.
91
92

44

achieve reproduction.” 94In actuality, sexual coercion and violence is really about relationship
dynamics, power, and domination—not reproduction or biology.
As scientific thought and practices continue to evolve along with an increase in the
acknowledgement and acceptance of sexual diversity in non-human animal studies, there is
enough empirical evidence today to falsify sexual selection theory as a universal template for all
males and females. Although there are some males in some species that use aggression to control
females (e.g. Chimpanzees) or females who may prefer the showiest males (e.g. possibly
Peacocks), there is far too much evidence of other forms of gender dynamics based on
cooperation, or even reverse gender stereotypes when a gender binary exists, to support sexual
selection theory as a scientifically accurate universal model. With Malthus’s tooth-and-claw
struggle for existence theory being discredited in the 1950’s,95 it is time for scientific institutions
to rework the sexual selection theory and reject universal biological narratives of gender
essentialism and brutal competition for survival as scientific truth. Roughgarden argues that “the
uncritical acceptance of sexual selection theory has led to underestimation of the extent of
cooperation among animals, forcing scientists to construe all interactions between organisms as
somehow competitive,” and is scientifically inaccurate as it is “unable to account, even by
extension, for the diversity of bodies, genders, sexualities, and life histories” that exist among
living organisms. Rather than being a scientifically accurate model, sexual selection theory is
more readily a tool to promote social injustice and is long overdue for a reimagining or
retirement. As more information becomes available about queer animal sexualities, multitudes of
animal “gender” presentations, and evidence of animal friendships and cooperation, those

94
95

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 174.
Roughgarden, Evolution's Rainbow, 161-162.

45

belonging to sexual and gender minorities, such as myself, have found empowerment through
these new narratives.
Even though Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is inaccurate, there is value in teaching
it as a way to ground scientific inquiry historically, as it illustrates the influence of cultural bias.
Darwin’s sexual selection theory intentionally supports the status quo of his time, which was “a
society that glamorized a colonial military and assigned dutiful, sexually passive roles to proper
wives,” whereas today’s version of sexual selection attempts to justify gendered sexual violence,
reproductive injustice, and patriarchal relationship dynamics. It is no longer acceptable to
continue using inaccurate theories and models that either suppress the exuberant biological
realities of our world, or frame diversity and difference as deviance, unnatural, or undesirable.
Especially in light of the environmental threats posed by the climate crisis, we need scientific
frameworks that can be adaptable, accept and accommodate new information that has not been
molded by essentialist bias, and can envision both human and non-human relationships through
cooperation rather than violence and competition.

Myths busted
As more evidence of same-sex sexual activity and pair bonds, along with the variety of
“gendered” body types present in many species comes to light, sexual selection is unable to
account for the diversity of sexual acts, bodies, and behaviors in non-human species. If Western
science has any hope of being truly objective and reflective of biological realities, then scientific
institutions must begin the work of undoing “heteronormative epistemologies” that ignore certain
knowledges in favor of manufacturing particles of truth to fit the particular narrative of the
master model. 96 As one major source of transformative research on the sexual diversity of

96

Alaimo, “Eluding Capture,” 56.

46

animal behaviors and bodies, Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance documents over 450
different non-human species that have been observed engaging in queer behaviors. While
limiting his work to mammals and
birds, Bagemihl examines the
wide range of “same- sex acts,
same- sex childrearing pairs,
intersex animals, multiple
‘genders,’ ‘transvestism,’ and
‘transsexuality’ [(transgender)]
existing throughout the moreFigure 1. The World of Animal Homosexuality.
A map showing a location where animals of that type have been observed
engaging in homosexual behavior (courtship, sexual, pair-bonding, and/or
parenting).97

than- human world.”98 Finding
evidence in his research that
queer animals have been observed

on every continent, as we see on the map in Figure 2, Bagemihl argues that “the world is, indeed,
teeming with homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered creatures of every stripe and feather.”99
Drawing from over two centuries of scientific observation, Bagemihl’s research shows that

males caress and kiss each other, showing tenderness and affection toward one another rather
than just hostility and aggression. Females form long lasting pair bonds-- or maybe just meet
briefly for sex, rolling in passionate braces or mounting one another. Animals of the same
sex build nests and homes together, many homosexual pairs raise young without members of
the opposite sex. Other animals regularly have partners of both sexes, and some even live in
communal groups where sexual activity is common among all members, male and female.
Many creatures are ‘transgendered,’ crossing or combining characteristics of both males and

97

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 10-11.
Alaimo, “Eluding Capture,” 52.
99
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 9-11.
98

47

females in their appearance or behavior. Amid this incredible variety of different patterns,
one thing is certain: the animal kingdom is most definitely not just heterosexual.100

As another significant source of research on the natural diversity of both human and non-human
sexual and gender variation, Joan Roughgarden builds upon Bagemihl’s elaborate work in
Evolution’s Rainbow. Within these two exceptional texts from Bagemihl and Roughgarden, both
encompassing queer ecology, the enormous diversity of sexual behaviors, parenting and family
structures, gender variation, and cooperative behaviors are explored, and thus disrupt sexual
selection theory and other heteronormative scientific narratives.
In her chapter “Sex Versus Gender,” Roughgarden explains the difference between the
biological category of sex versus the social/cultural category of gender. In her attempts to dispel
common misconceptions about human sexuality, Roughgarden challenges stereotypes around sex
and gender in zoological and botanical studies. Inspired by Roughgarden and others, I challenge
common heterosexist myths with non-human species as examples. To illustrate these examples, I
include art work by Humon Comic, from the book Animal Lives Compared to Humans101. The
artist depicts non-human reproduction and relationships through human bodies to educate about
the diversity of non-human sex, relationship dynamics, and gender presentation through social
media. With LGBTQ+ education being banned in many schools, non-academic and culturally
significant spaces, such as the internet, are becoming more and more important as sources for
learning.

100
101

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 12.
Comics, Humon, Animal Lives Compared to Humans.

48

(1) “An organism is solely male or female for life.
No, the most common body form among plants and perhaps
half of the animal Kingdom is for an individual to be both
male and female at the same time, or at different times
during its life. These individuals make both small and large
gametes throughout their life.” 103 A body that produces
both small and large gametes during some period of its life
is either referred to as intersexual (the correct term for
Figure 2. Barnacles.
“The longest penis compared to body
size belongs to the hermaphroditic
barnacle. Barnacles are the small shells
often found on the bottom of boats or the
bellies of whales. The barnacles are
stuck in place, so the long penis enables
them to mate with one another without
ever having to move.”102

human bodies) or hermaphroditic bodies that make both
gametes at different times in its life span being sequential
hermaphrodites. Tropical ginger from China is an example
of sequential hermaphrodism, as “some individuals are male

in the morning, making pollen, while others are female in the morning, receiving pollen. Then
they switch sexes in the afternoon.”104 Another example of sequential hermaphrodism can be
found among clown fish (Amphiprioninae spp.), where a male will change into a female if the
female in a monogamous pair-bond is killed. While sequential hermaphroditic bodies change
from producing one gamete size to the other, simultaneous hermaphrodites will produce both
gamete sizes in their bodies at the same time. Hamlets (Hypoplectrus spp.), a small simultaneous
hermaphroditic coral reef fish, require cross-fertilization from another hamlet in order to
reproduce and will “change between male and female roles several times as they mate [with] one

102

Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 7.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 27.
104
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 35.
103

49

individual release[ing] a few eggs and the other fertilizing
them with sperm,” then switching roles throughout the
mating ritual.105
While hermaphrodism is common among marine
invertebrates and fish, mammals can also be
hermaphroditic, although the appropriate term to use here is
intersexed. An intersexed body is one that “has gonads to
make both eggs and sperm and/or combinations of spermFigure 3. Reef Fish.
“In a lot of reef fish species, all members
are born the same sex. They group
together, and the strongest or biggest
change into the opposite sex. This is
quite convenient because this way no
one has to fight over females or males,
and the leader can spend his or her time
protecting territory instead. In some
species, the leader will breed with all the
individuals in the group, and in others
this right is reserved for the next
strongest member. Should the leader die,
the next strongest will change sex and
become the new leader. For reef fish, its
unusual to stay the same sex all their
lives.”106

related and egg-related plumbing parts,” that can develop in
a variety of combinations.107 In some wild populations of
Grizzlies (Ursus arctos horribilis), Black Bears (Ursus
americanus), and Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus), “as many
as 10-20 percent of the Bears in some populations” exhibit
intersexuality, having “the internal reproductive anatomy of
a female combined with portions of the external genitalia

of a male, including ‘penislike’ organs…with most adult intersexual Bears…[being] mothers that
successfully raise cubs.”108

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 33.
Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 28.
107
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 36.
108
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 234.
105
106

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Additionally, there are a number of species of plants,
fish, lizards, insects, and other invertebrates that are all born
producing large gametes, thus making every organism in
the species female, who reproduce asexually—without a
male. In plant species, this form of reproduction is called
apomixis, “in which seeds are formed but they contain
embryos that are produced independent of fertilization" in
which "the embryos are genetically identical to the
Figure 4. Whiptail Lizard.
“In some whiptail lizard species, males
don’t exist and the females reproduce
asexually by laying eggs that hatch into
offspring which are identical clones of
their mothers. One would think this is an
advantage because they don’t have to
find a mate to reproduce, but oddly
enough, having another female to
simulate intercourse with helps with egg
production. The only time there is any
evolution in these species is on the rare
occasion when one of the females feels
like trying something different and
crossbreeds with a male from another
whiptail species.”109

parent.”110 In Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis), which
occasionally hybridizes with related species, new distinct
varieties of hybrids that are sterile, “may become
widespread by asexual means,” allowing the "individual
strains…[to] be particularly successful in specific
habitats."111

In non-human animal species, this form of asexual reproduction is known as parthenogenesis,
“where each member of a parthenogenetic species is biologically female (that is, capable of
producing eggs)” and doesn’t require “sperm to fertilize these eggs, however, she simply makes
an exact copy of her own genetic code.”112 One interesting example of a parthenogenic species
are some whiptail lizards (Cnemidophorus spp.), who despite being born all female and
reproducing asexually, will engage in same-sex courtship behaviors and rituals that even involve
cloacal region contact and mounting. These lizards illustrate two points: 1) even when non-

109

Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 35.
Evert, Eichhorn and Raven, Biology of Plants, 214.
111
Evert, Eichhorn and Raven, Biology of Plants, 214, 217.
112
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 37.
110

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human animals don’t need to engage in sexual activity to reproduce, sexual activity still occurs,
and 2) that non-human animals do in fact engage in same-sex sexual activity—although the
“reason” why is still up for debate. Even though I have been taught that the “normal” state for
bodies is having separate sexes in separate bodies, exploring the vast variety of hermaphrodism
and intersexuality that can occur among individual bodies and entire species, is it not simply
human hubris to claim that separately sexed bodies is the norm for all bodies?
(2) “Only two genders occur, corresponding with the two sexes…[and] males and females
look different from one another. No, many species have three or more genders, with individuals
of each sex occurring in two or more forms… [and] in some species, males and females are
almost indistinguishable.”113 Typically when talking about plants and non-human animals, the
term “morph” is used in place of “gender,” as the term “gender” may be perceived as solely
belonging to humans, however many authors attempting to disrupt heteronormative and human
exceptionalism narratives use the term “gender” in their texts regarding non-human species. As
we saw in the last misconception, bodies don’t always have separate sexes in separate bodies as
the norm. However, even when species do follow a sexual binary of separate sexes in separate
bodies—male (small gamete producing) and female (large gamete producing), there isn’t a
guarantee that males and females will look differently than each other.
In some species, such as the shore bird Pigeon Guillemots (Cepphus columba), males and
females are nearly indistinguishable from each other, however there are also other

113

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 28.

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species that exhibit multiple genders. While the scientific
community plays catch-up in developing proper language
around discussing non-human queerness and gender,
Bagemihl suggests using the term “transgender” to refer to
species that cross or traverse existing gender categories.
Although using some dated language (especially if used
towards humans), Bagemihl refers to organisms that
Figure 5. Ruffs.
“The Ruff has three types of males who
are different from each other in both looks
and behavior. The most common is the
territorial male, who is stronger and more
aggressive toward other males of his own
kind. He spends most of his time fighting
and displaying. The next is the satellite.
Male. He doesn’t have territory of his own,
but hangs out in the territorial male’s
domain, sneak-breeding with the females.
The territorial male tolerates this because
females are attracted to the presence of the
satellite male. Then there’s the rare third
type, called the faeder. He is smaller than
the other males, looks more feminine and,
like the satellite male, has no territory. He
also sneak-breeds with the females, but
will just as happily let the other males
mate with him. At first, people thought the
other males confused the faeder with a
female, but closer studies of the faeder
topping other males suggest that they are
well aware of his sex. The strong territorial
male allows him in his territory because
the high amount of homosexual activity
attracts the females, and males who have
topped or been topped by a faeder are
more lucky with the females. The females
are incredibly promiscuous and always
breed with all three types if they are
available.”114

appear to be “imitating the opposite sex, either
behaviorally, visually, or chemically” as transvestism,
whereas organisms which “physically [become] the
opposite sex,” as transexuality.115 Regardless of what
terminology is used, there is far too much variety of
gender presentations in the non-human world to ignore
and claim that only a rigid binary of masculine males and
feminine females exists and is therefore the “norm.”
In mushrooms, for example, “it is rare for a fungus to
have only two biological sexes, and some fungi, such as
Schizophyllum commune, have as many as 23,000 mating
types.”116 Fish, lizards, and birds also once again offer a
plethora of examples of species that live in polygendered

societies. Many reef fish species exhibit a range of multiple genders, with Striped Parrotfish

114

Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 29.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 37.
116
Kaishian and Hasmik, “The Science Underground,” 10.
115

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(Scarus iserti) having five distinct genders, as it is common for Striped Parrotfish to change sex
over their lifespan. With the advancement in methods and technology, sex determination in nonhuman animal studies has become more accurate and has led to the realization that there is vast
diversity in gender presentation in birds as well. For instance, in Hooded Warblers (Wilsonia
citrina), not only has male same-sex sexual activity, pair-bonding, and child-rearing been
documented, but also a range of transgender females has been recognized.
While male Hooded Warblers tend to present with a dark black hood and chin strap, females
have been documented exhibiting a spectrum of “feminine” to “masculine” presentation. As seen
in Figure 7, on the feminine end of the spectrum females lack any black plumage on their heads,
whereas on the masculine end
of the spectrum, females
exhibit a full black hood and
chinstrap, similar to the males.
Figure 6. Transgendered Hooded Warbler.
Females of this species present on a spectrum of masculine-femineity, with the
feminine end of the spectrum having no black plumage on their heads, through
a spectrum of black plumage, to the masculine end of the spectrum with
females having a full black hood and chinstrap, similar to males.117

Furthermore, there are
females that fall somewhere in
between these two ends of the

spectrum with a gradation of plumage patterns—possibly what we might consider as non-binary
birds? As Roughgarden puts it: “Indeed, whenever one looks deeply into any biological category,
a rainbow is revealed. The living world is made of rainbows within rainbows within rainbows, in
an endless progression.”118

117
118

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 153.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 44.

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(3) “Males control females. No, in some species females
control males, and in many, mating is a dynamic interaction
between female and male choice. Females may or may not
prefer a dominant male.”120 In many non-human species,
even when there is one distinct male morph and
one distinct female morph, males and females don’t always
follow heteronormative gender roles of the dominating,
aggressive male and the submissive, caretaking female, but
Figure 7. Spotted Hyena.
“A lot of animals turn our ideas of
gender roles upside down, but the
spotted hyena takes it to the extreme.
Females are larger and far more
aggressive than males, and even the
lowest-ranking female in the hierarchy
ranks above the highest-ranking male.
This hierarchy is so strong that adult
males are even scared of female cubs,
and for good reason, as females are
typically violent toward males; but
adult daughters show kindness towards
their fathers by being less violent to
them than to other males. And it
doesn’t stop there: female hyenas have
pseudo-penises that can get erect and
are bigger and longer than the males’
penises. The females’ pseudo-penises
make it very difficult for males to mate
with them, and rape impossible. An
erect penis, however, is seen as a sign
of weakness, so males will present their
erections to females to show
submission in the same way other
animals expose their throats.”119

rather change up these roles entirely. For instance, the
Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta) live in matrilineal clans,
with males living in single sex groups during their
adolescence, eventually joining different all-female clans
throughout their adulthood. All female hyenas outrank males
(which are smaller than females) in their highly organized
social system, hunt and live together cooperatively, as well
as raise their young as single mothers. However the most
interesting aspect to have learned about female hyenas is that
all female hyenas are intersexed as they have an elongated
clitoris that resembles a penis in structure, sometimes also

referred to as a “female penis,” which they are able to urinate through.121 Rather than having a
vaginal opening, hyenas’ labia are fused closed, resembling a scrotum, along with an enlarged

119

Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 32.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 28.
121
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 38.
120

55

clitoris that is “90 percent of the length of the males’ penis (nearly seven inches long) and equal
to it in diameter; it can be fully erected.”122 Having no vaginal opening, a female hyena is able to
invert her clitoris to allow for penetration during mating, however, as the clitoris is located on
her lower belly, actual penetration is challenging, and ultimately making rape next to impossible.
Hyenas also give birth through their clitoris, which can cause significant bodily trauma and even
death, so to prevent pregnancy many females do not allow penetration during mating, often
acting aggressively towards males attempting to mount them. Due to this genital design and
aggressive behavior towards males, the majority of hyenas are considered non-breeding,
meaning they never produce offspring. Female hyenas also engage in homo-social or sociosexual
behavior—females often mount one another, with occasional clitoral penetration, as well as
engaging frequently in “meeting ceremonies” where two females stand parallel to each other
head-to-tail, licking, nuzzling, and sniffing each other’s genitals. If a fight breaks out during one
of these meeting ceremonies, often the subordinate hyena will signal by erecting her clitoris—as
an erect penis in hyena language is a symbol of submission, usually resulting in reconciliation
between the two.
Spotted Hyenas offer an extraordinary example of female bodies that resemble male bodies,
engage in same-sex sexual and social behavior as a part of their highly structured matriarchal
social groups, which include meeting rituals as a part of their culture and are dominant over
males. Another additional favorite queer animal of mine that shakes up our ideas of
heteronormative non-humans is the Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis). In the wild, these sheep
live in sex-segregated groups, only coming together for a few months in the year when ewes are
able to conceive (estrus). Males live in what’s been described as “homosexual societies,”123 as

122
123

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 446.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 138.

56

same-sex courtship behaviors and same-sex sexual activity occurs regularly among all males
living together. While females typically won’t allow themselves to be mounted unless they are in
estrus, so prevalent is same-sex activity among male Bighorns, that females trying to mate with
males have been observed “mimicking” (behavioral transvestism) the behavior patterns “typical
of younger males being courted by older males, thereby sparking sexual interest on part of rams
because, ironically, they now resemble males.”124
Even more interesting, the only male sheep who do not live separately with the other males,
and also does not engage in same-sex sex, are the males that live with the females year-round.
Physically, these males look the same as the other males, however, these males behaviorally
“mimic” females, as they adopt “effeminate” behaviors like crouching to urinate (like females),
do not dominate the females, and are less aggressive overall. In Bighorn Sheep society, the
“normal,” aggressive, “masculine” males all live together, court one another, and regularly have
“full- fledged anal sex with other males,”125 whereas the “aberrant” (as previous researchers have
implied) exclusively heterosexual males live with the females, adopt “effeminate” behaviors, and
are overall less aggressive. As humans, we like to use animals as symbols, and the Bighorn ram
is an iconic, charismatic animal used by sports teams and even as a truck brand as a symbol of
rugged male heterosexuality. However, in reality, the typical “macho” male Bighorn is quite
queer, whereas the “feminized” male is the one who avoids homosexual encounters and gets
along with the females. Once again, the more-than human world offers us an array of examples
of bodies and behaviors that resist cis-heteronormativity!

124
125

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 407.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 138.

57

Within birds, where 90% of species form monogamous pair-bonds and raise offspring
together,126 one or both sexes may have sex with the same or opposite sex even though they are
in a pair-bond. Additionally, one of the birds might initiate “divorce” when their partner
“cheats,” or leave their partner for another higher-ranking bird.127 With mammals, the majority
of species have polygamous systems, which “take the form of either one male with several
females (polygyny), one female with several males (polyandry), a combination of both
(polygynandry),” or have promiscuous systems where animals of either sex mate with multiple
partners, forming no long-term bonds.128 In some species trios (or as I like to call them
“throuples”) will form, sometimes with all animals engaging in sexual activity with one another,
and in other instances, the bond is more of a companionship, without sexual activity taking place.
These trios come is a variety of forms, some being homosexual bonds between three animals of
the same sex, they can be bisexual trios with two males and one female, or with two females with
one male, or they can be heterosexual trios, where “two animals of the same sex are bonded with
an opposite-sexed individual but not to each other.”129

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 54.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 28, 54-55. See also Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 207.
128
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 207.
129
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 22.
126
127

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In Saddle-backed Tamarin monkey (Leontocebus fuscus) family structures, “22 percent
consist of one female with one male in a monogamous relationship, 61 percent of one female
with multiple males, 14 percent of multiple females with multiple males, and 3 percent of males
only.”131 Saddle-backed Tamarins organize their families in a structure called cooperative
polyandry, as the males help in caring for the offspring and
cooperate with one another in doing so. Even in families
with only one male and female, older offspring will assist in
the caring for younger offspring. In Eurasian Golden Plovers
(Pluvialis apricaria), a heterosexual pair-bonded male and
female couple will join another heterosexual couple and
raise their offspring together as a quartet, in a doubleparenting structure. In American Red Squirrels
Figure 8. Cotton-Top Tamarin.
“Tamarin monkeys are known to have
all possible variations of families, such
as one male and one female, or one
male and two females. But by far the
most common family arrangement is
one female and two males. This is quite
logical because tamarin females usually
give birth to twins and the males are the
ones who care for the young, only
handing them over to the mother to
breastfeed. Carrying the young around
is a lot of hard work and the males even
gain muscle weight while the female is
pregnant to prepare for the task. They
then each care for one of the twins,
making child rearing significantly
easier. A male with two females might
risk having to carry around four
babies.”130

(Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), it is typically the female that
raises the offspring alone, forming no bond to the males she
mates with, however there has been documentation that
occasionally females will form bonds with one another
female, engaging in “sexual and affectionate activities
leading to joint parenting.”132
Alongside these different family configurations, “nearly
300 species of mammals and birds have developed adoption,

parenting-assistance, and ‘day-care’ systems, in which offspring are raised or cared for by

130

Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 10.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 58-59.
132
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 141.
131

59

animals other than their biological parents.”133 Nuclear families are only one of multiple
constellations of non-human families and child-rearing structures. What could humans learn to
change about our own systems of childcare from non-human animals that raise their offspring
together or have males that cooperate with one another to raise offspring they may or may not be
the biological father of? Could more people be accepting of same-sex or nonmonogamous/polyamorous relationships if they were taught how infrequent life-long
monogamous, nuclear families were in non-humans?
(5) Bisexuality is a uniquely human quality. No, “the participation of an individual in both
homosexual and heterosexual activities is widespread among animals: bisexuality occurs in more
than half of the mammal and bird species in which same-sex activity is found.”134 Interestingly,
there is even diversity among types of bisexuality among non-human species, as each individual
in any given population of species will have their own sexual orientation. Perhaps one of the best
models used for expressing the spectrum of human sexuality, is the scale developed by Alfred
Kinsey, as “individuals generally fall along a range from those exhibiting predominantly or
exclusively heterosexual behavior, to those exhibiting a balance of both, to those exhibiting
predominantly or exclusively homosexual behavior, and every variation in between.”135 In other
words, an individual’s sexual orientation will fall somewhere on a spectrum, with exclusive
homosexuality on one end and exclusive heterosexuality on the other end—this orientation may
change over an individual’s life history, but this is something that is in need of more research,
both in human and non-human populations.
Variations of sexual orientation occurs across populations, where

133

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 206.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 50.
135
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 51.
134

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In some species, the majority of animals are exclusively heterosexual, but a small proportion
engage in bisexual activities (e.g. male Ostrich [Struthio camelus]). In others, the vast
majority of individuals are bisexual and few if any are exclusively heterosexual or
homosexual (e.g. Bonobos). Other species combine a pattern of nearly universal bisexuality
with some exclusive homosexuality (e.g. male Mountain Sheep). In other cases, the
proportions are more equally distributed, but still vary considerably.136

In what is referred to as sequential or serial bisexuality, a non-human animal will alternate
between periods of exclusively engaging in same-sex sexual activity or opposite-sex sexual
activity. These periods of time can differ between and within species, sometimes correlating to
breeding season patterns or even age. Some quick examples of the range of bisexuality are
walruses (Odobenus rosmarus), who typically participate in same-sex courtship and sexual
activity outside breeding season; giraffes (Giraffa), where younger males typically engage in
same-sex activity; or some in African elephants (Loxodonta) same-sex courtship and sex is more
typical in older elephants.137 Another range of bisexuality is called simultaneous bisexuality,
where one non-human animal might court both a male and female at the same time or within a
short span of each other, or in instances of group sex, sexual activity with both opposite- and
same-sex will take place at the same time.

136
137

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 53.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 50.

61

Bonobos, one of human’s closest primate relatives, are
nearly all bisexual (similarly with Chimpanzees), with their
preference of partners existing on a continuum. Bonobos
have a promiscuous mating system, with females forming
tightly bonded smaller groups where they are dominant to
males. Group sex occurs frequently among Bonobos, “often
with one individual thrusting against a pair who are
Figure 9. Bonobo.
“Chimpanzees and bonobos are the
closest relatives to humans and closely
related to one another. Though the two
species share a lot of traits when it comes
to sex, they do things very differently. In
chimpanzee society, the biggest and
strongest males rule. In Bonobo society,
though the females are physically weaker
than the males, they work together,
allowing them to rule the mails and
control them using sex. In general,
everything is an excuse for sex in
Bonobo society, especially when tension
is high. For example, if two males want
the same female, instead of fighting,
they'll have sex with each other, which
eases the tension and reinforces their
friendship. If a female hits a baby, the
mother will chase her, but afterwards,
they will rub their clitorises together to
make up. If a male starts getting
aggressive, a female will grab him and
give him a quickie to make him relax.
While chimpanzees exhibit sexual taboos
and social restrictions like humans,
there's practically no such thing for
bonobos, where sex is very casual.
Everything goes in all combinations, and
Bonobo society is one of the most
peaceful societies because of it. They
literally live by the motto ‘Make Love,
not war.’”138

copulating, and individuals may participate in several bouts
of heterosexual [and homosexual] activity in rapid
succession.” 139 Although both male and female Bonobos
engage in both opposite- and same-sex sexual activity,
females tend to have more sex, will mount males, and some
females have been documented having a clear preference for
same-sex partners, ignoring males making appeals for sex.
Some females will also have multiple sexual partners at once
and have been shown to have “favorite” partners, especially
among their female partners.140 In looking at female Bonobo
sexuality, some authors have argued that pleasure needs to be
more seriously considered in scientific theories surrounding
reproduction and survival. Researchers have suggested that

“because same-sex matings can be as common as between-sex matings [in Bonobos], the

138

Comics, Animal Lives Compared to Humans, 9.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 273.
140
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 272.
139

62

geometry of the genitals may be shaped to promote same-sex contact as well as between-sex
contact.”141 Bonobo matings often takes place in a face-to-face position, with female pairs
rubbing their genitals (referred to as genito-genital rubbing or GG-rubbing) together by moving
in a side to side motion to both receive pleasure, whereas in male-female pairs, researchers
suggest that male Bonobos assume a frontal position in order to adjust for the female partner’s
genital geometry. As Roughgarden points out, “from the standpoint of female reproduction, little
is gained by placing the clitoral neurons near the vagina to further between-sex mating when
males are well motivated for intercourse anyway. Instead, the pleasure neurons are shifted to a
location that promotes same-sex matings and may yield more effective same-sex bonds,
increasing overall Darwinian fitness at no reproductive cost.”142
In Chimpanzees, male same-sex sexual activity is highly variable and occurs frequently after
males get into a fight, as a form of tension relief and reconciliation. However, most males that
engage in same-sex sexual activity also mate with females, ultimately making them bisexual.
Although much research still needs to take place on why bisexuality occurs in so many species,
some scientists, such as biologist Vincent Savolainen, suggest the theory called the “bisexual
advantage.”143 According to this theory, bisexuality might give certain animals an evolutionary
advantage to survival, especially in social species, as purely heterosexual animals might lack the
ability to form same-sex alliances that lead to higher rates of survival, but a purely homosexual
social structure would lead to low/no reproduction of offspring. So in this sense, a bisexual

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 157.
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 158.
143
Savolainen and Hodgson, “Evolution of Homosexuality,” 5.
141
142

63

organism has an advantage by being able to form and maintain strong alliances with both
opposite and same-sex organisms.145
Alongside pleasure being an important component of Bonobo culture, these close relatives of
ours are also an empowering example of a sexually fluid society where female pleasure seems to
be placed at the center of social interactions. So important is sex in Bonobo society, that
Bonobos have even developed their own form of gestural communication (basically sign
language) used specifically for sex. Over 25
distinct gestures used during sex have been
identified, with some accompanying illustrations
as seen in Fig. 11. Studies of Bonobo hand
gestures could have significant implications for
not only understanding communication systems
among Bonobos and other species, but also
understanding humans’ early communication
development. Primates studies can be more
impactful than other animal studies, as they
resemble humans, and at some point in humanity’s
evolutionary history, our ancestors may have lead
Figure 10. Bonobo communication.
Bonobo “lexicon” of ten hand gestures used for
communication during sexual interactions.144

lives not so dissimilar to today’s primate species.
To me, some primate studies seem to be just as

much about learning about the animal as it is about trying to learn something about ourselves. If

144
145

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 67.
Bawagan, “Overturning Darwin's Paradox.”

64

studying primates is truly giving us a peak at some of the possibilities for how our early human
ancestors lived, then once again we can see there is no universal template for sex and gender.

Reimagining Possibilities
This list could go on with the numerous heteronormative stereotypes often taught as
“natural” and universal, however, aren’t aligned with the reality of biological diversity. While a
biological binary does exist between sexed bodies producing large gametes/eggs (female) and
small gametes/sperm (male), that is ultimately where universals end, and the diversity begins.
Even a gamete binary isn’t universal, as we saw in some of the examples above, that many
invertebrate species exist in bodies that produce both gamete sizes (intersex/hermaphrodite),
along with many species being able to change their sex during their live span as well, such as
many reef fish. In species where two separately sexed bodies are the norm, we can find that
many species can have multiple of one or both morphs/genders, like in many birds, fish, and
lizard species, in addition to having bodies that don’t align with what we would think as typical
for an animal of that sex, such as the enlarged clitoris of the Spotted Hyena. When it comes to
behavior or “gender roles” of non-humans, no heteronormative universal binary exists either
with all females being submissive to males and “coy,” or all males being competitive with one
another in order to control females. While this dynamic may be true for some species, there is far
too much variety of “gender roles” and behaviors that have been observed to support the idea
that patriarchy is the “natural” model. Some animals flip these roles upside down, with females
being more aggressive and controlling of males and the males playing the role of offspring
caretakers (e.g. Wattled Jacana), or in other species, where other configurations of behaviors and
dynamics have been created where cooperation is a crucial quality and violent competition is
rare. Queer animals, or non-humans that pair-bond and/or engage in sexual activity with the

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same sex, exist in abundance along a spectrum of sexualities alongside species with variety of
gender presentations and expressions. Western science’s continued denial of sexual and gender
diversity in favor of heteronormative interpretations or framing this diversity as something gone
wrong in Nature, is not only unscientific, but results in an inaccurate depiction of non-human
behaviors and bodies, which then gets projected onto humans. Not having the whole picture of
what is really going on in non-human species can have negative effects for non-human species
we are trying to conserve along with serving to promote injustices amongst humans.
As humans, we use our understandings of Nature and more-than-human species to
understand our own “true” natures, often times believing that if something occurs in Nature, than
it must be “natural” for humans to do as well. However, as we see that queerness is an integral
part of Nature and many non-human cultures, has not meant that queerness among humans has
been accepted as “natural” or acceptable characteristic for either non-humans or humans. I am
thoroughly curious how much U.S. culture might change around its views of human queerness
and transness if queer ecology were to be taught as a regular part of academic curriculum, or
even simpler, if Nature documentaries leaned less heavily on promoting heteronormative
narratives and rather showed the diversity of queerness, gender presentation, and relationship
dynamics that exist. Would education about queer and trans animals be strong enough narratives
to curb queer- and transphobia? If nothing else, these narratives are empowering for LGBTQ+
people who have had to cope with a constant barrage of discourses that frame their identities as
“unnatural,” alongside making anti-LGBTQ+ arguments claiming to be backed by “science”
easy to debunk.
Even as more scientists and activists respond to these arguments and attempt to spread
information on the abundance of diversity of our world to wider audiences, if scientific and

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educational institutions do not actively work to undo inaccurate heterosexist models, change will
be a slow process. Additionally, many Western science institutions holding onto these models
usually have heterosexist cultures, often being hostile environments for LGBTQ+ scientists, who
often remain in the closet or feel alienated and that their work is devalued in these spaces. These
types of institutions often exclude those whose life experiences greatly differ from those with
“normative” identities, such as women, people of color, and differently-abled bodies, so much so
that individuals will leave their jobs or places of learning because they don’t feel that they belong
there. So while these institutions’ models limit our understanding of biological diversity, the
exclusion of scientists from oppressed identity groups further stifles intellectual diversity. In a
time when we are in desperate need of alternate models and imaginings of different ways of
being, excluding a diverse range of intellect and ways of problem solving could potentially be
our downfall. When I was much younger and coming to terms with the fact that my sexual and
gender identity didn’t align with what I had been told my whole life was “normal” or “natural,” I
felt my identities were a burden—something that would keep me from ever feeling accepted or
acceptable. However, as I grew and came into my queerness, I became thankful for being so
different and realized I have a lot to offer the world from these differences. Seeking out
queer/trans spaces and communities, I have witnessed so much healing, care, and resilience first
hand, as so many LGBTQ+ individuals have had to make connections through found family after
being rejected by their own flesh and blood. This is not to say that LGBTQ+ communities are
always perfect—there is a lot of trauma in these communities and sometimes this results in what
is essentially wounded people wounding others to cope with their pain—however in no other
community that I’ve been a part of have I ever seen so much effort being put in to turning toward
these wounds collectively and working to heal and unlearn harmful behaviors learned from

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living in a hetero-patriarchal society. It would seem then, that if we are looking for different
cultural models to live by, we don’t even have to look at other species as there are plenty of other
“non-normative” cultures in the U.S. to look at.

Indigenous Perspectives in Queer Ecology
Where Western science fails at accounting for and incorporating the multitude of non-human
behaviors, many queer ecologies authors have advocated for the uplifting of Traditional
Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Indigenous science, and Western science learning from
Indigenous communities, not through appropriation, but as co-creators and collaborators. Within
Western science, queerness in both human and non-human species “is an anomaly, an
unexpected behavior that above all requires some sort of ‘explanation’ or ‘cause’ or ‘rationale,’”
whereas in

many Indigenous cultures around the world, homosexuality and transgender are a routine and
expected occurrence in both the human and animal worlds…[and have] accumulated a vast
storehouse of knowledge about the natural world—including the sexual and gender systems
of animals—over thousands of years.146

Western science has had a far shorter history and scientists have only begrudgingly began to
recognize queerness in both humans and non-humans over a span of the last 200 years, and this
recognition hasn’t always been framed as something positive. Because of the devaluing of
Indigenous knowledge within Western culture, TEK is often over-simplified and framed as the
same as Western ecology, but with more spirituality or seen as needing to first be validated by
Western science to be taken seriously. Western science not only devalues TEK because of antiIndigenous racist ideologies, but also because much Indigenous knowledge is stored and shared

146

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 215.

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through oral tradition and lore, rather than having been written down as empirical data. However,
as more non-Native academics look for alternative solutions to address climate change and
transform Western conservation practices, more scientists and institutions have begun to work
with Indigenous tribes and communities in order to implement models based on TEK. These
coalitions and partnerships are but one step towards not only healing relationships between
Native and non-Natives, but also empowering these communities through the ability to manage
their lands through cultural practices.
Although much Indigenous knowledge is encoded in mythological stories, this lore is
grounded in thousands of years of direct observations from the natural world from cultures that
don’t view humans as being separate from Nature. As Bagemihl points out in his research on
Indigenous perspectives, that “aboriginal knowledge about the organization of the natural world
often mirrors the findings of more ‘objective’ scientific inquiry, sometimes down to the most
minute detail,” as well as many Indigenous cultures having “developed comprehensive
classification schemata for plant and animal species that rival the system of scientific
nomenclature used by biologists today.”147 In Bagemihl’s examination into perspectives on
queerness and transness among various Indigenous cultures, he notices commonalities between
Native North American, New Guinea/Melanesian, and Siberian/Arctic cultures, which include,
symbolic representations of animals associated with human queerness and transness:

beliefs about mutable or nondualistic gender(s) of particular species, often represented in the
figure of a powerful cross-gendered animal or in sacred stories (‘myths’) about sexual and
gender variability in animals; ceremonial reenactments or representations of animal
homosexuality and transgender, sometimes combined with ritual reversals of ordinary
activities; and animal husbandry practices that encourage and value intersexual and/or
nonreproductive creatures.148
147
148

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 238.
Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 216.

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It is important to note that Indigenous cultures are not a monolith—each culture has different
beliefs, stories, and cultural practices and deserve recognition of these variabilities.
Many queer ecologists, whom many are non-Native, are advocating for TEK because so
many cultural practices and knowledge have been formed through the observation and caring of
the “natural” world. In her collaboration with the Karuk tribe in what we know today as
California, Kari Norgaard observes that:

by all accounts, the diverse Indigenous notions of gender that organized human
communities…have long been more fluid, less binary, and organized around caring and
stewardship rather than hierarchy and domination. Gender constructions have also been
intimately interwoven with ecological activities and responsibilities.149

Specifically looking at the gender construction among the Karuk, Norgaard observes that for
Karuk men, masculinity is performed through fishing—providing food for their immediate
family and community, as well as having a responsibility to maintaining the ecosystem in a way
that allow culturally important fish species to thrive. For Karuk women, managing lands with fire
in order to perpetuate culturally important plant species, such as tanoak, along with the
“gathering, preparing, and sharing [of] food, fiber, and medicinal plant resources with the
community,” were viewed as the “domain of females.”150 For the Karuk, as well as many other
Native communities, having access to ecologically healthy lands and waters that can provide the
community with sufficient resources is necessity for individuals to effectively perform their
gender role and cultural survivance.

149
150

Norgaard, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People, 165.
Norgaard, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People, 166.

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In settler-colonial culture, “heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity should be interpreted as
logics of colonialism,” as masculinity is performed through dominance and femininity is
performed through subservience to the masculine.151 Settler-colonialism and heteropatriarchy
become mutually reinforcing as

Heteropatriarchy disciplines and individualizes communally held beliefs by internalizing
hierarchical gendered relationships and heteronormative attitudes towards sexuality.
Colonialism needs heteropatriarchy to naturalize hierarchies and unequal gender relations.
Without heteronormative ideas about sexuality and gender relationships, heteropatriarchy,
and therefore colonialism, would fall apart.152

However in Karuk culture, gender performance is based more on responsibility and care for the
community and non-human species (often referred to as “kin”) that are relied upon. Within many
Indigenous cultures there is the view of “kincentricity,” or that humans are a part of and related
to the more-than human/Natural world and thus have a responsibility to care for those relations,
which has begun to be suggested as an alternative model for Western ecological understandings.
For many Indigenous communities, cultural genocide is ongoing as many communities lack
access to ancestral lands, have limited rights on harvesting materials from these lands, or lands
and waters have been so poorly managed through Western practices that culturally important
species (such as salmon) are in such low numbers that they are virtually inaccessible or
threatened with extinction. Without the ability to manage, process, and distribute these culturally
valuable resources, social connections are disrupted, gender roles are unable to be performed,
and communities are forced to rely on unhealthy commodified foods—all resulting in both
mental and physical health issues. However, although many modern settler-colonial narratives

Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke): Bringing ‘Sexy Back’ and
Out of Native Studies Closet,” 33.
152
Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke),” 33-34.
151

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depict American Native culture and communities as either “extinct” or fully assimilated into
White Western culture, many North American Indigenous cultures have survived ongoing
settler-colonialism, and some even continue to thrive. Native activists are at the forefront of
defending against oil pipelines (ex. Standing Rock) and other unsustainable practices in natural
resource management, often without the support of well-funded mainstream environmentalist
organizations, putting much time, energy, and resources into legal battles against the U.S. federal
and state government and corporations.
As a White, non-Native academic, I am just beginning to understand various Indigenous
cultural beliefs and practices, as well as learning how to build better relationships with Native
communities and individuals within Nature-based work. In the collection of essays in Queer
Indigenous Studies, Native scholars and activists write about Indigenous-specific forms of queerand transness and bring “critiques of colonial heteropatriarchal gender/sexuality into broader
conversations within queer and Indigenous studies that link queer Indigenous people within and
across Indigenous nations, colonial borders, and global networks.”153 In this Indigenously
produced body of work, authors discuss how current and pre-colonized Native nations fully
accepted and integrated identities, behaviors, and bodies that were outside of a heteronormative
binary. However, authors writing from nations within the United States draw attention to the fact
that some tribes have internalized heteropatriarchal colonialism and have attempted to establish
heteronormative gender roles as a part of their traditional culture. Native activists in these
communities push back by fighting for decolonization of their culture, arguing that “Native
nations that mirror the U.S. nation-state by relying on homophobia and heteropatriarchy to
establish national belonging and exclusion are not ideal models to further Native sovereignty.”154

153
154

Driskill, et al. “Introduction,” 3.
Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke),” 39.

72

In order to cultivate belonging amongst LGBTQ+ Native Americans, Indigenous communities
came together in 1992 to propose the use of the term Two-Spirit (2S) as a means for Indigenous
LGBTQ+ to name “their diverse lives and their sense of relationship to Indigenous tradition of
gender/sexual diversity and spirituality.”155 The introduction of the community-based label was
also intended to replace the term berdache, which was created by colonial anthropologists who
framed sexual and gender diversity among Native populations as deviance. While the original
intent in proposing the label of Two-Spirit was to create “an Indigenously defined pan-Native
North American term that bridges Native concepts of gender diversity and sexuality with those
of Western cultures,”156 not all Native LGBTQ+ people use the term Two-Spirit to self-identity.
As Two-Spirit is a term intended to connect queerness with Indigeneity, some individuals will
use Two-Spirit only when they are in Native communities as they feel non-Natives will not
understand the context of the term, or they will use multiple labels alongside Two-Spirit, such as
gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer. In many tribes, much cultural knowledge has been lost due to
ongoing settler-colonial violence and cultural genocide, where in some instances, it is unknown
if specific tribes at one point had different names for queer sexualities and genders. Some tribes
may not have had different labels as queerness was not viewed as abnormal, or due to loss of
language, certain labels have been forgotten or are unable to be confirmed as historically
accurate. However, some tribes do have nation-specific terms that they utilize or have worked to
create contemporary labels of their own.157
Ultimately, in the creation of the Two-Spirit label, the goal was to create an Indigenousspecific LGBTQ+ label established by Native peoples in order to “disrupt external and

Driskill, et al., “Introduction,” 12.
Thomas and Jacobs, “'...And We Are Still Here': From Berdache to Two-Spirit People,” 92.
157
Driskill, et al. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature.
155
156

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internalized colonialism, heteropatriarchy, gender binaries, and other forms of oppression,”158 as
well as to strengthen nation building across Native regions and cultures that do not replicate
colonial narratives of nationalism and nation-states. Within decolonial Indigenous nationbuilding, nationalism is not based on “notions of nativism or binary oppositions between insider
and outsider, self and other” nor does Native nationalism “root itself in an idealization of any
pre-Contact past, but rather relies on the multifaceted, lived experiences of families who gather
in particular places,”159 making identity relational and grounded in a particular place in its
history. It is because of Native communities’ ability to come together to nation build outside the
context of settler-colonialism and recognize a nation that is multi- and cross-cultural, centering
responsible relationships and interconnectedness, that so many non-Native academics are now
advocating for the uplifting of Indigenous leadership, especially in the Climate Justice movement
and conservation efforts. Indigenous perspectives offer methods for “reimagining kinship…for
affirming…diversity without reinforcing heterosexist norms of family or nation,”160 as well as
for human and non-human relationships. One example of reimagining relationships to land can
be seen by looking back at the Karuk, where women (or people who identified as women) used
fire as a tool to manage the land and encourage particular species to thrive, as opposed to maledominated Western conservation, which views fire as a danger to property and therefore needing
to be suppressed. In one culture, fire is seen as a natural part of the landscape and something that
can be cooperated with in order to make biodiversity flourish, whereas in the other cultural view,
fire is an enemy to private property and something in Nature that humans must control. Although
Indigenous tribes work to heal their communities from internalized colonialism, much of the

Driskill, et al., “Introduction,” 19.
Brooks, “Afterword,” 244.
160
Driskill, et al., “Introduction,” 20.
158
159

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literature written from both queer ecologists and Native scholars establishes that queerness and
transness has always been a part of Indigenous traditional cultures. As more Western scientists
and conservationists acknowledge the legitimacy of TEK and begin to build coalitions with
tribes, it is crucial that views on both queer and transness in both human and non-human species
are also included. As Bagemihl argues, that:

For too long, negative views have been sanitized to make them palatable to non-Indigenous
people. In a world where Native American spirituality is co-opted…it has become something
of a cliche to speak of the environmental ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ of Indigenous cultures.
The reality is that homosexuality and transgender—along with many other beliefs and
practices that would probably be considered objectionable by large numbers of people—are
usually an integral, if not a central, component of such ‘balance’…What western science can
learn most from aboriginal cultures is precisely this polysexual, polygendered view of the
natural world.161

When we are able to step outside heteronormative ideas of sexuality and gender, we can
see that in both human and non-human cultures that there is an explosion of diverse sexualities,
gender presentations and roles, as well as relationship dynamics. Worldviews that suppress
diversity or try to force bodies and behaviors into limited categorizations are not only
scientifically inaccurate but cause more harm than good. I very much doubt that the majority of
people would want to live in a world that is so often depicted in Western apocalypse narratives.
However, if we cannot learn to unlearn heteropatriarchal, White supremacist, individualistic
nationalism, which relies on the domination of Nature, the feminine, the queer, and non-White
bodies, then a bleak future is possibly in store for current and future generations. Yet I remain
hopeful that this nihilistic story is not one that we are destined to follow, as conversations around
identity and systemic oppression that would have been seen as “too radical” a few decades ago

161

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 244.

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are taking place in public and mainstream discourses. Because of the ease of sharing new
information and our own personal narratives through media and the internet, more people have
been able understand the struggles of others and be exposed to new ways of thinking, being, and
identifying. As resistance grows, so too does the collective imaginings of our pasts and potential
futures, slowly developing “a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which
gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities or multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid
and transmutable. A world, in short, exactly like the one we inhabit.”162

162

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 262.

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Pathologizing Queerness and Creating The White Wilderness
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then
you read…The things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the
people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in
ourselves can we understand them in other people.
-James Baldwin, Life magazine 1963163
“History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut
short or advance our evolution as human beings.”
-Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution164
Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The
fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about
homosexuality.
-James, Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin165

In the United States, there is currently a battle being fought over whose history is being
taught in schools, colleges, and universities and how. On one hand you have those desiring for a
multicultural, diversity-affirming approach where many histories are taught as a reflection of our
multicultural nation, along with the need to engage with history more critically in order to heal
from past harms whose legacies remain today. Then on the other hand, you have those who are
actively resisting teaching anything but a sanitized universal mythology that centers Whiteness
and heteropatriarchy, and work to achieve this goal by banning books and suppressing
pedagogies that confront racial and heteronormative power as a diversity-suppressing approach.
History, or rather how and what history is taught is powerful—as Grace Lee Boggs said, “history
is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past.”166 The stories we tell about the past are

Baldwin, “The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are.”
Boggs and Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, 79.
165
Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, 79.
166
Boggs and Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, 79.
163
164

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often reflections of what we want the past to be, especially when history is taught through a
diversity suppressing lens that focus on a hegemonic, universalized narrative. Ignoring diversity
affirming stories such as those that center Blacks, Indigenous peoples, people of color, women,
the differently abled, as well as LGBTQ+ people, has created a sort of historical amnesia. These
mythological versions of the past ignore difficult stories involving injustices and violence that
are woven into the fabric of our country, making it is easier to “forget” the cultural genocide of
Indigenous peoples that took place in order for White settlers to become “naturalized” as the
rightful owners of the lands now called the United States. Sanitized histories make it easier for
some to dismiss ongoing violence and injustice when historical accounts erase unsavory facts
altogether and replace actual events with a “nicer” version of the past. It is easy to “forget” that
we live in a highly racially segregated and White supremacist nation when we teach civil rights
history as though everything has been resolved in the past and we live in a post-racial society.
Women are perpetually marginalized due to misogynistic beliefs that they, with the except of a
few “Queen bees”, don’t do anything that is historically noteworthy. It is easy to “forget” that
LGBTQ+ individuals have always existed—and in different periods of time and places been
accepted and honored—when we erase these people from our stories or believe that queer and
trans people are somehow a new “phenomena.”
In attempting to learn about myself as a queer and trans person, I have had to do a great
deal of self-educating as the majority of academic institutions I have attend from childhood to
adulthood have failed to provide this education. While I have felt empowered learning about
current and past individuals and communities who fought for their rights—and ultimately my
rights that are now endangered—these histories also hold a lot of pain and trauma. Knowing that
the source of this violence stems from homo/queer/transphobia, I have found it helpful to dig into

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history in order to try to understand where this mindset came from in the first place. How did
homo/queer/transphobia become so naturalized in American culture in the first place? Early in
my academic pursuits I had the good fortune of being able to take a pilot class with an out gay
professor who had the same question:

Much of what follows is derived directly from questions posed to me by my students in
American history, the most frequent in which has been, ‘But why do people hate gays and
lesbians so much?’ I thought I had some insight into the basic question because I had had
firsthand experience. In 1975, I was a Special Forces First Lieutenant and was courtmartialed for allegedly engaging in homosexual acts. The raw hate I received shook me to the
core, and I sought to discover why my fellow soldiers reacted so negatively to behaviors only
asserted, not even proved. The only answer I came up with was education. These men and
women were literally trained throughout their lives to hate homosexuals for no other reason
than that they were ‘faggots.’ That was, I thought, stupid and utterly irrational. What had any
homosexual ever done to them that called forth such profound vituperation? As far as I could
tell, nothing, but the fear and anger persisted despite their not even knowing a single gay or
lesbian.167

As I learned from my professor Jay Hatheway in both his lectures and in-depth book The
Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, homophobia, or as I will refer to it
as queerphobia, in the U.S. had roots spanning back to the late 1800s. Although the roots of
queerphobia stem back much further in U.S. history due to the institutionalization of Christianity,
however it wasn’t until the late 1880’s that same-sex sexuality was “discovered” in the U.S. and
began being written about in scientific literature of the time. Writing through a queer ecological
lens as well, it was throughout the early to mid 1900s when queer and trans identities first
became pathologized and Nature became a source of “treatment.” This was a tumultuous period
of time in American history, slavery had recently ended after the Civil War. During the
Reconstruction period, demographics were quickly shifting with massive amounts of immigrants

167

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 1. Italics added for extra emphasis.

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arriving primarily from Eurasia. The U.S. was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing during the
19th and early 20th century. With racial demographics and gender roles changing and
restructuring throughout this period, the powerful elite—mainly wealthy White men—feared
losing what power and control they had, and it was through early medical practices and
environmental conservation that these anxieties played out.

American Anxieties of Moral Decay
Queerphobia in the United States has a long history of being expressed through religious
views, however it was during the late 1800’s through the early 1900’s when scientists began
studying the “phenomena” of same-sex attraction and gender variation under the pretense of
“curing” these forms of “deviance” through medicine. During this period of time in the U.S.,
“homophobia, although not a word then in use, found its roots in this matrix of disease,
degeneration, and national decline.”168 In an era faced with great instability and change, the
belief in American exceptualism greatly appealed to “the mostly urban, white middle-class
Protestant, which initially held that the United states was exempt from the historic processes of
national decline by virtue of its enlightened republican government, freedom of economic
opportunity, and dependency upon divine grace.”169 According to Hatheway, this was also a
period when educated elites wanting to elevate and secure the status of their scientific
professions gained authority with

the assistance of the educated middle- and upper-class white professionals who together with
industry could affect reform and preserve America’s national ideology from the trash bin of
history. Linked by education, patronage, and birth, the new elites coalesced into a
transnational aristocracy with the intent of making America a better place.170

168

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 197.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 5.
170
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 67.
169

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This scientific aristocracy framed themselves as the authority that would prevent the decline and
collapse of the U.S. as science was seen as “rational, allegedly universal, practical…[and] it was
precisely because of America's practical application of science that Americans now consider
themselves the rival to Great Britain and, more importantly, the last repository of freedom in the
world.”171 Around 1870, the country had been a largely rural nation with Western European
immigrants and their descendants holding the most political and economic power. However, with
the rapid development of the railroad, steel, iron, and oil industries combined with the arrival of
“approximately 12 million immigrants… from central and Eastern Europe replacing those who
had come from the ‘traditional’ locations of Scandinavia, England, English Canada, Ireland, and
Germany” sought economic opportunity primarily in cities.172 For instance, in 1880 of the
457,000 immigrants arriving in the U.S., 312,000 immigrated from Northern Europe and
Germany, 38,000 came from Eastern Europe, 6,000 from Asian countries (predominantly China),
100,000 entered from Canada, 1,400 immigrated from the Caribbean, and 18 came from African
countries. Compared to 1900, of the estimated 448,000 new arrivals, 103,000 were Northern
European and German, 321,500 arrived from Eastern and Southern European regions, 18,000
were Asian, 5,000 immigrated from Canada, 30 from Africa, and 400 came from Australia. 173
The country began to shift from being a predominantly White rural nation to one with quickly
growing multicultural urban centers.
With more women entering the workforce alongside dispossessed Black farmers and
immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia moving to cities, the status quo was being challenged.

171

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 68.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 34.
173
States, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 22-23.
172

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“Newer” immigrants at this time were “darker” than the previous immigrants and often Jewish or
Catholic, and often English was not their first language. For White Protestant Americans, the
influx of African Americans, non-Protestant Eastern European, and non-European immigrants
into the cities alongside the rate of women entering the workforce outpacing that of men entering
the workforce, was seen as a threat to their way of life.174 Being a time where bigotry was
expressed overtly, “racists and nativists made no attempt to hide their disdain for ethnic
minorities and agitated for immigration reform, the exclusion of Asians, segregation of African
Americans, and the destruction of Native American culture.”175 Up until 1875, the United States
had relatively open borders, however West Coast conservatives introduced the Page Act of 1875
(Sect. 141, 18 Stat. 477, 3 March 1875) wherein Chinese workers were “targeted…as the source
of economic depressions and unemployment problems… [and] female Chinese [were branded]
as prostitutes, whose arrival in America would corrupt the morals of the nation's youth.”176 Being
the first restrictive federal immigration law in the U.S. and being based on race and class, the
Page Act of 1875 attempted to slow the number of unskilled Chinese laborers and Chinese
women from immigrating to the United States. Expanding upon the this act, the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 “prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years
and barred all Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship” in which class bias in the act
was demonstrated by exempting “merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats” from
exclusion.177 With the high levels of political and economic corruption of the time leading
rapidly growing urban areas to become overcrowded, polluted, having high levels of poverty and

174

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 33-44.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 62.
176
Peffer, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women Under the Page Law, 1875-1882,” 28.
177
Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882- 1924,” 36.
175

82

crime, as well as being sites for labor-related protests, urban areas and the working classes
became linked with “moral decay” brought about by modernity.
Within the growing industrial economy, new “white collar” jobs often required some
form of higher education and offered more social privileges due to higher income. These
positions often went to the children of the urban middle-class from the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon
gentry “who formed the backbone of the bourgeoisie elite.”178 While still a small population, the
“middle class gradually exerted a great deal of influence by virtue of its increasing importance as
educated professionals in the expanding national economy” and began connecting the idea of
American exceptualism with “good character” to their success.179 Between the educated middleand upper-class, it was their “belief that the United States was a unique and exceptional place
where the historical ‘law’ of corruption and national decline could be suspended. The key was to
clearly understand the causes of corruption then devise and implement strategies that would
ensure continued growth and development rather than decay and degeneration.”180 During a
period of tumultuous change, a growing middle-class of predominantly White Protestants who
feared the end of their way of life and ultimately the collapse of America into “degeneracy,”
science stepped up as an authority to discovering the “natural laws” in which to live by and
prevent the country from decline.
Supported by educated elites in the middle- and upper-classes, science was advocated as
having the ability to understand and establish “behavioral norms” structured by essentialism,
“that if internalized and followed properly provided direction, order, and personal fulfillment.”181
Here is where social sciences took on the task of “locating universally binding principles to

178

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 38.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 38.
180
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 48.
181
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 48.
179

83

which a majority of people, in spite of their very real differences, might agree,”182 and thus
“produce a smoothly functioning society that was naturally moral.”183 With the social sciences
positioning itself as an authority on social norms, scientific medicine situated itself as an
authority on healing those who had deviated from those norms.

Pathologizing the Queer
As essentialist science was leaned on more heavily to be a moral authority guiding
America into continued growth and progress, the new field of criminology and medicine
influenced each other. Within the field of criminology, “the notion of ‘natural born criminal’ thus
entered the scientific imagination, and was picked up throughout the medical community where
it was particularly well received.”184 The idea of a person being born a criminal was accepted
and linked to social illness as a part of the degeneration theory, which “asserted that some
illnesses, especially the mental ones, were inheritable, and as they passed from generation to
generation, they got worse and threatened the very fabric of society itself.”185 Social illnesses
that were linked to degeneration could include alcoholism, pauperism, insanity, engaging in nonreproductive or same-sex sexual activity (e.g. anti-sodomy laws), or not conforming to gender
roles based on essentialist views of heteronormativity. Often times those assigned to have an
essence of inborn criminality were “individuals who were economically less well off than the
middle and upper classes…lived in the inner cities of North America” and were often “the darker
Eastern European, the Jew, the Italian, or the African American…[along with] women…who
engaged in non-gender conforming activities.”186

182

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 63.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 65.
184
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 87.
185
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 86.
186
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 88.
183

84

While social scientists in fields like criminal anthropology played the role of
“discover[ing] the laws that ensured the ‘evolutionary’ victory of the liberal, Protestant,
republican, capitalist America and reverse the frightful slide into chaos,”187 those in the newly
emerging psychology fields worked to understand the cause of and to treat those exhibiting
deviance. However, this was also the period in time when the idea of nature vs. nurture—
whether certain behaviors were something an individual was born with or developed due to their
upbringing and environment—was being debated188. Whether a characteristic was congenital
(inborn/nature) or acquired (nurture/environmental) mattered greatly as it determined how
society should handle deviance from social norms that had been established through biological
essentialism. If a behavior was congenital, then was it really fair to legally punish someone as a
criminal for something that couldn’t be helped? On the other hand, if a deviant behavior was
acquired, then should it not be up to doctors to treat and “heal” those suffering from deviance?
This is the debate that brought queer/trans individuals into the scope of early medical discourse.
Prior to the American medical community taking an interest in same-sex attraction, it was
in a newly unified Germany among the neuro-psychiatric community that same-sex attraction
was “discovered” and became medicalized. Karl Westphal, a neuro-psychiatry professor
published an article in 1869 detailing two cases of people who dressed in the opposite gender’s
clothing and were attracted to the same sex. Dubbing these behaviors as “contrary sexual
feeling,” Westphal argued that these behaviors where congenital and that “this condition was
usually pathological, and should be the concern of the physician rather than the court, where

187

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 66.
During the late 19th century and early 20th century, the field of genetics was developing alongside theories of
inherited traits, which set the stage for the “nature vs. nurture” debate, especially around concepts of criminality
being inheritable.
188

85

victims of this phenomenon traditionally found themselves.”189 Westphal had also been
influenced by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, “self- proclaimed lover of men and the first major figure in
the 19th- century German homophile movement.”190 Ulrichs was a lawyer and journalist who
was publicly working to stop “paragraph 143 of the Prussian penal code that criminalized sex
between members of the same sex” from being included in the German Empire’s new
constitution.191 Prior to the unification of the German States, Ulrich’s home in the Kingdom of
Hanover had no laws regulating sex among consenting adults—same-sex or opposite sex. Ulrich
wrote twelve tracts called the Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love, where he argued for the “biological
innateness of same-sex attraction” in hopes that “if lawmakers understood the same-sex
attraction was as natural and normal as opposite-sex attraction, they would be more inclined to
reject paragraph 143 outright.”192 Alongside Ulrich and Westphal, Austro-Hungarian writer Karl
Maria Kertbeny spoke out against paragraph 143 and is credited with not only bringing this issue
to public attention, but also for coining the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual.”193 However,
it was Viennese neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing who is credited for “moving
homosexuality out of the shadows of vice and into the light of science and medicine.”194
Although Krafft-Ebing firmly argued that homosexuals should be the responsibility of
doctors rather than the courts, he was also influenced by the essentialist science of his time.
Scientists working of newly emerging theories of evolution believed they had discovered the
“sex instinct,” which “drove species to propagate by means of sexual reproduction, the lack of
which would lead to extinction…any form of non-procreative sex was a perversion of the sex

189

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 101.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 101-102.
191
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 101-102.
192
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 101-102.
193
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 103.
194
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 103.
190

86

instinct because it would not lead to reproduction and the survival of the species.”195 Thus
Krafft-Ebing viewed any sexual activity that did not lead to procreation as a sexual aberration,
introducing the concepts of “acquired” and “congenital” sexual perversion that would eventually
be picked up by American scientists. For Krafft-Ebing, acquired homosexuality was “the result
of bad habits or influences that had the cumulative effect of turning an individual away from
normal sexual behavior,”196 whereas congenital homosexuality was “a biological perversion of
the sexual instinct,…clinically a ‘functional sign of degeneration’ and…in most cases
hereditary.”197 However, the idea that would really stick with American scientists was KraftEbing’s theory that “sexual pathologies were caused by the stress upon the central nervous
system, an unfortunate side effect of civilization.”198 Krafft-Ebing believed that even though
Europeans had “progressed…from its own barbarous and decadent past…he was worried that as
modern cities increased demands upon the nervous system, decadence, sensuality, and
effeminacy would result and undermine the ‘morality and purity’ of the family.”199 For those
exhibiting moral degeneration, the stresses of modernity were to blame.
For American doctors practicing in a country that was rapidly industrializing and urbanizing
with racial demographics and gender roles in flux, modernity seemed like the perfect culprit for
moral degeneracy. Although those writing on sexual perversion in Europe at the time were
mostly referring to homosexuality rather than transgender, Edward Spitzka, the first American
physician to write about “contrary sexual feelings,” lumped both homosexuals and transgender
together, thus setting the precedence for other American medical practitioners. Working from

195

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 105.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 107.
197
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 108.
198
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 106.
199
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 106.
196

87

Krafft-Ebing’s work, Spitzka further developed four categorizations of sexual perversion, which
were those who lacked any sexual feelings, having too strong of sexual feelings, having sexual
feelings at an “abnormal time in life”, and having a sex instinct that “is simply perverted, this is,
not of such a character as to lead to the preservation and increase of the species.”200 In the U.S.,
doctors studying sexual abnormalities seemed to be of two minds on treatment that often
reflected class-based prejudices. Physicians who primarily treated the (often White) educated
middle- and upper-class, also known as nerve doctors, sexual perversion was seen as congenital,
or being biological in that:
the victim was not necessarily mad, delusional, psychotic, or depraved…[rather] bad biology
was at fault and under the circumstances one was certainly not responsible for the condition
and should be allowed to go about ones business discreetly.201
Remaining in the “closet” or hiding
one’s same-sex attraction during this
time was a crucial survival tactic, which
has made identifying some historic
LGBTQ+ figures a challenge as
speculation is all we have to go on
sometimes. Yet rereading personal
correspondents and writings of some
historical figures through a queer lens
Figure 11. Portrait of Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle.
Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, by M.P. Rice, circa 1869.202

has revealed some possible “new”
historic LGBTQ+ icons. The nature-

Spitzka, “A Historical Case of Sexual Perversion,” 379.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 125.
202
Rice, “Image of Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle.”
200
201

88

loving poet Walt Whiteman is one prominent figure that is now being suggested as having been
gay, although his writing on same-sex attraction is written in a more spiritual tone than erotic. In
Whitman’s collections of poems Leaves of Grass, he celebrates the comradery of men, which to
the public could be read as heterosexual friendship, however in his letters to Peter Doyle, a
romantic tone is much more obvious (unless you intentionally ignore it and force a heterosexual
reading). Writing about Doyle in Leaves of Grass, Whiteman writes:

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been/receiv’d with plaudits in the
capitol, still it was not a/happy nigh for me that follow’d,/And else when I carous’d, or when
my plans we accomplish’d,/still I was not happy,/ …. And when I thought how my dear
friend my lover was on his way/coming, O then I was happy,/O then each breath tasted
sweeter, and all the day my food/nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day passed’d well,/
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening/came my friend,/And that
night when all was still I heard the waters roll slowly/continually up the shores,/I heard the
hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to/me whispering to congratulate me,/For the
one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover/in the cool night,/In the stillness in
the Autumn moonbeams his face was inclined/toward me,/And his arm lay lightly around my
breast – and that night I was/happy.203

However in the case of asylum doctors whose observations came from patients from lower
classes, sexual perversion was seen as an acquired condition “as a result of bad habits” with
“insanity…[as] the diagnosis” and thus institutionalization as a required treatment.204 During this
period of time when professional medicine was still in its early development, medical conditions
linked to inappropriate gender expression and sexuality were commonly addressed with
“treatments” that could today be likened to forms of torture. Women’s behavior during the 19th
century was of great concern to middle- and upper-class society, and “merely being a woman in
the 1860s was tantamount to having a medical condition. Women with a sensitive clitoris might

203

Whitman and Bucke, Calamus: A Series of Letters Written During the Years 1868-1880 by Walt Whitman to a
Young Friend (Peter Doyle), iv.
204
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 125.

89

awaken to find it amputated by a doctor as a cure for ‘hysteria.’”205 For queer and transgender
men and women, “sexual inversion”206 was often the diagnosis with a variety of “treatments”
such as “aversion therapy, lobotomy, clitorectomy, and physical or chemical castration.”207
Aversion therapy, for example, could consist of exposing a queer person to a nude person of the
same-sex in-person or in erotic photography, and then physically punishing the patient if
they showed any sign of arousal. The theory behind aversion therapy was that the patient would
associate the “erotic photograph with pain and learn somehow not to be aroused—much as a
mouse is trained with rewards or punishment in operant conditioning.”209 Even though there
were medical scientists at this time such as sexologist Havelock Ellis,210 who early on
understood aversion and
conversion therapies were
ineffective, both aversion and
conversion therapies for changing
sexual orientation continue in
some states in the United States
to this day, despite there being no
evidence that these types of
Figure 12. Hydrotherapy.
Patients were subjected to forms of hydrotherapy practice, where
attendants wrap patients in wet sheets and wait for several hours or days.
The photo above was taken circa 1900, retrieved from the National
Archives and Records Administration/National Building.208

“treatments” do anything but
harm.211

Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 303.
Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, “Introduction,” 8-9.
207
McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” 90.
208
Stamberg, “'Architecture of an Asylum' Tracks History of U.S. Treatment of Mental Illness.”
209
Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 294.
210
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 149.
211
APA, “APA Resolution on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts.” See also Movement Advancement Project,
“Conversion ‘Therapy’ Laws in the United States.”
205
206

90

During the early 20th century, Social Darwinism gained popularity and gave rise to a belief
that “modern America had become a cauldron of unstable passion as each person laid claim to
his or her individuality, unchecked by religion or reason, and thus without morality.”212 Social
Darwinists argued that “acquired and congenital homosexuality were ‘diseases of society’ that
demanded draconian measures to ultimately eradicate them if the United States were to be healed
and returned to a state of health and vigor.”213 This idea influenced the American eugenics
movement which theorized and popularized that diseases and mental disorders were solely linked
to genetic inheritance and that human populations could be improved through selective breeding.
Combining Christianity with biological essentialism, Social Darwinists and eugenicists sought to
rid the country of those who “tainted” the good morals of society in an effort to return the nation
to “traditions and standards that had once made the country great.”214 This was also a time when
scientists were expanding on “race science” developed by Enlightenment Era thinkers like
François Bernier, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Carl Linnaeus, going beyond
simply categorizing racial differences and rather seeking to find ways to improve races through
breeding.215 After the horrors of genocide committed by the Nazis, it was only after it came to
light during the Nuremberg trials that the Nazis had been inspired by American eugenicists like
Madison Grant’s deeply racist work Passing of the Great Race, that Americans began to pull
back the acceptance of eugenic ideologies.216 Although the sentiments of destroying the “unfit”
have waned in popularity and acceptability after the atrocities committed by the Nazis, the
influence of social Darwin and eugenics still lingers in many American institutions and among

212

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 151.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 153.
214
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 150.
215
Lopreato, “Biology's Influence on Sociology: Human Sociobiology,” 1219.
216
Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History, 69.
213

91

conservative thinkers today.217 It was only in 1973 that homosexuality was removed from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a mental illness, while it wasn’t
until 2012 that the American Psychological Association changed "gender identity disorder"
(transgender) in the DSM to "gender dysphoria," and 2019 that the World Health Organization
removed gender nonconformity from its global manual of diagnoses, the International
Classification of Diseases, and thus no longer recognizing transness as a mental illness. Yet
despite the removal of same-sex sexual attraction and transgender from mental health diagnostic
materials as mental illness, there is still much work to be done by those in the medical fields to
undo the stigma against LGBTQ+ individuals.

Social Darwinism and Conservation
The late 19th century and early 20th century was a period in which Western scientists and
other influential thinkers looked to Nature to understand human society and to search for the
“natural laws” humans were to follow in order to thrive. This was also a time of great societal
changes and conflict in America, and those from predominantly wealthy White classes feared
losing power. For those of the capitalist class with political economic power, subjugating those
with characteristics deemed inferior (e.g. women, Eastern European and “non-White”
immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, working class/impoverished, disabled, etc.),
social Darwinism and eugenics offered solutions. Social Darwinists took ideas from Charles
Darwin and twisted his notions of evolution and natural selection to justify individualistic
competition and laissez-faire capitalism, alongside White supremacy and nationalism. This
philosophy was also used to advocate for the idea that those who are successful have earned their
Although with the emergence of the “alt-right” politics emboldening bigoted ideologies, some individuals have
utilized the tactics of using coded language to express prejudices to avoid being labeled as a racist. One example has
been to identify as a “race realist, a euphemism that reflects how they like to believe the scientific facts are on their
side,” in order to avoid being identified as a White supremacist or White nationalist. See Saini, Superior: The Return
of Race Science, 98.
217

92

success and that the “unsuccessful” in society are deserving and to blame for their failures.
Although social Darwinists claimed to be applying biological concepts to society, in the present
day many scholars recognize social Darwinism as a form of pseudoscience with the sole purpose
of advocating for the naturalness of misogyny, racism, imperialism, or even fascism.218
Although Darwin utilizes the term “fitness” in his works as a means of describing the
mechanics of natural selection, fitness in Darwinian terms more refers to reproductive success
and an organism’s ability to survive in its environment in order to reproduce offspring. Social
Darwinists however, utilized the notion of “survival of the fittest” as interpreted by English
philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. In his 1864 book The
Principles of Biology, Spencer imagines “fitness” as physical characteristics that enhance
survival and reproduction, writing that:

This survival of the fittest, implies multiplication of the fittest...This survival of the fittest,
which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has
called ‘natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for
life.’...That organisms which live, thereby prove themselves fit to live, in so far as they
have been tried; while organisms which die, thereby prove themselves in some respects
unfitted for living; are facts no less manifest, that is the fact that this self-acting purification
of a species, must tend ever to insure adaptation between it and its environment.219
For Spencer, “fitness” implied physical and mental fitness, and that competition allowed certain
individuals and societies to flourish by allowing the strong to thrive and the weak to be
eliminated. For Darwin, Spencer and other Western scientists of this time, the concept of race,
racial differences, and racial hierarchy were a continuation of Antiquity and Enlightenment Era

Rutledge, “Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, and the Metaphysics of Race.” See also Schoijet, “On
Pseudoscience.” and Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 38-48, 143-155,
183-194.
219
Spencer, The Principles of Biology, 444-445.
218

93

thinkers who debated whether humanity was monogenetic, one unified species, or polygenetic,
“that humans evolved from several independent pairs of ancestors.”220 Often using the terms
“race” (sometimes conflated with ethnicity) and “species” interchangeably, Enlightenment
scientists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Carl Linnaeus, sought to define
differences between races as well as create distinct categorization.221
From the 15th-18th centuries the meaning of “race” tended to have no stable definition in
biological terms, often having two dimensions. As Michael Banton argues, the vertical
dimension of the use of “race” framed all humans as descendants of Adam and therefore
“identified the historical origins of what made a set of persons distinctive, emphasizing heredity
and genealogy … fitted with the anthropology of the Bible,” whereas the horizontal dimension of
the use of “race” instead “identified the nature of that distinctiveness.” 222 From the period of the
Renaissance until around the 18th century, scientists’ understandings of human diversity was
filtered through natural theology, where scientists studied Nature as a means for understanding
“the Bible’s record of creation and for a better understanding of the Creator’s plan.”223 Interested
in finding a natural method of classification for plant, animal, and even human diversity
(although only a small portion of his work), the work of Carl Linnaeus helped establish race as a
scientific concept, even though the word “race” was not utilized in his taxa, but rather through
the use of “varieties." In Linnaeus’s 1758 edition of his Systema naturae, he categorized humans
into two classifications, homo sapiens (creatures of the day) and homo troglodytes (creatures of
the night). Homo sapiens were then further divided into four “varieties”, the Americanus,

McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” 81. Also see Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern
Science, 143-183.
221
Banton, “The classification of races in Europe and North America: 1700-1850,” 45-50. See also Linnaeus,
Systema Naturae.
222
Banton, What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity, 11.
223
Banton, What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity, 12.
220

94

Europeanus, Asiaticus, and Africanus, which included physical and cultural characteristics of
each of these varieties. Concerned mainly with classification, Linnaeus’s classification was not
hierarchical and believed all varieties of homo sapiens were one species, unlike most of his
contemporaries who were more interested in the causes for human variation. Linnaeus’s
contemporary Count de Buffon advocated that human diversity arose from the “influence of
climate, from the difference of food, and of the mode of living, from epidemical distempers, as
also from the intermixture, varied ad infinitum of individuals more or less resembling one
another.”224 Although rejecting polygenist ideas of different variations of humans being separate
species, some writers of this time, such as Buffon and Immanuel Kant expressed racist
ideologies, with Buffon making “disparaging accounts of Negroes and Lapps” and Kant
describing “the Jews as a nation of swindlers.”225 For 18th century writers, Christianity and
scientific understanding went hand in hand, with three main lines of understanding for human
variation emerging: 1) that human variation was the result of divine intervention and “blackness
being a curse or punishment upon the descendants of Ham”; 2) human variation arose from
environmental influences and inheritance (although genetics had not yet been identified); or that
3) “variations had been there all along, having been part of the Creator’s intention … [which]
denied the possibility of evolution … represent[ing] the natural world as static and was
sometimes associated with the claim that the Bible was the story of Adam’s descendants
only.”226 Although Darwin’s natural selection theory debunked the third explanation for human
variation, this view of human diversity gained in support scientifically, publicly, and politically
throughout the 19th century. Throughout the 19th century, scholars debated if differences could be

224

Buffon and Duchet, De l'homme/Presentation et notes de Michele Duchet, 320.
Banton, “The classification of races in Europe and North America: 1700-1850,” 47.
226
Banton, “The classification of races in Europe and North America: 1700-1850,” 48.
225

95

attributed to “the nature of the environment” or if “the main human stocks had always been
distinct” and were “original and permanent.”227 For both sides of this debate, the notion of “race”
was developed into the explanations for variation as well as becoming associated with ideas
around “nation” as nationalist movements of the time were gaining momentum.
Understanding race through evolution during the 19th and 20th century, scientists categorized
humans into distinct races according to geographic regions, as well as physical characteristics
like skin color. 229 Each race was
placed along an evolutionary hierarchy
with “White” Western Europeans at
the top, being viewed as the most
advanced societies and thus superior to
Figure 13. Who was more likely to be sterilized in North Carolina?
“From 1937 to 1966, Black women were most likely to be forcibly
sterilized in the state; desegregation coincided with a dramatic
increase in the rate. White women were the next most likely
demographic group to be forcibly sterilized, followed less
frequently by Black men and white men. The chart illustrates
sterilization rates per 10,000 people, by race and sex.” Missing
1953 data is interpolated”.228

the “lower” races, who were viewed as
“savages” and “primitive”230.
Although Darwin wrote in disgust

about slavery in his work The Voyage of the Beagle, in the U.S., “slavery’s defenders turned to
science,” arguing that “negroes were simply not fellow human beings…for Negroes and
Caucasians were in fact distinct species.”231 After the emancipation of slaves in the U.S.,
alongside the increasing workforce of women and immigrants (who were also engaging in
fighting for better work conditions), the educated White male elites turned to social Darwinism
“to support their overtly racist and sexist attitudes toward women and people of color by keeping

227

Banton, What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity, 14.
Stern, “Forced Sterilization Policies in the US Targeted Minorities and Those with Disabilities--and Lasted into
the 21st Century.”
229
Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, 355-384.
230
McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” 75-76.
231
McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” 79.
228

96

them in their ‘place,’” and in turn “deny[ing] the same power to those on the outside by virtue of
their alleged, ‘inherently unfit’ natures.”232 Through the logics of social Darwinism, those who
were at the bottom of society belonged there as they were “naturally unfit to survive or be
successful in a competitive environment of the most fit.”233 To give those deemed “unfit”
assistance was seen as unnatural, a squandering of resources, and ran the “risk [of] the possibility
that the unfit may one day artificially populate the world rather than go the way of the
dinosaur.”234
With middle- and upper-class White men benefiting the most from rapidly growing
industries under capitalism through the exploitation of its labor force, the so-called captains of
industry promoted social Darwinism, viewing themselves as exemplary models of superiority.
Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate and supporter of the eugenics movement wrote in his essay
“The Gospel of Wealth” how the survival of the fittest was crucial for the good of the nation:

While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it
insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore,
as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment,
the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the
law of competition between these as being not only beneficial but essential for the future
progress of the race.235

Likewise, oil baron and supporter of eugenics John D. Rockefeller, viewed the survival of the
fittest as both biological and divine law:

The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest...The American Beauty
rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only
232

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 39.
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 39.
234
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 39.
235
Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth,” 16-17.
233

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by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in
business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.236

Although social Darwinists favored industrialization and the economic growth that arose from it,
urbanization rocked the status quo with an influx of African Americans, working women, and
immigrants posing a threat to American
exceptualism. Likening modern
America to the Roman empire in
decline, social Darwinists feared that
without regulation of moral conduct
America would be doomed to
Figure 14. Sterilization rates per 1000 institutionalized patients.
“In the first half of the 20th century, approximately 20,000
people—many of them Latino—were forcibly sterilized in
California.” Chart by The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Data by
California Eugenic Sterilization Dataset, University of Michigan.
237

collapse.238 Viewing queer people,
people of color, the chronically ill,
disabled, and those who went against

gender essentialism of heteronormativity, were seen as “biological enemies of the human
species, pollutants and pathogens whose very presence posed a physical and possibly mortal
threat not only to individuals but to the species as a whole.”239
In order to avert further moral decay of American society, social Darwinists turned to eugenic
law and medicine to assure that only the “fit” were able to thrive and that the “unfit” were
eliminated—or at least kept from over-populating. Marriage control in the form of “granting
marriage licenses only to those who showed no ‘signs’ of mental or moral deficiency,” as well as

236

Ghent, Our Benevolent Feudalism, 29.
Novak and Lira, “Analysis: California's Forced Sterilization Programs Once Harmed Thousands, Especially
Latinas.”
238
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 151.
239
McWhorter, “Enemy of the Species,” 76.
237

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disallowing interracial and same-sex marriages, was viewed as a way to assure that “only those
and those deemed “incurable,” the recommended “therapy” was often a stripping of civil rights,
life-time imprisonment, forced sterilization, or even death.240 The practice of forced sterilization
would have a long legacy in the U.S., with over 65,000 Americans being “legally sterilized
without their consent” by 1972.241

The Progressive Era and the Conservation Movement
Social Darwinists and eugenicists helped popularized the notion in the U.S. that moral
degeneracy, such as homosexuality, arose from the stresses of modernity and that there was a
need to return to a pre-industrial lifestyle by reconnecting with Nature.242 During the Gilded Age,
industrial capitalism led to polluted and overcrowded cities, mismanagement of natural
resources, economic depression, rampant political corruption, as well as civil unrest in response
to its excesses. The U.S. began to move into the Progressive period between the 1890’s and 1900
which lasted until around the beginning of World War I. The Progressive era heralded a wave of
social activism and political reform in response to industrialization and urbanization, with
politicians pushing for corporate regulation, urban pollution control, restricting immigration,
along with the rise of environmental preservation and conservation. Although there are many
influential individuals from what is now known as the early modern environmentalist movement,
Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy as a conservationist and president is indeed a complicated one.
While Roosevelt is often praised for his strong support of scientific natural resource management
(influenced by his friendship with Gifford Pinchot) along with his hand in the creation of five
national parks, too often the darker side of his motivations go unexamined. In Roosevelt’s mind,

240

Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 155.
McWhorter, “Enemy fo the Species,” 86. See Figure 14 and Figure 15 for more forced sterilizations data.
242
Hatheway, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia, 154.
241

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conservation was “a great moral issue…[involving] the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and
continuance of the nation.”243 For environmentalists of this era, “the creation of ‘wilderness’ and
public lands (parks and forests) was the centerpiece to the nation-building project of defining
who we are as Americans…these lands…[are] supposedly, the best of who we are and who we
can be.”244
Roosevelt’s 1910 “The New Nationalism” speech conveyed his desire to join Americans
under a shared universal national identity that could “distinguish the United States from
Europe,”245 and was rooted in “the right kind of character - character that makes a man, first of
all, a good man in the home, a good father, a good husband - that makes a man a good
neighbor.”246 However, what and how to create “good character” for Roosevelt was informed by
social Darwinism, which intertwined with gender and race, and he feared “racial suicide”247—the
idea that the “unfit” (non-White, criminals, mentally or physically ill/disabled, non-Christian,
and the impoverished) would “outbreed” the “fit” (White, wealthy, “native-born” Protestants),
thus driving the “fit” into extinction. The extinction of the most “fit” American citizens was
ultimately Roosevelt’s greatest concern and priority, writing in a correspondence stressing the
importance of hard-work, essentialist gender roles, and procreation:

What is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country-that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial…The man or woman who
deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so
shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race,
and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people…If the men of
the nation are not anxious to work in many different ways, with all their might and
strength, and ready and able to fight at need and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the
243

Roosevelt and Abbott, The New Nationalism, 22.
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 50.
245
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 29.
246
Roosevelt and Abbott, The New Nationalism, 33.
247
Van Vorst and Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils; Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls, vii-ix.
244

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women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and
mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future.248

Not only was Roosevelt informed by the heteronormative and White supremacist logics of social
Darwinism, but also by the idea of sublime wilderness and the passing frontier. Influenced by
John Muir and other preservationist notions of “wilderness,” lands in which the majority of
Indigenous peoples had violently been removed, were now fetishized as a “pristine sanctuary,
where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature [that] can for at
least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization.”249
Ignoring the level of sophisticated knowledge and land management practices of Indigenous
cultures that cultivated these “pristine” places to begin with, wilderness was mythologized as
“untouched” lands where one could go to commune with (Christian) God. Alongside this
construction of “pristine wilderness,” the myth building of the U.S. frontier profoundly
influenced Roosevelt and his racial conservation efforts. Inspired by historian Frederick Jackson
Turner’s 1893 work The Frontier in American History, he builds the frontier myth through the
narrative of early European immigrants leaving civilization, “rediscover[ing] their primitive
racial energies” through the rigors of taming wild lands and ultimately constructing a rugged,
individualist form of democracy in which a new American ethnic and national identity was
formed.250 However, Turner points out that this rugged individualistic character was in danger as
Americans begun to run out of “free land,” writing that:

Movement has been [American life's] dominant face, and…the American energy will
continue to demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free
248

Van Vorst and Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils; Being the Experiences of Two Ladies as Factory Girls, vii-ix.
Italics added for emphasis.
249
Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 69.
250
Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 76.

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land offer themselves...and now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end
of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going
has closed the first period of American history.251
In Turner’s eyes, the frontier had been a special place for White Americans to re-create
themselves in new lands, which ultimately embodied true American freedom and identity. Yet,
with the frontier “closing,” this American identity was at risk of disappearing unless lands were
set aside for Americans to exercise and once again reclaim their rugged individualism. Roosevelt
and others who felt nostalgia for the frontier “lamented not just a lost way of life but the passing
of the heroic men who had embodied that life.”252 To Roosevelt, the image of the tough, stoic
(read as White) cowboy was the epitome of American masculinity, writing nostalgically in his
book Ranch Life and The Hunting Trail of the “fine, manly qualities” of “the wild rough-rider of
the plains.”253 Creating the national parks was a means of conserving not only a nostalgic idea of
American identity, but as protection against the effeminizing effects of modernity—as the
wilderness was a place where “a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to
be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.”254 Additionally, while
early environmentalists were influenced by transcendentalists like Henry Thoreau and John
Muir, who viewed Nature as a source for spiritual renewal and a place to commune with God,
Ralph Waldo Emerson helped incite the idea of Nature as a commodity and to be used by man.
Advocating the virtues of individualism and capitalism in his essays “Self-Reliance” and
“Wealth,” Emerson’s essay “Uses of Great Men” frames Nature as a resource:

251

Turner, The Frontier in American History, 27-28.
Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 77.
253
Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, 100.
254
Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 78.
252

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Nature seems to exist for the excellent…As plants convert the minerals into food for animals,
so each man converts some raw material in nature to human use…The destiny of organized
nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos; on every
side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals,
men, may be milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.255

Ironically, as William Cronon claims, men like Roosevelt, who perpetuated this masculinist idea
of using Nature to escape from civilization, were often “elite urban tourists and wealthy
sportsmen” who in a “peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism…projected their leisure-time
frontier fantasies onto the American landscape and so created wilderness in their own image.”256
These nostalgic frontier narratives and the construction and commodification of wilderness
reflected the desires of powerful White men to return to a time when America, in their eyes, was
great, and thus these desires played out through the creation of the National Parks systems, strict
immigration laws, as well as eugenic laws.
It would be easy to dismiss the ideas of individuals from over 100 years ago—as simply
just ideas from a time when racism and sexism were overt and widely accepted. Yet, these men
are sanctified as heroes who founded the modern environmental movement and major
mainstream environmental organizations. Although their words may have been forgotten, their
ideas linking conservation, nationalism, and racism are still playing out.257 Environmental
organizations, such as the Sierra Club, have opposed immigration as late as 1998, “using
arguments that differed in little but terminology from those eugenicists would have used,”258 as
well as mainstream environmentalists supporting the idea that overpopulation is at the core of
environmental problems. Overpopulation, usually using Global South nations as the prime

Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” 1, 4, 7.
Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 79.
257
Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth, 166-177. See also Wölfe Hazard,
Underflows. And Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces.
258
Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature, 174.
255
256

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problem nations, is “an appealing distraction from the effects of capitalism and
industrialization…effectively turning attention away from the consumption activities of white,
middle- upper- class Americans who often made up the movement's membership…[which] the
discourse continues to resonate today.”259
While there is far more complex history and nuance than I can talk about here, many
scholars such as Carolyn Merchant and Carolyn Finney, have critiqued the ideas that form the
bedrock of the environmental movement and environmental policies,260 as well as working to
expand the diversity of environmental narratives beyond a White man’s perspective.261
Critiquing the dominant universal narrative and expanding to multiple narratives is crucial, as
“the American environmental movement remains predominantly white and middle class,
detached from minorities, immigrants, and the poor along the same lines of class and color that
existed a century ago.”262 In a time of deep political polarization and increasing concern over the
dangers of climate change brought about by human activity, we must brave facing these wounds
and heal together so that we might have a chance at cooperation. We can no longer idealize
American individualism, as large-scale issues of environmental degradation and social inequity
cannot be solved by any one person—but rather are problems we need to address collectively in
solidarity. We live in an interconnected world full of interdependencies—we have the choice to
recognize and embrace those connections and find our own ecological niche within our world, or
we can deny these connections in favor of individual superiority and remain fearful and violent
towards each other. It is our decision what kind of world we want to live in and create.

Gosine, “Non-White Reproduction and Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts Against Nature,” 153.
Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction, 141-155, 162-168.
261
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces.
262
Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature, 174.
259
260

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Discussion—Transformation
-Jonathan: What is it about non-binary people and trans people that is so threatening to these
systems of power?
-Alok: We represent possibility. We represent choice, being able to create a life, a way of living,
a way of loving, a way of looking that’s outside of what we’ve been told that you should be.
-“Can We Say Bye-Bye to the Binary” on Jonathan Van Ness’s Getting Curious show (episode 3)
on Netflix263
We hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these
worlds, to plant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need.
-adrienne maree brown, from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice
Movements264

Through the Lens of Queer Ecology
My exploration of queer ecology was born from a desire to understand how to bring the
work of anti-oppression and the liberation movement together with that of environmentalism. Far
too long has it felt that as a queer and transgender person, that I was confined by the binary
thinking that I could either fight for human rights, or for the environment—but not both. As
climate crisis worsens with more severe and frequent natural disasters occurring and impacting
the most vulnerable populations, ignoring the interconnectedness of social and environmental
issues is not only unjust, but for many—such as myself—intolerable. As an emerging
transdisciplinary field, queer ecology is brimming with potentiality to continue the work
ecofeminists began in bridging the theoretical gap between sex, gender and Nature through an
intersectional lens, alongside offering possibilities for new ways of constructing identities and
being in relation not only to each other, but with the more-than-human. Although the

263
264

Ness, “Can We Say Bye-Bye to the Binary?”
Imarisha, et al., Octavia's Brood: Science Fisction Stories from Social Justice Movements, 279.

105

examination of links between sex, gender and Nature has a long history dating back to ancient
times, queer ecology draws from the work of (eco)feminists who “juxtapose[ed] the [egalitarian]
goals of the [women’s liberation and ecology] movements” to construct “new values and social
structures, based not on the domination of women and nature as resources but on the full
expression of both male and female talent and on the maintenance of environmental integrity.”265
As Prudence Gibson and Monica Gagliano argue, a feminist approach to ecological
understanding “involves the dismantling of conventional constructs and habits that do not treat
everyone and everything fairly and equally” as well as there being great potential in learning
from plant life (as well as non-human animals) “in order to formulate better models of human
collectivity and communicative cooperation.”266
Expanding on feminist works within ecological understandings, queer ecology not only
seeks to broaden linkages between the domination of women and nature, but also to examine the
exclusion of LGBTQ+ identities from this analysis, the ways LGBTQ+ individuals have been
charged with “unnaturalness,” and to center the perspectives and experiences of LGBTQ+
identities within ecological contexts. The goal of queer ecology being not to only uplift and make
more visible LGBTQ+ ecological narratives, but to offer different possibilities of heterosexual
dynamics, femininity, masculinity, non-binary or spectral gender identities and sexualities, care
and relational systems, as well as different ways of humans relating to and fitting into the nonhuman/Natural world. During this period of deeply polarized politics generating oppressive
conservative law making that diminishes the rights of “othered” humans and Nature, queer
ecology provides a lens in which to view “new social concerns” in order to “generate new

265
266

Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, xix.
Gibson and Gagliano, “The Feminist Plant,” 125-126.

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intellectual and historical problems” along with “new interpretations of the past [to] provide
perspectives on the present and hence the power to change it.”267
Queer ecology can be understood as having three functions: 1) to question and disrupt the
colonially-constructed, heteronormative ways in which Western societal understandings of
“(un)naturalness” and “(ab)normality” of sexual and gender identity have been grounded in
biology and constructions of Nature; 2) to extend the diversity of cultural, biological, and
environmental narratives of the past and present beyond the dominant universalized narrative
conceived by mainly White, heterosexual, cisgender, middle- and upper-class men; and 3) to
transform frameworks of our understandings of sex, gender, identity, and Nature that aren’t
limited by value hierarchies, rigid binaries, White supremacy, settler-colonialism, and
heteropatriarchy. What I have found to be the strongest part about queer ecology is that it goes
beyond only having the goal of deconstructing “normality,” offering a reconstruction of current
ideas and the systems built upon those ideas. Queer ecology ultimately has the goal of expanding
our collective imagination of the past along with potential presents and futures of creating new
systems of care in place of systems of harm, as well as seeking healthier ways to be in relation
with each other and our environment from an individual scale to a global scale.
Throughout my time in “traditional” academic institutions I have been feed the narrative
of social justice issues being separate from environmental problems, climate change being
framed as doom and gloom narratives in which problems were given with no solutions along
with blame was placed on individual behavior, or solutions rely on top-down (government or
institutional) approaches in which bottom-up, community-based solutions were framed as too
idealistic. Framing social and environmental issues as separate has not only limited our ability to

267

Merchant, The Death of Nature, xix.

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tackle large-scale intersecting injustices but has also limited the ability of coalition building and
addressing systemic issues from a bottom-up grassroots approach—that is through stronger
community participation in decision making. Much scholarship has already been done to
examine these issues, often looking at the history of the modern environmental movement which
rose out of the later 19th- and early 20th century conservation and preservation movements when
“the perception of abundant unexploited lands teeming with wildlife and fertile soils began to
turn to one of wasted resources and inefficient use.”268 Between the emergence of both the
conservation and preservation movements, the understandings of Nature as a natural resource to
be utilized by humans, as well as “wilderness” being framed as a uninhabited space for White
middle- and upper-class visitors to exercise and have a religious experience, became solidified in
the foundation of the modern environmental movement. As writers like Carolyn Merchant and
Carolyn Finney argue, “the narrative of the great outdoors in the United states is explicitly
informed by a rhetoric of wilderness conquest, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and the belief
that humans can either control or destroy nature with technology.”269 Within the conservation
movement, Nature was viewed through a utilitarian lens in which “natural resources” should be
regulated for “the greatest good for the greatest number…for the longest time.”270 Promoting the
idea of scientific forestry and better regulation of laissez-faire capitalism’s misuse of natural
resources and lands mismanagement, forester and friend of President Theodore Roosevelt,
Gifford Pinchot, institutionalized “resource efficiency in the use of forests, water, and
rangelands” as well as “a sustained yield process in which timberlands must be reforested after
cutting.”271 Although better regulation of natural resource management and extraction is

268

Merchant, American Environmental History, 141.
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 28.
270
Merchant, American Environmental History, 145.
271
Merchant, American Environmental History, 143.
269

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something worth celebrating in history, often times the darker side of the intentions of founding
conservationists gets left out of the history lesson. During the mid to late 19th century scientific
understandings of inheritable traits through genetics were being expanded upon and the notions
of improving both plants, livestock and humans through selective breeding were being
popularized through the eugenics movement. Being advocates of eugenic ideologies and fearing
those deemed as “unfit” (e.g. non-White, Eastern European and Asian immigrants, disabled,
impoverished and “moral degenerates”) outbreeding “fit” populations (White, Protestant,
middle/upper class, able-bodied, Western European immigrants/descendants), early
conservationists not only promoted conserving natural resources for future generations, but also
the imperative of conserving the White race.272 Theodore Roosevelt promoted these efforts in his
idea of a “new nationalism” in which conservation of Nature became a moral imperative and
patriotic duty as it was a means of preserving the superiority of the White race.273 For Roosevelt,
and men involved in the outdoors movement during this time, “wilderness” was seen as a crucial
place for White men to reclaim their virility and masculinity, because “in the wilderness, a man
could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his
energy and threatened his masculinity.”274 For affluent White men fearing that modernity was
leading to the effeminization of masculinity, reestablishing their masculine domination of
feminine Nature was in-line with the logics of (social) Darwinian “fitness.”275
While conservationists viewed Nature through a utilitarian framework, preservationists,
who also played an influential role in the formation of modern environmentalism, split from
conservationists on the use of Nature. Rather, preservationists, viewed “wild nature” as “a

272

Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 39.
Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature, 166-177.
274
Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness,” 78.
275
Merchant, American Environmental History, 147.
273

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treasure to be cherished and preserved” with “mountains, waterfalls, valleys, and even deserts
[taking] on characteristics of the sublime, associated in the public mind with the awesome power
of God."276 Largely influenced by John Muir’s advocacy in preventing a dam being constructed
in the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park, “people who had never visited Yosemite
National Park or the Hetch Hetchy Valley wrote to Congress, urging that the valley be saved,”277
thus initiating the largely White, middle-and upper-class public involvement in environmental
protection. In the efforts to preserve “wilderness” as spaces “devoid of permanent residents”
through the creation of the National Parks System, “native and rural peoples living in a
subsistence mode of daily life” were “often displaced in the effort to create a heroic narrative of
national conservation.”278 The idea of “wilderness” as uninhabited by people has encouraged the
erasure of the role Indigenous cultures played in shaping the lands, as well as the violent removal
of tribes and those who relied on the lands for survival in order to create parks for more wealthy
tourists and outdoor enthusiasts. Although many mainstream environmental organizations today
would not overtly express the racist and misogynistic views of their founders, with some
organizations taking steps to reckon with problematic founders, the modern environmental
movement is still “grounded in these values, beliefs, and attitudes of the individuals who
construct[ed] them…[which] manifest in our everyday environmental practices, affecting our
livelihoods and our interactions with each other.”279
This has led to many mainstream environmental organizations and learning institutions to
prioritize White, middle-class, heteronormative values, in which protecting “pristine” Nature and
over-prioritizing charismatic animals, while the voices and concerns of those who may relate

276

Merchant, American Environmental History, 147.
Merchant, American Environmental History, 151.
278
Merchant, American Environmental History, 152-153.
279
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 28.
277

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differently to the “environment” are often excluded. In turn, this has also led some social justice
activists to focus narrowly on single identity issues while avoiding an exploration of how these
issues are entangled with and need to be simultaneously addressed with environmental problems.
Additionally, I have seen and felt the effects of nihilistic framings of climate change—the
blaming of the individual rather than demanding accountability of corporate industries at the
center of environmental damage or that we are too late to stop climate change so therefore all
hope is lost. This mindset has done nothing but stun individuals into inaction because of fear,
guilt, or the overwhelming feeling that we are trying to solve such a complex issue all on our
own. I have to ask then, what good is this “traditional” model for? Fortunately, we live in a
deeply diverse world full of individuals and communities who are giving the rest of us the
permission to question and flat out reject this model of cynicism and impending extinction in
favor of alternative models which embrace hope and collective survival.
In the first section, I examined how queer ecology disrupts the idea of normality and how
there is a misconception that “normal” human behavior is a result of biology, and that if a
behavior occurs in non-human animals, it is then acceptable in humans. However, there are
numerous behaviors in animals that many human cultures would not find acceptable for humans,
and human behaviors that are not seen in other animal behaviors. In looking at American culture,
a “master” narrative exists in which certain characteristics and identities are organized through
normative dualisms, where valued traits are placed on one side of a binary and thus naturalized
as superior to its opposite. Rather than being based on anything scientific or biological, valued
traits are more of a reflection of the desires of those with the most power and privilege to justify
injustices enacted upon devalued identities to maintain inequitable power dynamics. The
masculine is valued over the feminine, White racial groups are valued over non-White racial

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groups, heterosexuality and cisgender are valued over queerness and transgender, and human
culture is valued over the non-human or Nature. Much of queer ecology literature examines this
binary line of logic in response to supposedly biologically-based arguments for denying certain
groups of identities basic human rights and protections, especially those that frame LGBTQ+ as
“unnatural” and other characteristics that are deemed closer to Nature (e.g. the feminine,
intuition, BIPOC). In unpacking these arguments, scholars have noted that often times gender is
misinterpreted as a biological category linked to reproductive organs and strict binary gender
roles, rather than understanding gender a culturally constructed categorization that changes over
time, and sex being a biological categorization linked to whether a body produces eggs or sperm
(or both in cases of intersexed bodies).
In working to understand where this current logic of sex and gender has arisen from,
scholars have pointed to Charles Darwin’s sexual selection theory. Darwin proposed in his
theory that there is a template that all males and females (both non-human and human) naturally
follow in order to successfully reproduce and thus further the species. In Darwin’s mind, males
were constantly in competition with one another, more intelligent than females, and virile,
whereas females were meant to be more passive, caring (especially of offspring), and coy (not as
eager to engage in sexual activity). Additionally, through the rationale of sexual selection theory,
procreation becomes the most important mechanism for evolution despite all other behaviors and
traits that exist that assure survival, thus creating repro-centric ideologies in which making
babies becomes the goal of life rather than surviving and thriving. This has led to many queer
ecologist and ecofeminist writers to suggest a rethinking of not only sexual selection theory, but
also calling out how repro-centric narratives of survival through procreation ignores the
complexities and importance of non-reproductive sex (such as same-sex sex) and the

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undervaluing of other social behaviors that ensure survival, such as cooperation. Additionally, I
explored some of the “common-sense” lessons I have been taught through American culture and
education that attempt to uphold compulsory heterosexuality and the privileging of cisgender
identities.
Throughout these biased lessons, I offered a small pool of plant and non-human animal
examples that not only prove heterosexist claims about Nature scientifically inaccurate, but also
showed that the world we live in is an explosion of sexual and gender diversity that refuses to be
confined to a rigid universal binary. These examples are not meant to necessarily naturalize
human queer and transgender identities through the logic of occurs in animals = acceptable for
humans, but rather debunk claims that queerness and transness is a uniquely human
characteristic. However, in a time when LGBTQ+ individuals are constantly having to justify
their existence and survive in a country where it is acceptable to debate and deny rights to certain
groups of people based on identity, learning that queerness (in both the sense of sexuality and the
opposite of “normal”) is abundant and crucial in Nature may be empowering information for
LGBTQ+ individuals as well as heterosexual and cisgender individuals who suffer under
heteropatriarchy. Ultimately the main arguments for uplifting the knowledge of queer and
transgender non-human animals are that Western science has limited itself as a model. By being
largely unwilling to incorporate the vast diversity of life in our world, scientists often rely on a
diversity-suppressing mode of thinking in which difference is framed as “deviance” or a
“mistake.” In studying the life histories of non-human species, we are offered a plethora of
models of other possibilities and other ways of being in relation with each other that can
accommodate a diversity of sexualities and gender presentations, as well as ways of being
cooperative, rather than competitive.

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In my own lifetime, I have witnessed more individuals expressing concern over the loss
of rights, political polarization, and concern over the continued loss of biodiversity that has only
been increased in the face of climate change. The models we have now that value individualism
over collectivism, universality over diversity, and exclusion over inclusion, are being recognized
by many fighting for lasting change as unsustainable. Some activists and scholars have suggested
looking at different non-human animal societies for different models of being for humans, as
many social species utilize cooperation and have been able to integrate queer and transness into
their social structures.280 Others have suggested uplifting Traditional Ecological Knowledge
alongside Western science, as many Indigenous cultures hold a deeper understanding of
sustainable land management based on mutual respect and care for Nature and the non-human—
or the notion of kincentricity, gender dynamics that do not rely on patriarchal control and
domination over the feminine and Nature, having a responsibility to one’s community, as well as
queerness being an integral part of many Indigenous traditions. TEK models and Indigenous
leadership is invaluable for climate justice movements as it offers different ways of thinking
outside of colonial concepts, emphasizes multiculturalism, community governance and solutions
over reliance on the state, and has been formed from cultures that have essentially already
experienced their own form of apocalypse under colonial genocide, in which they have had to be
adaptable and resilient in order to survive and thrive.
Lastly, LGBTQ+ communities have also been suggested as a potential model in which
we might utilize during this time of crisis. LGBTQ+ people have often needed to find different
ways of being in a world that outwardly rejects us as well as finding ways to live authentically
when a repressive binary doesn’t suit our identities. We have created new families of our own

280

Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, 54.

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when our “biological” families have turned us away. We have carved out safer spaces for
ourselves and communities when all other spaces have worked to exclude us and keep us out.
We have created our own art, literature, music, and media in response to harmful representation
or bad representation that was created about us, without us. We have formed new ways and
systems of care through mutual aid when it has become apparent that the government and our
institutions are not meant to provide for us or actively harm us.281 We have created a vast variety
of our own identities and terminology when the language available can’t accurately describe us.
Since LGBTQ+ identities span across all other existing identities, there is great potential in
coalition building and solidarity building across race, class, age, ability, nationality, and so on.
This is not to say that there is one model that is better than the other, or that we even need to
settle on just one. Rather, we need to be open to entirely new ways of being that don’t replicate
our current structures of oppression and control. Even within oppressed communities that
organize to address systemic problems, internal conflict arises due to internalized oppressive
power dynamics, the inability to conflict resolve, along with the inability to agree on what
actions are best to take in providing solutions. This is why it is so important for those seeking
liberation to recognize and unlearn heteropatriarchy, White supremacy, and colonial thinking in
order achieve effective and long-lasting change created through collaborative action. It is also
crucial that both scientists and scientific institutions be open to new ideas and knowledge
productions, such as the existence of queer and transgender animals, the idea that humans are not
separate from or meant to dominate Nature, and that TEK is a crucial model for addressing social
inequity and creating ecologically sustainable futures.

281

Lang, “Behind the Fundraisers Saving Queer and Trans Lives during COVID-19.”

115

In the second section, I examined how queer ecology offers extensional scholarship
through the historical roots of queer- and transphobia, specifically in the United States, and how
this prejudice became entangled in the formation of American national identity and the early
environmental conservation movement in the early 20th century. Presently, there is a major fight
over the teaching of American history being played out through the banning of books and
curriculum on race, gender, and sexuality. This is an effort to dismiss the realities of inequity in
our culture and perpetuate a historical amnesia that allows those with the most power and
privilege to be perceived as innocent from causing harm or that change (or at least the changes
those on the political left want to see) isn’t needed. When we deny the reality of our collective
history, not only do we deny a very real part of our individual identity as Americans, but we
deny ourselves the potential to learn from past mistakes, to empathize with those whose lives
have differed from our own, and we lose the ability to understand how we have arrived at
present-day problems. In looking back at my own education as a child, which lacked much
nuance or discussion around any of the topics conservatives are currently working so hard to ban,
my childhood learning feels more like propaganda than an actual meaningful education. I have
no doubt in my mind that if my early education had engaged at all with sexual and gender
diversity as being “normal” I would have figured quite a few things out about myself sooner,
rather than in my early thirties. If I had been taught to critically think about systems of
oppression in a historical context at an earlier age and in learning communities, I would have
potentially been a better ally as a White person earlier in my life, as well as grappled less with
how as an individual I could support the changes I would like to see.
Through my research on 19th and early 20th century American history, I was shocked to
see that some of the same arguments being made against LGBTQ+ people (as well as women

116

and people of color) today were being made over one hundred years ago. Although the majority
of anti-LGBTQ+ arguments I have noticed have been within a religious context, there have still
been a significant amount made on the basis of “scientific” evidence that LGBTQ+ people are
“unnatural,” mentally ill, are a new “trend,” or flat out don’t exist. This has been the legacy of
the pathologizing of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities during the 1800s and 1900s when
scientific medicine was deeply engrained in the ideology, which extends back to Antiquity, that
men and women were “naturally” heterosexual and had immutable inborn gender-based
characteristics. This was also a time that viewed any deviation from heteropatriarchal gender
roles as pathological. People of the same sex falling in love or engaging in sexual activity were
seen as either ill, because of the stress of a rapidly modernizing country, or moral “degenerates”
who needed to be removed from society to prevent their “moral taint” from spreading. During
this period of time, scientists expanding upon Enlightenment theories of “race science” with
social Darwinian notions of fitness, worked to normalize even further that “non-White” races
were less evolved than “White” races, and therefore could be seen as less-than human (or even as
separate species). Fortunately, modern doctors and psychologists have made great strides in the
last century in recognizing that framing LGBTQ+ individuals as mentally ill is scientifically
indefensible and trying to “fix” them through conversion therapy is ineffective and causes great
harm—a violation of the hypocritic oath to do no harm. There is still much more work to be done
within our care systems for LGBTQ+ and people of color, as there are still bigoted medicine
practitioners who either treat their patients poorly or flat our refuse to provide care. I personally
have also experienced doctors and mental health providers who have failed to educate
themselves on treating LGBTQ+ patients, where I have had to spend a great deal of time and
energy trying to explain my identity. I have listened to the experiences of others who end up with

117

doctors who refuse to assist in gender affirming care and continue to misgender and deadname282
them. Depending upon which state someone lives in, if a trans person wants to change their legal
name or gender marker on their identification, they must provide documentation from a doctor
that they are receiving gender affirming treatment. If they can’t find a safe doctor to assist, or
don’t desire to medically transition, this makes gender affirmation in other ways next to
impossible. Even in the year of 2022, there are still states that allow conversion therapy to be
done on children, as well as states that have worked to criminalize parents who allow their
children to transition283, despite mounting evidence that gender-affirming care for transgender
adults and youths can save lives.284
While the legacy of pathologizing of queerness and transness by scientific medicine is
slowly beginning to shift, sentiments of LGBTQ+ individuals being “unnatural” have also been
entangled with the legacy of social Darwinism’s ideas around “survival of the fittest” and the
desire to destroy the “unfit.” Throughout the pandemic, I have noticed these arguments
becoming louder in public and political discourse, in the sense of resistance to protecting the
most vulnerable to not only the COVID virus, but also in assisting those who were already
housing, food, and medical care insecure. Social Darwinism was constructed by White, wealthy
men who feared losing their power during a time of great social change and shifting
demographics and sought to use pseudoscience to justify using violence to maintain their power.
These men believed that through eugenics they could encourage the best “stock” of people (read

Deadnaming refers to using a trans person’s birth name (the name given to them at birth) rather than using their
“preferred” or chosen name that they use to affirm their gender. This is a transphobic tactic used to invalidate and
degrade transgender individuals by denying trans people’s autonomy to self-identify as the gender they feel they are.
283
Chappell, “Texas Supreme Court Oks State Child Abuse Inquiries into the Families of Trans Kids.”
284
See ACLU, “Doctors Agree: Gender-Affirming Care is Life-Saving Care.” See also The Trevor Project,
“Gender-affirming care has been shown to reduce suicide ideation and attempts in transgender individuals, along
with social support, familial support, and reduction of discrimination.” Also see Turban, “The Evidence for Trans
Youth Gender-Affirming Medical Care: Research suggests gender-affirming medical care results in better mental
health.”
282

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as “fit” Whites) to procreate to ensure the best quality of American citizen, all the while
attempting to eliminate those deemed “unfit” and seen as threats to making America a truly
exceptional place. Through this lens, LGBTQ+ people are seen as “unreproductive” or morally
degenerate for engaging in non-procreative sex and therefore have no place or purpose in
society—they are reproductively and morally unfit. Similarly, the gender-nonconforming,
immigrants and people of color were also seen as threats to American exceptionalism as they
were seen as “morally degenerate,” or less civilized than White Western European races.
Mingling with the ideas of social Darwinists and eugenicists, early conservationists, such as
Theodore Roosevelt, saw the conservation of natural resources and “wilderness” as a means of
saving the White race and being a place for White men to reclaim their masculinity, rather than
viewing Nature on its own as valuable or having rights.
The long-lasting result of these attitudes has been the “othering” and exclusion of those
outside “dominant” or “normal” identity groups from participating in not only the environmental
movement, but how Nature and differing identities fit into and participate in nation-building.
Some of the largest, most well-funded environmental organizations in the U.S., such as the Sierra
Club, The Audubon Society, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund, have remained largely
made up of White, middle-class members, as well as focused on campaigning to save “pristine”
environments and charismatic non-human species.285 Some of these and other environmental
organizations have worked to increase diversity within their organizations over the last decade.
Organizations like Green 2.0 have even emerged to promote accountability for inclusivity in the
environmental sector, reporting that many mainstream organizations have increased the diversity

Andrew, “The World's Top Environmental Organizations Are Still Predominantly White, a New Report Finds.”
See also Green 2.0, “2021 NGO and Foundation Transparency Report Card.”
285

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of their organizations, however, still remain largely White.286 To those with the most power and
privilege, there is a disconnect from other identities who experience oppression, and often times
are unable to even recognize that there is a problem of exclusion within their organizations.287
Many writers and activists have worked to draw public attention to this issue, arguing that:

Understanding the history of racism in the conservation movement is important, not to
assign blame, but to diagnose our unhealthy relationships with each other and with
nature, learn from our mistakes, and begin cooperating in the ways that we must in order
to reverse our destruction of the earth's ecosystems.288
Climate change, along with other large-scale issues that are at the forefront of many American’s
concerns, such as housing, food security, the ability for a community to deal with natural
disasters and shifting weather patterns, are problems that cannot be solved by any one individual
alone, but rather require collective solutions. Due to the slow response of many environmental
organizations’ inability to understand issues of inequity and increase diversity and inclusivity of
not just a variety of identities, but also prioritize tackling interrelated social and environmental
issues, new environmental organizations that center anti-oppression have emerged in response.
Some organizations, such as Latino Outdoors, Outdoor Afro, Native Women’s Wilderness,
Queer Nature, Queer Ecojustice Project, and The Venture Out Project have organized to create
safe spaces for those who experience identity-based oppression to engage with environmental
advocacy, as well as cultivate a stronger connection to Nature that they may have previously
been denied in mainstream organizations. These spaces have been critical in modeling different
frameworks for understanding the interconnections between social and environmental advocacy,

Green 2.0, “2021 NGO and Foundation Transparency Report Card.”
Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces, 95-96.
288
Wohlforth, “Conservation and Eugenics.”
286
287

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as well as transform the community structures in which this work has been done. More
importantly, these spaces are fertile grounds for reconnecting individuals and communities who
have been excluded from Nature spaces by allowing them to interpret the value and connection
to Nature on their own terms.

Transformation
These intersectional organizations are crucial in fostering a stronger sense of community
amongst oppressed individuals who understand that they “share an imperative with the rest of
humanity to live more sustainably on the planet,”289 but have had to previously chose between
fighting for their civil rights or fighting for the environment. Alongside identity-centered
environmental organizations emerging, a variety of grassroots organizations focusing on
intersectional environmentalism have arisen alongside the Climate Justice movement.
Organizations such as Organizing People Activating Leaders (OPAL) Environmental Society,
The Sunrise Movement, Generation Green, Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), and Intersectional
Environmentalist, have missions on making environmentalism more intersectional and
inclusive—that is, uplifting the voices and increasing the participation of Black, Indigenous,
People of Color (BIPOC), woman-identifying women290, and LGBTQ+ communities within
environmentalism. Within this new wave of intersectional environmentalism, organizations draw
from the Environmental Justice framework of recognizing that everyone’s life histories are
shaped by overlapping identities in which they may experience oppression and/or privilege.
Using the principles of Environmental Justice, various organizations have focused on
addressing environmental racism, linking environmental work with the Black Lives Movement,

Gray, “Heteronormativity without Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology,” 137.
Women-identifying women is a term used to be inclusive of not just cisgender women, but transgender women as
well.
289
290

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and have brought the framework of anti-racism into organizational missions. In a time when
terminology is quickly forming and changing, writers and activists, such as Ibram X. Kendi
argue that it is important to define what is meant by “anti-racism.” In Kendi’s book How To Be
An Antiracist, he defines “anti-racism” in the difference between a racist, a “not-racist,” and an
anti-racist:

What’s the problem with being ‘not racist?’ It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am
not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ But there is no neutrality in the
racism struggle … The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist.’ What’s the
difference? ... One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts
racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’ The
claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism … ‘Racist’ is not … a pejorative. It is
not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is
descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—
and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost
unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction. … The
good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one
minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each
moment, determines what -- not who -- we are.291

Following the framework of anti-racism, many organizations have expanded the logic of antiracism into anti-oppression, which is the idea that no one can truly be free from oppression until
everyone is free from oppression. Blending many frameworks from CRT, eco/feminist studies,
and ecocriticism, queer ecology has the potential to provide a model for including Nature into the
ideation of liberated futures. For those engaging in ways to implement transformative justice
with the incorporation of the natural world, emergent strategy has been a crucial framework in
coalition building and re-imagining possibilities outside of settler-colonialism, White supremacy,
late-stage capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. One of the foremost authors on transformative
justice, adrienne maree brown explains how “emergence emphasizes critical connections over

291

Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, 9-10.

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critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the
mind,” defining emergent strategy as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our
capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”292 In brown’s work Emergent
Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, she engages the tactics in which social justice
movements working under the framework of transformative justice can learn from “the ways
creatures and ecosystems function together in and with the natural world.”293 Brown asks us to
reimagine different life forms as teachers of resilience, for example, rather than viewing
dandelions (Taraxacum) as unwanted weeds, recognize these flowers as food and detoxifying
medicine (nourishing and healing), a lifeform that can resist aggressive removal and regenerate
itself through its long taproot (resilience, adaptive, and regenerative), as well as spread itself “far
and wide in the wind” 294 (decentralized, far reaching community). Brown wants us to consider in
what ways can we as individuals and communities be like a dandelion —to be more
decentralized, resilient, resistant, and regenerative? She invites us to reflect upon what we can
learn from mycelium about interconnectedness and remediation, or from ants (Formicidae) about
cooperative work, and even from starling (Sturnus vulgaris) murmurations295 about collective
leadership and adaptability.
In the same vein of transformative work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs blends emergent strategy
in her studies of marine mammals and their resilience during a time of ocean rising and
acidification. Gumbs urges those engaging in activism towards a sustainable future to look at the
societies of marine mammals to question “what becomes possible when we are immersed in the

292

brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 3.
brown, Emergent Strategy, 5.
294
brown, Emergent Strategy, 46.
295
brown, Emergent Strategy, 46. brown describes the potential of learning from starling murmurations, or the
synchronized movement patterns of a flock in flight: “Guided by simple rules, startling murmurations can react to
their environment as a group without a central leader orchestrating their choices; in any instant, any part of the flock
can transform the movement of the whole flock.”
293

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queerness of forms of life that dominant systems cannot chart, reward, or even understand?”296
Much like the end goal of queer ecology, the framework of emergent strategy is intended to
strengthen our imaginations—both individually and collectively. Our imaginations allow us to
contemplate different structures that will liberate us all rather than a privileged few. We must
begin to imagine how to construct multicultural societies that don’t work to assimilate difference
and allow us to move from independence to interdependence. Collectively we must imagine how
we are going to transition from a capitalist system where labor is undervalued, and
environmental damage is acceptable collateral damage along with how we can transition from
fossil fuels to ethical green energies. Within the context of ocean rising, how can we imagine
ways of preparing for mass migrations from coastal cities? What care systems can we imagine to
assure people’s basic needs are met and that the most vulnerable populations are kept safe during
times of heat waves, intensified winter storms, droughts, and floods? In light of the unbelievable
tragedy of the COVID pandemic and associated grief, we must now dream and enact how we can
heal and care for one another when our own governments fail to do so, and political polarization
tears our connections with each other apart. These lines of collective organizing are far from
anything new, as in the early 1900s when American social Darwinists were working to normalize
violent competition and the struggle for existence as the driving mechanism for evolutionary
“fitness,” the opposite notion of cooperation and mutual aid as the main driving force in
evolution was being argued by Russian anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. In hist 1902 book
Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, Kropotkin works to debunk social Darwinism by examining
how cooperation rather than competition within species ensures survival:
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and
that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course,
296

Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 109.

124

in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a
struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species. The animal species, in
which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of
mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the
most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is
obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience,
the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of social habits, secure the
maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution The
unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.297

Once we break away from thinkers who worked to uphold the status-quo of individualist
capitalist social structures, such as Kropotkin or brown, we are offered entirely different ways of
viewing our world and the possibilities of ways to construct our social systems. Without being
able to first imagine different ways of existing and relating to each other, we cannot begin to
create a multitude of solutions that will be needed to preserve the abundant life on our planet that
we are at risk of losing in the face of human-driven climate change and unadaptable, unjust
systems.

Concluding Thoughts
Within my research on queer ecology, I could have gone in many different directions as
this area of study and practice is by nature highly interdisciplinary. As a queer/trans-nonbinary
student learning within communities of those with a deep desire to alleviate human suffering and
avoidable environmental damage, engaging with queer ecology has become a wellspring of
inspiration and hope. In this period of crisis, having hope and inspiration for the possibility of
change is crucial. My research in queer ecology has been done with the intention of educating
myself on LGBTQ+ issues and history that has been denied to me through my formal education,
as well as an attempt to understand how queer-and transphobia has been engrained into our

297

Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, 157.

125

national identity. Queer ecology has great potential to disrupt the universal narratives of
“naturalness” that stifle our imaginations of other’s realities and possible futures. Learning about
the profuse variation of sexualities and gender among non-human species has been indeed
empowering for myself and others who I have shared my new knowledge with. I find it endlessly
invigorating to learn of how many non-human animals engage in same-sex relations with one
another, the enormity of gender presentation and changing that occurs, and how scientists are
coming to realize how much non-human species rely on cooperation—rather than violent
competition, in order to survive. Growing up in a culture that lacked good media representation
and witnessing the ongoing fights for basic rights and protection against violence for LGBTQ+
people, knowing just how integral and diversely abundant queerness is in Nature can be greatly
affirming that queerness is indeed “natural,” has always existed, and is all around us.
I have always appreciated learning a more nuanced version of history when I am trying to
understand the present. So much of our current history has been sanitized of violence and
reduced down to a single “truth,” denying the reality of present-day problems that have been
long-ongoing. Engaging with history through more nuance and critical thinking opens the space
to understand where certain ideas actually came from, what the real legacy of our supposed
heroes actually were, and gives us the opportunity to learn not only from past mistakes, but to
break visible cycles of systemic injustice we are trapped in. Although my primary focus of
history was to understand the roots of certain oppressive ideas and how those ideas became
entangled with environmentalism, there is thankfully many others who are doing the work of
uncovering erased histories and bringing to light narratives that can teach us about past forms of
resistance and survival, and thus giving us new figures to celebrate.

126

Over and over I have heard the sentiment of needing new and better ways of being and
doing things being expressed, and that is ultimately the goal of queer ecology—to allow us to
imagine those other possibilities and bring those dreams into being. Queer ecology asks us to be
critical of the frameworks that trap us into uncreative, nihilistic, reductive ways of viewing the
world, each other, and how we relate and interact with those around us (both the human and nonhuman). While I have found great importance in queer ecology’s disruptive and extensional
scholarship, it is possibly the transformative work that is the most relevant. Too long has
environmental and social justice movements been acting and thinking separate from one another.
Queer ecology seeks to heal this separation by reframing environmentalism through
transformative justice and building a framework in which to understand how human culture and
Nature are connected. Often times those working to solve environmental problems (especially
those regarding climate change) become overwhelmed with the enormity of uncertainty or ability
to effectively counter misinformation, ultimately leading them to a place of despair and inability
to feel that they can do anything to help. It is here that queer ecology can offer hope, drawing
from radical thinkers engaging in transformative justice work, that seek to teach us ways of
seeing problems in their wholeness, understanding how to build coalitions across difference, and
giving us permission to break away from social norms that feel toxic to building healthier
relationships. To quote the brilliant Grace Lee Boggs: “Every crisis, actual or impending, needs
to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond
protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that
help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing systems.”298

298

Boggs and Kurashige, The Next American Revolution, xxi.

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Being in conversation with a multitude of disciplines, queer ecology allows us to
recognize the isolating influence of an individualist society and find ways to return to each other.
Queer ecology asks us to question the validity of universal narratives and scientific institutions
that normalize certain identities as “natural,” but frame “others” as “deviants” or “unnatural.”
Viewing our world through rigid binaries and diversity-suppressing models limits our ability to
see the world in its wholeness and interconnectedness. In a time with such deep political
polarization and those committed to resisting new ideas, queer ecology will probably seem like
radical propaganda to conservatives. However, for LGBTQ+ individuals who are constantly
having to justify their existence and defend their basic rights, queer ecology can be a source of
empowerment. Queer ecology can also have relevance for non-LGBTQ+ individuals as it seeks
to liberate everyone from oppressive and toxic forms of identity-based power dynamics. Even
more importantly, queer ecologies provide models for the most vulnerable populations to build
stronger coalitions by understanding the interconnection of each other’s identity-based struggles,
create mutual-aid networks, along with building an understand on how to ideate and create a
better future together.

128

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