Introduction to Queer and Trans Perspectives on Climate Justice

Angelique 00:10 

In today’s episode, I’ll be interviewing Alex Walker, a researcher here at SUTE who specialises in queer and trans perspectives on climate justice. Recently completing their Masters degree in climate change and social change, they are passionate about communicating the intersections between queerness and climate change, and increasing 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion in climate spaces. 

Angelique 00:46 

Shake Up The Establishment is a youth-led, registered (#1190975-4) national non-partisan, non-profit organisation that operates within the geographical confines of what is currently known as “Canada”, but what is referred to by its First Peoples as Turtle Island. Indigenous peoples have inhabited Turtle Island for over 10,000 years, and were the sole inhabitants less than 500 years ago. 

Angelique 01:10 

Hi Everyone! My name is Angelique Dack and I use she/her/elle pronouns. I have had the privilege of living, working and playing on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi in so-called Oshawa, ON. I am the Project Lead for the Establish Podcast as well as the Director of Research for Shake Up the Establishment. 

I come to you today with the following positionality: As an able-bodied, neurotypical, white, cis, pansexual womxn with the financial privilege to attend higher education, I would like to acknowledge the privilege I experience due to the intersections of these identities I hold. Growing up, my family was of lower-class status which limited my ability to see the inequities of the world; I had the privilege to not engage with the topic of social justice because of my whiteness and other identities. As a settler in so-called Canada, I have had the privilege of not needing to know or to think of how my ancestors first came to be on these lands. As someone who came from a broken home, I have detached from my family’s history but this privilege has not been afforded to others. I do not speak on behalf of communities I do not belong to such as the BIPOC community and have limited ability to speak on identities I do hold because of the diversity of lived experiences in both the Queer and female-identifying spaces. I only seek to further understand, advocate for and amplify the voices of marginalised individuals. 

I have been fortunate to be given a space in the SUTE community to further my education and expand my equity lens to continue to work towards the dismantling of unjust systems of power put in place through colonial genocide. 

Alex 03:03 

Hi, my name is Alex, and I use they/them pronouns. I’m a political researcher here at Shake Up The Establishment. I live, work and play in the area known as Tkaronto or Toronto, which is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This area is within the Dish With One Spoon treaty territory, which is a treaty between the Anishinaabeg, the Mississaugas and the Haudenosaunee, which binds them to peaceably share and protect the land of the Great Lakes region. Subsequent nations and peoples, including settlers like myself, have been invited into this treaty. I’m also on Treaty 13 land, which is between the Mississaugas of the Credit and the Crown. 

I am a white, British born and raised settler – as you can tell by my accent – arriving in so-called Canada around two years ago. Based on my positionality, I understand the colonial violence of my British ancestors and the destruction that they have brought upon people and land across the world. I hope to use the privilege granted to me by my whiteness and ancestral roots to work on issues of climate and environmental justice. I am queer, trans and non-binary and I hope to amplify the voices and work of all 2SLGBTQIA+ plus people in my work, while not speaking for people. Thank you for allowing me onto this podcast today. 

Angelique 04:17 

Awesome. Thank you for joining me today, Alex. How are you doing? 

Alex 04:20 

I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me for this conversation. 

Angelique 04:25 

Why don’t we just jump straight into it? What first made you interested in this field of research? 

Alex 04:30 

Absolutely. So my first interest, so I just completed my master’s degree. I just did my masters in environmental studies with a focus on queer and trans perspectives in climate justice. 

So I took a bit of a circuitous route to get into that. My first kind of academic slash theoretical interest that brought me here is the area of queer ecology. So queer ecology is the intersection of queer theory with environmental studies and environmental issues. And it’s quite a small field of theory, but it’s super exciting and super interesting. 

So some examples of queer ecology, queer ecology looks at how there is a naturally occurring exhibition of diversity within gender and sexuality in the plant and animal worlds. So for example It’s really common to find female-female pairings of seagulls, lesbian seagulls to apply our human construction there (1). Or in seahorses, male seahorses carry the young. Which is counter to our understanding of you know women carry babies etc. 

Another fun one is all clownfish are born as male. And when the female in the group dies, the dominant male changes sex. And it becomes the dominant female. And one of the juvenile males becomes the dominant male (2). So in lots of animal species, there’s a great diversity in gender and sexuality. So this is one of the big thoughts of queer ecology. And through my interest in queer ecology I kind of expanded that a little bit, thinking more broadly about climate change, trying to apply queer ecology to climate change, I started thinking about how queer and trans perspectives were represented in climate justice. And I was reading a lot of kind of academic theoretical introductions to climate justice and it was pretty interesting. 

I noticed a pretty big gap in these writings. So while the intersections of climate change with race, class, immigration status, colonisation and disability, while these things were all discussed, there was no discussion of gender diversity and sexuality in relation to climate justice. 

So some pretty big examples are the entire Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice does not mention transgender people or gender non-conforming people (3). In all the most cited articles on Google Scholar, which is where a lot of people get their academic articles from. In the most cited article on gender and climate justice there is not one mention of a transgender person. So what this kind of struck out to me is like, yes, we’re talking about gender, but what do we mean when we’re talking about gender? Who are we leaving out of these conversations? So that’s kind of how I got into my area of interest. 

Angelique 06:55 

And so interesting to note that because I think in the sake of trying to work towards equity, we’ve really been hyper focused on Female identifying folks because they’ve historically also been left out of the conversation. And when we talk about gender diversity, the default then because we’ve been trying to make space for women – when it comes to conversation about climate change, the environment and so forth – we then miss that there isn’t just 2 genders, there’s a multitude of genders and when we talk about gender diversity, it’s not binary, but our minds when we talk about these conversations really do go that way. 

So it’s very interesting, no mention of transness. Yeah, just so many different thoughts. When it comes to that. So it’s interesting. Also, lesbian seagulls never, never thought about it. And with that kind of alludes to my next question for you, which is what are some key insights and intersections that you’re seeing with queerness and climate change? 

Alex 07:57 

In thinking about queer perspectives and climate change, there is a difference between queer people and queer perspectives. So I’ll just elaborate on this a little bit first. So the word queer means to do something differently, to think differently, to challenge norms, “queering” historically meant strange. Queer perspectives can just be adding/ kind of disrupting norms. So I have a really nice quote here that I want to read which kind of offers something of queer perspectives. 

So this is a quote in a Grist Article written by Aletta Brady, Anthony Torres and Philip Brown (4). And I’m just going to read you the whole quote because I think it’s excellent. So it says: 

“In response to societies that enforce binary gender roles, expression and identity, and violently target people who defy these rules, queer and trans people have learned to create our own communities rooted in love and care for each other and the environment around us. To survive, we have developed resilient and interdependent communities that challenge societal norms that condition us to be individualistic, materialistic and competitive. Queer communities excluded from mainstream society have embraced interconnectedness, open communication and collaboration.” 

So I think that’s a really great quote that captures this idea of like queering societal norms, challenging societal norms. So queer perspectives on climate change, require us to think a little bit differently about climate change. What systems do we accept as normal? You know, kind of the way I started thinking about this is we all presume that you or that there is a narrative in society that you grow up, you find a husband or a wife, you get married, you live in a house, you have cars, you take the plane on your foreign vacation. You go to the supermarket, you know, there’s these expectations of how society goes and how the path of life goes and queering these perspectives really asks us to challenge what is presumed – like expected. So for example, why do we all live in single-family homes? They have a massive environmental impact. It would be much more sustainable to live in a kind of high-rise building. They are proven to increase urban density which is good for walking and transportation and things like that. So sort of like single family homes, why is that the expectation? 

Why is it the expectation that every family has to have a car that has space for 2 parents and 2 kids, why are we getting around in cars, why aren’t we using public transit? So when you kind of think through queering the expectations that society has for a lot of people and obviously this is different based on your socioeconomic position, your class, your race, you know, this all changes but adding a queer lens asks us to think differently about societal structures in societal norms. 

So that’s kind of queer perspectives, but in terms of queer people in climate change, there are a lot of different things. So one of the big things is that in the aftermath of natural disasters and disaster relief efforts, there is a lot of homophobia and transphobia against 2SLGBTQIA+ people. A quote from the Climate Reality Project that sums this up really nicely is while disasters do not discriminate, relief and recovery practices do (5). 

So throughout history there are really well documented instances of homophobia and transphobia in the aftermath of natural disasters. One of the most famous examples of this was after Hurricane Katrina. There were 2 transgender women who were arrested for showering in women showers at a kind of aid centre (6). You know, they didn’t know that they weren’t allowed to shower. They tried to check with the volunteers at the centre first but they were arrested for doing this and since then there have been so many instances of this kind of discrimination. A lot of international organisations are rooted in religion and sometimes there was a conflict between religious practices, religious beliefs and like queer and trans inclusion. 

There’s a big issue with documentation. So, queer and transgender people, particularly gender diverse and transgender people often have legal documents that say that they are one gender but then they may look differently or sound different and be putting themselves at risk when crossing international borders. 

And this is particularly the case in terms of climate migration and climate refugees. So people are really at risk due to national documentation. There is definitely a risk for climate activists, be they young climate activists, old, working in formal or informal spaces. 

There is a real risk that some people do not feel included and safe in the culture of their organisation. I myself have experienced this in some organisations I’ve been in. I’ve experienced kind of transphobia and microaggressions and it doesn’t make you feel welcome or safe when you’re entering into these spaces. And that’s something, so in my research I spoke to a lot of queer and trans people who work in climate spaces and several of them expressed that they had felt unsafe in their organising spaces. 

Something that I touched on in the introduction or earlier was the massive erasure of gender non-conforming people in discussions of gender and climate justice. So we kind of touched on that already, but it’s really pervasive, particularly if you’re looking in kind of academia. It’s very pronounced how there is not a discussion on gender diversity which means that people aren’t researching the risk space by transgender and gender non-conforming people. And if we’re not researching the risks, we don’t know how to mitigate them. There are a handful of studies that look at the experiences of this community in relation to climate change but not enough studies. And if we don’t know what the problems are, we definitely don’t know how to mitigate them. 

There’s also, something that I experience in the wider queer and trans community is that there is kind of a lack of understanding on how queer and trans liberation is a climate issue. 

This is something that I think super interesting and a lot of queer spaces may be lacking in climate activism and climate advocacy work and I think that’s something that needs to be explored as well. 

Angelique 13:33 

Yeah, I just wanted to go kind of back to. Some of the points that you had related to you, migration and climate refugees. Do you see the conversation changing or it getting better in terms of, as we see nonprofits in bigger corporations including EDI in their corporate structures, do you think that is going to aid in relieving some of these issues that we’ve been seeing, especially in times of emergency? 

Alex 14:07 

I would say I’m cautiously optimistic about this, but I believe that as of 2021 there are only 6 countries in the world – and Canada is included in that number- who talk about 2SLGBTQIA+ plus people in their national disaster relief policies (7). 

So at an international level at a governmental level, there still seems to be a gap in this understanding. I can only hope that as time goes on organisations are prioritising more issues of equity and particularly like queer and trans issues of equity in their policies. 

I can’t say I can name any specific examples of this happening, but I think there is an increasing conversation around queer and trans issues of climate change. So we can only hope that people can advocate for these changes to be made and for kind of policies and protections to be put in place. 

Angelique 14:52 

Kind of alongside that conversation. How do we queer climate spaces and address the areas of concern that you were just mentioning? 

Alex 15:01 

Sure, there are a lot of ways that we can think through this. So I think the biggest thing is ensuring that the queer and trans people in your organising spaces are properly protected. Does everyone in your organisation give pronouns or is it just on transgender people to give their pronouns. Are spaces divided according to the gender binary, for example, in your meeting areas or in your organisation or the only male and female toilets or is there space for people to show up as the full selves outside of this gender binary. Are all members of your organisation educated in correct language to use around queer and trans people. It’s very tiring if you’re the only person, the only trans person in an organisation to be constantly trying to educate and correct people.So does your organisation take it upon themselves to provide this kind of education so that everyone knows how to conduct themselves. 

To get a little bit more theoretical perhaps, climate spaces draw on very specific language in their messaging. So as a young person, you know, here or shake up this establishment we are a youth organisation and we are working on climate change because we want our futures to be protected. So that’s us talking about our futures. But it’s kind of a bit different when you have organisations talking about protecting the future for our future children or our future grandchildren. And when this kind of language is used in relation to climate change, it’s invoking this idea of reproduction or like nuclear family reproduction. 

It’s invoking these future children to mediate how we’re conducting ourselves now and I think this is something that queering in the kind of theoretical disrupting the norm sense can really help us in terms of climate space. 

So when we’re talking about climate change, what language are we talking about? There is a queer theorist called Lee Edelman and he had this theory called reproductive futurism and he theorised that society is structured according to the needs of the figural child (8). So when governments enact austerity policies, they’re cutting social support in the present and often the language that they use to support this is for the good of our future children. But in reality, they’re cutting support for people now. They’re cutting housing benefits and they’re cutting social support. So when we’re invoking the language of the future, we have to be really careful about what we are implying? What are we perpetuating when we use that language? So I think a great way to queer climate spaces is to think about the language that you’re using. 

Are you perpetuating the idea that there’s only one way for a family to look like. Are you perpetuating the idea that in order to have a stake in climate change you have to do it for children.You know lots of people have lots of different reasons to care about climate change. You know, some people, you know, we care about the inherent value of the earth. We care about the well-being of present people. You know, climate change is affecting people now. 

Queering climate discourse asks us to think a little bit differently about the kinds of language we use. So I think that’s a really powerful one. 

Angelique 17:47 

I never really thought about the language that we’re using in terms of speaking about the future and the way in which we get youth involved in a lot of climate conversations as being like “this is your future, this is what things are going to look, like it will be in your decade that the earth is no longer a habitable” 

However, what are we envisioning when we talk about the future when all our actions are really to address the immediate threats that we’re facing right now, especially with wildfires, heat domes and so forth. I never really thought about it in that way. 

Audio Break 18:20 

Angelique 18:33 

And so I think one of the things I wanted to ask you about as well is, do you find, in the research that you’re doing, that climate change is having more of an impact on queer folks than it is on others that are non queer. 

Alex 18:52 

This is a really interesting question and my immediate answer is that climate change itself isn’t but it’s how we are reacting to the effects of climate change that is. So a lot of queer and trans people already exist in points of social marginalisation. You know, LGBTQ youth are disproportionately represented in unhoused communities (9). Queer and trans people are more likely to experience many mental health conditions than heterosexual peers. A lot of queer and trans communities have experienced higher rates of poverty than non queer and trans communities (10). And of course these are also exacerbated particularly along lines of race and class and if someone is indigenous that these areas of social marginalisation intersect. So for example, it’s much harder to be a black trans woman in terms of your access to housing and support and health care than it is to be a white cis man. 

So in that sense, the way that we’re dealing with climate change really is having a more of an impact on queer and trans people. Particularly those that have intersecting identities than non queer and trans identifying folk. 

So I think a real way this shows up, kind of like I mentioned, already is in response to disasters. A recent example of this is in 2022 there was a huge amount of flooding in Pakistan and a lot of queer and trans people were denied aid in response to this natural disaster. Some of the reasons for this are due to straight out discrimination; a lot of specific communities, particularly third gender communities, engage in practices that are not seen as worthy of support. So for example sex work or dancing and some of these practices are not seen by NGOs as practices worth supporting (11). So a lot of people are denied aid in this regard. So in the crux of those areas, there is a higher risk for queer and trans people. 

Equally. COP 27 was hosted in Egypt and everyone wanted to go there and get their voice heard and get their communities represented. But Egypt is very hostile to LGBTQIA+ people. And a lot of queer, trans and 2-Spirit folk attended this conference and put themselves really at risk in trying to get their messages across. This is quite well documented and it was very scary for a lot of people to put themselves in that situation. 

So there’s also a highly elevated risk for a lot of people putting themselves on public stages if they’re queer and advanced, particularly if they’re coming from a country which does not respect queer and trans people. And this is close to home as well. We all know that in the United States right now there is a real roll-back in rights and protection for queer and trans people. So queer and trans climate activists in the States are definitely putting themselves more in harm’s way by being open and public about their identities. 

Angelique 21:32 

Can you think of any examples perhaps in, what we know now as Canada if we have similar -because we talk about this issue as being far international or sometimes we demonise the United States because of all the issues that we see in the news – however have we seen much of that in Canada? 

Alex 21:56 

Yes, just a couple of months ago there was a hate motivated stabbing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. At a gender, I believe it was a gender studies course where – I can’t remember if it was an alumni or a student or a fellow student – who went to a gender studies course and stabbed several students. And it is highly, widely believed that this was hate motivated because these people were exploring issues of gender in a theoretical academic sense. 

So yeah, this and there is a lot of other pushback from school boards about the kinds of books that there are, there’s a lot of pushback about flags that are being flown. So it’s not just the United States that’s experiencing this moral panic is what I like to call it against growing trans people. And it’s definitely different here in what is called Canada, but there is still an increased societal level. It’s more the case that people are putting themselves in harm’s way by being open about their identities. 

Angelique 22:50 

And so you can take this question either domestically or internationally. Where do we go from here? We’ve identified what the problem is and some areas of solution. However, where would you see the next steps being? 

Alex 23:07 

That’s a great question. And I’m of course only one person and I can’t speak on behalf of all members of the queer and trans community. Everyone experiences these problems very differently. Based on my work and my experiences I think that there does need to be a lot more awareness raised on this issue. 

Here at Shake Up The Establishment we’re looking to find ways to elevate these perspectives and elevate the problems faced by queer and trans people in relation to climate change and climate justice more particularly. 

So I think more awareness needs to be raised. I think there is some advocacy work that needs to be done to ensure that ENGOs and NGOs, the government, are ensuring that queer and trans people are recognized in the risks that they face in relation to climate change. 

Are there policies being created that can protect people? Are there campaigns in international organisations to ensure that everyone is receiving aid in their response to natural disasters? I think there is that kind of overarching advocacy work that needs to be done.I think particularly in academia, I think there needs to be better research done on the effects faced by queer and trans people. 

And the wider 2SLGBTQA+ plus community of course. So I think academically there’s things that need doing, governmentally there’s things that need doing but also within our own communities we need to be having these conversations more openly. I think something that a lot of people can do if you’re a queer and trans person or you identify as part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community – are you part of any queer spaces and are those spaces talking about climate change? Are there conversations being had about how climate change is intersecting with people’s positionalities and people’s identities? Climate change needs to be part of everyone’s conversations, particularly in the queer community too. 

Angelique 24:50 

And I think as somebody who is cisgender, one of the things that I can take away from this conversation is really looking around you in these conversations that you’re having with, at higher levels, let’s say at the organisations that I’m a part of – who is missing from the conversation, what identities aren’t being represented in the room? 

And then finding ways in order to get those voices in the room in order to help influence some of the things that we’re discussing, even at a smaller organisation like Shake Up The Establishment. A lot of us are students, the spaces that you occupy in academia as a student are very powerful. And then how can you leverage the conversations we’re having now in those spaces to then help the next generation of people doing studies and the research and continuing to evolve this conversation. Because if we don’t name it then we can’t study it and if we don’t study it then people pretend like it doesn’t exist and so. 

A lot of great insight that I can take from this conversation even for my own allyship and I thank you so much for your time Alex if there was anything else that maybe you wanted to plug at the end of this episode. I’d love to give you the space. If not, thank you for your time. 

Alex 26:07 

Thank you so much. Perhaps some things to plug – having conversations with those around you, educating yourself and those around you on the correct gendered language to use and more widely just the correct language to use when you’re talking about communities and talking with communities. 

There are many funds out there, mutual aid funds that you can find that send funds to where and trans people, affected yes by the climate crisis but also affected by other issues such as poverty and precarious housing. So wherever you can, try and find somewhere to donate some funds. So yeah, just try and show up. In your conversations and if you can, if you can offer any support, try and show up wiith whatever few dollars you have to spare as well. 

Angelique 26:44 

Awesome. And again, thank you so much for your time. 

Alex 26:47 

Thank you so much for having me. 

Angelique 26:52 

Thank you again to Alex for coming on to the podcast today for sharing key insights on how we can not only create spaces for gender-diversity and inclusion of Trans & Non-Binary voices but also how to queer our current climate spaces to address barriers to access within organising. Also a second special thank you to Alex for producing this podcast episode. 

Establishment is supported through funds from the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. The music you hear in the podcast today was created by Greg Markov (@GregMarkov on insta). 

Thank you all for listening!