3 Scientists Talk Queer Ecology

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LISTENING: to the birds outside my window
FEELING: proud of my new morning routine
SEEING: today's art piece on my desk (I love it!)

Did you know Rachel Carson was gay? I had no idea. In college, I was required to read her salient "Silent Spring." I wasn't the best student, so I read only passages and excerpts to get me through class. I've long known I needed to read this work — and now even more so.

I discovered this history in my conversation with queer scientists Robert Dellinger (better known as Bobby), Madeline Eppley, and Ally Swank. The trio, along with their colleague Andy Lee, have been publishing academic literature documenting the history of LGBTQIA+ people in ecology and evolutionary biology, as well as the lack of consensus on biological sex within the science community.

Scientists need to continue to raise these questions. We're living through an unprecedented moment when the federal government is abandoning science altogether (especially research that prioritizes the most vulnerable groups). We're also witnessing the right coalesce around their attack on queer and trans people and our rights.

Every day, the living world delegitimizes the binary in which Western society places us: male and female, gay and straight, black and white. As Pride weekend approaches and Pride Month comes to an end, I wanted to amplify the crucial voices of these young scientists working tirelessly to better their field and, thus, the public's understanding of our wonderful, wonderful world.

Let's hear it from the scientists themselves.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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YESSENIA FUNES
Introduce yourselves, particularly what you want readers to understand in the context of this interview, the papers we'll be talking about, and the topic of queer ecology more broadly.

BOBBY DELLINGER
Hi y'all! I'm Bobby. I'm a Ph.D. student at UCLA studying oceanic and atmospheric science, and I'm a queer marine biologist in training. And my interest in this topic really came from looking at the literature and feeling as though it did not represent queer lived experiences.

MADELINE EPPLEY
Cool. Hi, I'm Madeline. I'm a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University's Marine Science Center, north of Boston. I study marine genomics. I'm a queer scientist. And part of my interest in this work is really aligned with science policy. I wanted to be a queer scientist who advocates for how we talk about biological sex and queer ecology concepts so that we can improve the way that the public perceives this field of really rigorous and interesting research.

ALLY SWANK
Hi, I'm Ally. I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Boston University. I'll echo a lot of what Bobby said about the representation of queer perspectives in a lot of biological research and also thinking about how a lot of current definitions of sex don't really capture the diversity that we see in nature.

"There's this perception that there's always a correct and an incorrect answer. For me, queer ecology emphasizes that we don't always need to have an answer."

YESSENIA
I know a big part of what we're going to talk about today is this idea of queer ecology. I'd love to hear you all define queer ecology.

BOBBY
"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 thrive and to live." That's a quote from bell hooks.

In a way, I think that's what queer ecology is, right? Because we've been told for so long as queer people that our relationships are not valid, that there's not love there, right? That the purpose of species is to reproduce for the next generation, and I think queer ecology is fundamentally at odds with those narratives. It's looking at the relationships we actually observe in nature, realizing that the facts of nature falsify the theories we have, and putting our lived experiences into nature and understanding nature from that lens without, of course, trying to impose a human-centric view on how species reproduce and the actual biology behind it.

MADELINE
For me, what I think about with queer ecology as a scientist is: How does my perception shape my understanding of the work that I do? How does the public's perception differ from that? One example I like to use is that science is often viewed as really black and white by scientists themselves and also by non-scientists. There's this perception that there's always a correct and an incorrect answer. For me, queer ecology emphasizes that we don't always need to have an answer. Things can be gray; things can fall outside of the boundaries of what we originally thought the answer might be.

The refusal to resolve tensions is also really important to me. There are areas of science that we don't need to investigate further. Sometimes, we think about looking for a genetic, heritable basis of sexuality. And for me, that's a place where I don't feel we need to be resolving anything further. It's hotly debated. There's good reasons for why we should explore that field, and queer people are very split on this topic too. Some would love to better understand sexuality in that way, and some don't. But I think that tension inherently is what queer ecology is about.

We don't need to exist in this black and white space. We have a much more transformative view of ecology in the world.

YESSENIA
Those are really lovely definitions. One of the papers tries to investigate the fact that there's no real consensus on how to define biological sex. Why is it important that when we think about the organisms we're living alongside, we're asking this question? Especially given how governments are trying to control our bodies?

MADELINE
Yeah, that's a huge question. It's great that you asked this question because, just today, I spent a couple hours writing up a statement in response to these government provisions that state you can't use federal funds to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate anything that they're calling "gender ideology." And that term includes "theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans." I think it is so important in this moment to understand: What is biological sex? What do we know about this term? What are the limitations and the assumptions of the boundaries of the definition that we choose?

Right now, there is a public perception that scientists know what sex is, and it is binary, and it is black and white. And I would love to go on record and say that scientists are super conflicted about this. There is not one good consensus of biological sex and how we define it.

Everybody studies such different systems in ecology. That's one of the really cool things about ecology. And because of that, we all have very different methodologies that we use to study these systems. In some animals, we could directly observe the gonads, or sex organs. In some, we can easily access genetic data. In some systems, we have to rely on observation of things like color or size to assume the sex of the organism. And so it's important to state that there are limitations in ecological work that require us to use different definitions of sex.

So when I say there's no consensus on sex, I'm saying scientists are using many, many different traits to define sex. We're using chromosomes, gonads, gametes, any sort of phenotype, genes, hormones, etc. And because of that, there's this really rich understanding of the biological diversity of sex across the tree of life.

Secondly, I think the scientific consensus, especially for humans, is very much that sex is not binary. The idea of a sex binary is unsound. Up to 2 percent of the human population is intersex. It's very well established in humans — and in thousands of species across the entire tree of life — that sex is not binary. It's really important right now in this political climate, when the ideas of a sex binary and gender ideology are being used to weaponize federal funding against communities and the scientific field, that we clarify sex is very diverse. There's no one way to define it.

ALLY
When we bin organisms and people into these groups based on those traits, we're limiting ourselves. Say we're looking at butterflies or birds with a purple coloration, which are said to be male or female, but that isn't always represented by the gametes that they produce or the behaviors they display. We're limiting the diversity that we're able to explore by binning things that way. There's not one universal definition that can apply to every system. That's what we focus a lot on in our papers: Definitions might work 99 percent of the time in one system, but not always be universal.

"We're at a really unique point in history where a second wave of McCarthyism is coming at us. And these kinds of topics are being banned, or we're not being allowed to speak about them, so special emphasis should be pointed at them because they're using these tools to divide us."

YESSENIA
Where are these debates happening?

BOBBY
Sometimes, societies are having them internally.

MADELINE
Yeah, there have been some public letters that have been co-signed by multiple societies. Sometimes, they're sent to federal representatives. Sometimes, people online with blogs decide that they're going to reply to these letters. And it's essentially like a public comment forum that's taking place outside of a traditional academic journal.

More casually, everybody's talking about this. I'm serving on a diversity committee for the American Society of Naturalists right now, and we talk about sex and gender once a month, I would say. And we only meet twice a month. I think there's a lot of discussion right now because it's such a hot topic in the political space.

YESSENIA
And the other paper urges the field of ecology and evolutionary biology to better consider queer voices. I'd love to hear y'all talk a little bit about what that paper unpacked and discovered in terms of the ways that the field has historically excluded queer folks and what the science misses when our voices aren't a part of the science.

BOBBY
The main reason we created the paper was feeling that we hear about queer ecology, but we don't actually have any sort of scientific papers about it, right? There are plenty of queer scientists who are doing incredible work and trans scientists who are advancing theories, like Joan Roughgarden. But we wanted a paper that contended with why same-sex behavior in animals is not being reported in the way that it exists. What's the history behind that? And then, what can we learn about what we're analyzing from our perspectives and lived experiences? The paper flows a little bit like a history paper on the queer issues at hand that we think are important in same-sex behavior documentation.

We can go case by case about erasure and repression and people continuing to do the work regardless. We're at a really unique point in history where a second wave of McCarthyism is coming at us. And these kinds of topics are being banned, or we're not being allowed to speak about them, so special emphasis should be pointed at them because they're using these tools to divide us. And we can use the same tools against them that we've been offered to kind of dissect these queer histories.

MADELINE
I'm gonna quote ourselves really quickly because I think we said it best when we wrote it: "In the current moment, it's especially urgent to recognize that queer history does not represent a simple linear increase of tolerance and liberation, but it's a history where harsh setbacks to progress continually led to loss of life, acceptance, and scientific knowledge. The contemporary relationship between scientific research and LGBTQ liberation remains as complex and multifaceted as it has been throughout history."

That's a big takeaway of the paper: We have documented these moments in time where queer identities have crossed with biological science and the field of ecology and evolution. We document where some of these harms have occurred and the progress that's been made. But ultimately, it's a complex landscape, and we really wanted to take our lived experiences as queer scientists at a crucial point when society is obsessed with queerness without really understanding what it feels like to be a queer person. We wanted to have our say where we can put our knowledge together to create progress or at least acknowledge this history.

YESSENIA
Wow. I'm curious, in outlining and digging into those histories, was there a particular moment or event that stood out to you all?

BOBBY
A great example is Rachel Carson, not knowing she was queer. I don't even think that part is incorporated in her story, but it gets me thinking about her poeticism and her love letters and feeling that her understanding of ecology and nature was rooted in a place of deep love and reverence. And to read the letters between her and her lover and to see how that influenced her writings of ecology was beautiful, but also really heartbreaking. To find out that she had burned so many letters and that she was so scared of public disapproval, it gets me wondering: What kind of knowledge did we lose throughout these backlashes in history?

Another example could be the Lavender Scare and queer scientists being fired from their federal government jobs. What kind of knowledge was lost in that moment? Or even in 1933, when the Nazi Party burned the sexual institute that was doing a series of studies on sexuality among animal and human behavior. That was one of the first institutions targeted by the Nazi Party. For me, the question is always: What was lost? How do we catalog this?

"There's a chilling effect on speech and free thought in the scientific community when politicians are restricting what lines of inquiry we are allowed to pursue."

MADELINE
In the 1970s, there was some research proposed on seagull colonies in California. There was a grant that was proposed to follow up on previous work that had been done, and a 1972 nesting study showed that 14 percent of all the mated pairs on this island in California were female-female mate pairs. And when it became known that this work was being done on same-sex seagull mate pairs, the National Science Foundation kind of lost it.

There were actually some records in the congressional docket. A session of Congress in 1978 halted all funding for the National Science Foundation for 10 days with threats to further cut funding for biological behavioral research if that seagull study was approved. And it's just eerily similar to the themes that we see emerging today. We have lists of words now. Your grant can't be funded if you say the words sex, gender, male, female, right? We are policing and restricting the neutral inquiries of science. And that restriction really is terrifying.

There's a chilling effect on speech and free thought in the scientific community when politicians are restricting what lines of inquiry we are allowed to pursue. And, you know, NSF has funded projects over a very wide span of time. We talk about the history of NSF in our paper. They have funded many projects. It feels like we're experiencing a resurgence of these historical moments.

YESSENIA
There's so much to talk about. We could be talking for hours just digging into all these histories, but I wanna leave y'all with a final question: Why is it important to have these discussions and investigations within academia?

MADELINE
In our paper, we have this figure that shows the reciprocal relationship between science and society. I think that's really it for me. Why do I want scientists to pay attention to what I'm writing? It's because everything we do in science feeds into society. And scientists are active participants in society, too. We are the public. How would you want someone to frame it to you?

We have to understand that we're all active participants. Science is not apolitical. We are political actors in this space just as much as we are scientists. I think that there is an opportunity for scientists to step up to the plate and take the initiative to make reform in our work. Our work impacts society.

Scientists should be challenging these binary frameworks and saying that we know this isn't true. And when we see it in public government spaces, we should correct the record. Incorporating queer knowledge into our science would go a long way. We're missing those narratives. We need to center them in our work because if they're not available for the public to read, then where are they going to find them?

BOBBY
For me, talking about these topics forces academics to ask themselves why they implicitly have the biases that they have or to confront some truths and some discomfort around the fact that science cannot answer everything. I think of scientists writing a paper about dolphin behavior and saying they were confused why a dolphin would adopt a child that was not their own. For us as queer people, that's not confusion. That's love, right? We need to bring some of this soul into the academic space. Queer knowledge can be a form of social cohesion. It's just like queer organisms when they're interacting in nature. For example, if bonobos are engaging in intimacy together, they're sharing their resources together, they're rearing their offspring together. That increases the chance that their offspring are going to survive, right?

Queerness is embracing this idea of acceptance as a source of social cohesion. When facing a planetary crisis on this scale, we need to embrace this. We need queer thought, and we need queer knowledge. Because it exists in nature, of course, it exists in us. Maybe we have to spend a little bit of time looking at nature to get some inspiration about what that looks like.

ALLY
I'm also thinking about how we are teaching these biases. Another thing we talk about in our paper is that if we're incorporating queer knowledge into the way we teach science from elementary to high school or undergrad, it will transform a lot of stereotypes. 🌀

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