Brigitte Baptiste, Ecologist and Rector of EAN University of Colombia, courtesy
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She would never have guessed that there was a connection between her construction of gender identity, her rebellious public appearance at the turn of the century as Brigitte Baptiste and her knowledge as an ecologist. But he came across the book Evolution’s Rainbow by Professor Joan Roughgarden, a transgender woman like her, a university professor like her, and an ethologist who argued that because of the monolithic and masculine vision of science in the 19th and 20th centuries, we report or never adequately perceive the sexual and gender diversity in the animal kingdom.
Why hadn’t we seen homosexual behavior in almost all animal species if it did exist? Why hadn’t they talked about diversity in animals and we as human animals didn’t talk about this state of diversity that affects us more? Her wife, who accompanied her in her transition, and her colleagues then began talking to her about queerness, a concept that, although embodied in her own body, as a biologist she did not have at hand. He recognized that queer studies, stemming from the humanities and from the struggles of discriminated gay groups, were not about exactly what this new look at ecology was proposing, but were about equivalent phenomena: it was a call for visibility of what what was invisible.
“Science has blinded the diversity of sexuality, gender, even families, in animals. Culture has significantly blinded the participation of queer people in various social fields. And it turns out that queerness is a fundamental element for cultural evolution, just as sexual and gender diversity is for biological evolution,” says Brigitte Baptiste, Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Biological Resource Research until 2019. The ecologist, who serves as the rector of EAN University, was also one of the first trans women in Colombia to claim the right to change their gender on ID cards.
“I’m not deterministic. To me, the fact that there are gay animals does not imply any biological justification of human queer culture, because humans have freedom in between. There is a fundamental problem here, and that is that different people and the diversity of sexuality and gender among people have often been excused by the biological nature of the facts, and that strikes me as problematic. There may be some complex biological underpinnings that need to be analyzed, but I will not hide behind society in the inevitability of facts. Because diversity is not a disease, it does not need to be excused or explained using biological categories,” emphasizes Baptiste, leaving room to talk about queer environmental protection with his suggestions.
File image by Brigitte Baptiste.Daniel Mordzinski
Questions. “We should all know more about ecology,” she has repeatedly propagated as a scientist. What is so powerful about ecology that you find it so important to understand the world?
Answer. Ecology is a relational science and states that the relationship of the world is achieved through the complexity of those relationships, which are ephemeral, unstable… It is a boiling pot that makes people who work in ecology understand that the World constantly changing different time and space scales, which is always active.
There’s a part of science that seems too complex and says, “No, we’re going to reduce this complexity to the parts” and breaks the world down into small pieces and fixes them to try to understand. That’s what museums do, for example, everything that gets into the museum is a partial model of reality, but it’s also dead because it’s divested of its relationality.
Q And this relational vision of ecology, how does it affect humans?
R They are becoming more and more obvious to me: we are relational beings, intertwined with the rest of living beings and with our own creation technology. So we are the result of hundreds of thousands of processes that are intertwined every day to the point where none of them fully explains anything. This complexity creates absolutely heterogeneous paths in everything. So how can we not expect innovative and emerging patterns to emerge as a result of this relationship?
This is where queer theory is deeply ecological because it talks about everything going wrong. In a world like this, full of possible paths, everything ends up going wrong. Queer theory is a theory of the deviant that states with humor and irony that identity is a fiction full of anomalies and that everything and everyone is crooked.
For example, language is crooked, languages are never fixed and change. No one from this century would easily understand one another when speaking Spanish to someone from the 18th century because we are biased in relation to that referent. Evolution always does, it goes wrong, and perhaps the deepest thing about queer theory is that it posits that it goes wrong because of passion, because of erotic powers and sensitivity. It’s not intellectually twisted, it’s passion, the only thing that allows something to deviate from its authoritative or predetermined path.
Q If passion drives us to this twisted power in human relationships, what does ecology discover in nature, what drives it to explore? Or is nature crooked in itself?
R Quite! That is why I say that there is nothing stranger than nature, it is its ontological quality, constantly twisting in the complexity of the relationships established.
Q Can you tell us where to see this ontological “curvature” of nature?
R It is an almost invisible process as it is linked to genetic variation on a daily basis. Joan Roughgarden presents many cases at all levels to talk about gender and family diversity. Most well known is the Nemo minnow, which when there are too many males there is something in hormonal communication that reaches a saturation point and causes some to become females. There is a common chemical and behavioral signal that causes this. Generally, reef fish that are so colorful and flashy have this kind of ability, some can even constantly change sex from male to female and back to male, implying that they have a reproductive system that is sensitive to biochemical signals and hormones.
So we would have cycles of five years as a woman and another five years as a man, if there was too much of one thing you would morph into the other. Ha! That would help us understand the polarities that don’t exist. This is also the case with birds and insects. They are not central or dominant tendencies, they occur on the fringes of adaptation, they are tests subject to natural selection.
Q Does queer environmentalism think of plants, ever more plastic and flexible in their behavior?
R With plants it is even clearer. For example, the wax palm, which is Colombia’s national tree by law, is a high-mountain palm that is endemic and threatened by deforestation, and some palms have recently been found to change sex. . This is how the Colombian national tree changes gender to suit the circumstances. In the face of deforestation, there’s a biological signal letting them know they need to reproduce faster, so as a species they need the male palms to become female, or at least produce female flowers.
Queer environmentalism also talks about interspecific relationships because we think palm trees with palm trees or clown fish with clown fish. Well, but let’s think about the orchids that have to be pollinated by an animal, it’s a ménage à trois, it’s another species essential to ensure the reproduction of another. The bumblebee reaches the flower, which offers to drink the sweet nectar and in return gives it the pollen so that it can go to another flower and deposit it. A sexual intermediary, a forbidden act, like an assisted reproduction clinic.
Brigitte Baptiste. EAN University
Q So, as part of nature, are we humans also crooked?
R As for humans, we have completely changed the order and configuration of ecosystems, and we have done it to survive but also for pleasure, to enjoy life more and create new relationships. We have reorganized the world, we have created a special community of relationships. This is a strange exercise! It’s twisted, it’s uniquely human. Of all living beings, we are the only ones who can think of it. Our cultural state is absolutely lopsided compared to the rest of the planet.
Our perspective, I would say, is to become what we think we want to be. Ulrich Beck tells us in his book Risk Society that we could do things with technology that were absolutely impossible just a few years ago. We talk about it, instead of thinking about sending a rocket to the moon, we open ourselves to the possibility of being a rocket. And no, it’s not impossible, intensive care units are the most effective and complex prosthetics we’ve designed to extend life, whether inactive or unconscious. An intensive care unit is a robotic device that allows our bodies to overcome moments of crisis, this is the prelude to sleep units in spaceships. Meanwhile, in the Metaverse, you might want to be a chocolate chip cookie and experience the sensation of someone chewing on you. The queer conception of the metaverse will be our next big question.
Q In ecology, changes show up as signs of disturbance or extreme disturbance. If so, do you see that we are in a society moving towards change?
R They are called early signs and occur when a large ecosystem changes, a forest turns into a desert, or a lagoon changes. I think there are very clear early signs of change in the new generations. As a university rector, I see the identity expression of thousands of university students in western and liberal countries, where communication signals allow everyone to operate on their bodies and present themselves in a more autonomous and experimental way. . There is fear, yes, because it is an experiment and we have not yet created a satisfactory set of codes to get closer to each other. Many forms of organization must emerge from this questioning of the freedoms that we are given and that we have achieved largely thanks to the feminist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. These contemporary freedoms cannot be understood without feminism.
Q Should these new social symptoms open spaces to create other relationships with less dominance and exploitation with the rest of the planet?
R Yes, but I don’t see you there yet. We are very surprised at ourselves. There are many Reconnection movements, some say jump into the jungle, get rid of the culture. These usually don’t survive. Other movements say: separate yourself from culture and humanity from anything that makes it difficult for you to contact other living beings, such as permaculture, agroecology, experiences linked to ancestral knowledge or ways to connect with other ethical perspectives.
Rather, I place myself in a model that relies on the ability to reshape the world with an ecological reflection that considers and reconsiders all of its technological and institutional capacities. Of course there are days when I wake up and want to shed my culture and hit the river because that’s nice, but mostly I don’t see it as a viable attitude for 8,000 million people. From time to time I think I’ll dive into the Metaverse with a new outfit that will allow me to interact with other beings on different planes of reality. We don’t know if this will be feasible, but I think we’ll be forced to try once we hit 10 billion by the end of 2100.
The world has no reversal, climate change will not be reversed, we are trying not to make it deadly, but we must adapt to a planet we never knew. We already inhabit a planet B, there is no way to go back to earth, so I deliberately didn’t use the word nature, because there is no nature that needs to be worshiped, except one that understands that we are constantly evolving and twisting . The future is wrong.