When I first started to explore and connect to my own queerness, I was immediately aware that it was both part of my personal identity and part of a wider belief system. The concept of gender, something which I was taught as innate and immovable, suddenly felt completely unnatural to me. So I looked to the natural world - the world which is free from our societal pressures and expectations, from religion, colonialism, politics and capitalism - to see how natural gender really is.

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Of course, science* and the people who study it are not free from those things and I was shocked by the narratives I found threaded throughout ecological studies. Every instance of queerness amongst animals was being explained away, and the explanations are genuinely laughable - the same ones I told myself as a closeted bi-sexual teenager at a girls’ school: “we’re just doing this for the boys attention” “we’re just practising for the real thing.” Grown up, highly educated people genuinely drawing these conclusions.

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Now, it must be said that I am not a scientist. The research that has been put into this show is second hand. I have no qualifications in professional scientific research. And maybe this is my super power....Because the scientific world has, for the most part, been squinting through a heteronormative, patriarchal lens for decades. I am approaching the research from another angle; from a queer, non human-centric point of view.

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The fact that we, as human beings, are animals seems both obvious and vital to me. The fact that animals have an inner life, just like we do, isn’t a question - why wouldn’t they? I have had pets and they prove to me that if you spend time with an animal, you will meet their personality. Plus, I am an animal and no one is in any doubt that I have an inner life. 

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There is a general rule amongst ecologists - do NOT anthropomorphise (assign human traits to animals). I understand the arguments for this but I am not an ecologist and my goals are different. I put it to you that anthropomorphising is one of the best ways to de-centre humans from our view of the natural world. We are selfish beings and we are much more likely to relate to a creature if we see something of ourselves in it.

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And the reverse is true – Connecting to the animal in me (my whole being really…) has been a joyful, freeing experience. When I learnt about clown fish changing biological sex; about male cuttlefish releasing female hormones; about the thousands of biological sexes of fungi; about female Japanese macaques having intensely intimate sexual bonds with one another; about bisexual bonobos - I felt liberated in my own queerness. 

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The word ‘unnatural’ has been weaponised against us for centuries but nature is undefinable, queer and fluid. It defies binaries and breaks rules which didn’t even exist until we humans wrote them. There is nothing more natural to me now than my queerness.

 

So, Queer Planet is my love letter to nature and to the queer community. It is a rallying call for people to change the way they see the natural world and to reframe how we think about our own identities.

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Our relationship to the natural world is more vital now than ever before. I want everybody to be injected with a little bit of the compassion and respect for animals that my parents gave me. I want us to stop underestimating their complexity and to de-centre ourselves. I want us to look to the fluidity and the freedom in the natural world and let ourselves get swept up in it. I want my trans-ness and my queerness to be accepted for what it is; entirely natural and inevitable. I want all queer people to feel the liberation I have found in connecting to my queer family in the more than human world. I want to bring you a bit of silliness and joy.

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