Protest the Transphobes — TERFs Off Our Turf!

How an ‘anti-trans’ group split the fight against a lithium mine
By Jael Holzman | 01/27/2022 01:36 PM EST

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Now the fight against the mine, Thacker Pass, is in disarray, with environmental and Indigenous activists saying DGR’s positions on transgender and nonbinary people are discriminatory. They have been trying to distance themselves from the two men, who say they have camped out in the desert, off and on, for a year.

People of Red Mountain, an Indigenous group challenging the mine in court, recently severed its relationship with Falk, who was acting as its attorney. A spokesperson for the group specifically cited Deep Green Resistance’s views on transgender people as the reason for parting ways.

Ian Bigley, an environmental activist and organizer in Nevada, said he’s heard from potential donors who would otherwise give money to help oppose the mine, but who are worried about being associated with Deep Green Resistance.

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In October 2019, Wilbert, Jensen and Keith penned an essay on the Canadian website Feminist Current bemoaning that they couldn’t get their environmental message out to the public, as a book they had written was being rejected by a publisher demanding that they “explain our ‘transphobia.’”

“Okay, hands up everyone who predicted that when Big Brother arrived, he’d be wearing a dress, hauling anyone who refuses to wax his ladyballs before a human rights tribunal, and bellowing ‘It’s Ma’am!’” the essay began.

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The Environmental Movement Isn’t Ready for Transphobia
DGR members camped out at a controversial lithium mine site have made transphobic statements—showing how left-oriented transphobia can infiltrate movements.

By Molly Taft
Published February 9, 2022

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As Funes wrote in Atmos, some Indigenous activists say that “colonial transphobic perspectives” brought in by outsiders, like Falk and Wilbert, can set back community work and healing. Holzman also emphasized that transphobia often manifests as skepticism of the existence of, and the need for, medical treatment for gender dysphoria, which has a broad scientific consensus. The environmental community at large should be already primed to push back on anti-science claims like the ones DGR is making. Allowing junk science like transphobia to exist in an environmental coalition is a slippery slope.

Tolerating transphobia in environmental spaces, in turn, opens the door for right-wing actors to take advantage of these voices—as Carlson did by having Dansky on his show, where she was portrayed as a left-wing feminist who was simply concerned about women. “Right-wing figures have been really eager to seek out these anti-trans left-wing voices to say, look, this is a mainstream issue, even when you see most people are just not that activated by it,” Drennen said.

There’s even deeper danger. As facist movements have grown in recent years across the world, the environmental movement has had plenty of heads-up about the threat of ecofascism: both the Christchurch shooter and the El Paso shooter used climate change and the environment as a partial justification for their racist killing sprees. Yet the belief that climate is firmly a left-wing issue, the purview of traditionally “liberal” activists, seems to be entrenched in the culture. Last January, a rumor briefly flew on Twitter during the Capitol insurrection that one of the rioters, famously known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was a paid actor because he’d also attended an Arizona climate march. He is, in fact, simply an ecofascist. A failure to recognize that fascist elements like racism and transphobia can and do coexist with activists who care about the environment gives those movements room to grow.

“Trans-exclusionary so-called ‘feminists’—it’s a hate movement,” Drennen said. “A common thing that hate movements do is infiltrate other spaces, with the intent to find other people to radicalize and recruit to their cause.”

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