By Taylor E. Hartson
In the Michigan August heat, Mika(1) and I find a cool, shady spot under the old tree in their front yard. Mika splits a just-picked yellow watermelon for the two of us to share, each of us taking a half and slicing out cubes with our pocket knives. Our hands quickly get sticky as we chat, occasionally taking a break to sip the juice that pools in the concave rind. Mika tells me it’s their second season operating their own vegetable production - their first season on the land where we’re meeting - and they’re continuing to work part-time on another vegetable farm in the area. “I started working at this other farm last winter and loved it. It was the first farm I had worked where I felt like communication was healthy, and their systems made a lot of sense to me. They really prioritized their staff and our needs. I felt like I couldn’t let that job go, and so I signed on for this summer season, which felt crazy, and still sometimes feels kind of crazy, but it’s been so nice,” they said.
But Mika’s farming journey - like the journeys of many other queer and transgender growers - hasn’t always been so supportive. For many of these growers, farming requires a constant negotiation of safety and visibility as they try to find operations where their queer identities will be welcomed. In Mika’s first season farming, they worked under a boss who they described as predatory and manipulative. “I think through that, and then other different managers, particularly cis[gender] white men with anger issues, I've really had to learn how to set healthy boundaries in a space that is often really rural, and you're using both your mental and physical energy. It's incredibly draining.” As Mika’s story highlights, part of adapting our agricultural practices to a changing world is reimagining our relationships and practices to support the wellbeing, health, and safety of those who produce our food.
Since 2021, I’ve been interviewing queer(2) growers across the Midwest United States, gathering stories about the embodied, emotional, and relational practices in their farming work as part of my ongoing dissertation research. After talking with more than seventy queer farmers, three kinds of experiences stand out to me that many transgender and nonbinary(3) interviewees share with one another, regardless of geographic location. First, many trans and nonbinary growers shared encounters where they didn’t feel safe around their bosses, coworkers, customers, or other people they interacted with in their work. Second, I heard so many stories of trans and nonbinary growers having to negotiate the visibility of their gender in agricultural spaces, sometimes at risk to their safety. Finally, in spite of the ways that trans and nonbinary growers encounter risks to safety and visibility, many of them see their queerness as an opportunity to question why farming is done the way it is. Each of these stories helps us see that we have opportunities to create safe and welcoming spaces within agriculture while encouraging imaginative alternatives to systems and practices that aren’t working for many growers.
Creating a culture of safety and belonging
It’s mid-November 2023, and I’m visiting an urban farm in Indiana to interview Em, an Indigenous two-spirit(4) person and the lead farmer. We’re seated at a picnic table near the medicinal herb beds, where now-brown mint stems and echinacea lay dormant for the winter, still marked by handwritten signs. The sun is shining - an anomaly for late fall in the Midwest - and I’ve just asked Em how being queer has impacted their farming journey. They recount part of a recent professional development training they attended:
“The facilitator asked us to share our name and pronouns, and I said my pronouns are she/they. Then they continued down and the next person made a comment like, ‘My pronouns are, I'm just normal.’ The trainer was like, ‘Can you expand on that? What does that mean?’ They were kind of like, ‘Well, I don't understand why these young people are making us talk about this. I'm a girl. Look at me,’ and was getting very defensive. I would've never spoken up if it wasn't this kind of training, but this is a person that I work very closely with that I think doesn't even realize that I’m not a cis[gender] person. I'm one of these people that they're crapping on right now, and they don't even realize.”
Em’s experience in this training illustrates how difficult it can be for trans and nonbinary farmers to encounter cisgender people who are hostile toward practices like sharing one’s name and pronouns. These practices are intended to cultivate inclusivity and respect for everyone (not just trans and nonbinary individuals). Additionally, comments such as, “I’m a girl. Look at me,” reinforce the assumption that someone’s appearance neatly corresponds to their gender identity, and the assertion that “these young people” are the reason for sharing pronouns in introductions erases a long history of queer and transgender people that came well before this generation.
However, it’s not just in these formal training settings that trans and nonbinary farmers encounter misgendering, transphobia, or other kinds of hostility towards queer folks. Most of the trans and nonbinary farmers I interviewed had experienced working with cisgender people who repeatedly used the wrong name or pronouns for them. During a virtual interview, Fallon, a nonbinary and transmasculine(5) farmer who describes their gender as ultimately “limitless” and “undefinable,” recounts a particularly frustrating encounter with a coworker from a past season: “They kept talking over [me, as] someone who was presenting as a femme(6) [at the time], not getting my pronouns right, thinking that I could just talk to them at any time, not asking me if I could talk right now.” Whether intentional or unintentional, using the wrong name or pronouns for someone communicates to that person that their identity isn’t important and often leads to a person feeling unsafe. While Fallon ultimately ended up leaving the position, many queer farmers have to stay in unsafe positions because they can’t afford to change jobs midway through a season.
When I ask Fallon about any spaces where they’ve felt like they belonged in agriculture, they tell me about a season from a few years prior when they worked on a queer-run farm with two other nonbinary growers. “There were so many things that we just didn’t even have to discuss with each other,” Fallon shares. “It wasn’t even a question. We got to exchange stories, and it was nice to not have to worry about someone misgendering me. It gave me the space to process my gender and process how I want to present myself to the world.”
The experience of “having space” to explore queerness came up repeatedly in my interviews. I was particularly captured by the vision of space that Lou, a queer farmer from Ohio, shared with me while we talked over a cup of coffee at a local independent book publisher:
“For a long time, I've dreamed that I could get land and have it be a place for reentry and rehabilitation for folks. It could just be a safe space for people, more than anything. Especially for trans folks. If I can get land, I could also make that space a resource broader than just the farm because it could be land, it could be safe, and it could feel like safety for folks.”
Many trans and nonbinary farmers that I talked to described some desire to steward land alongside other queer and trans farmers, and at the heart of this desire is a need for physical and emotional safety, understanding and respect for their queer identities, and mutual work toward creating spaces of belonging for everyone.
Negotiating visibility in agricultural spaces
While respect and understanding of transgender and nonbinary identities is a central component of feeling safe and welcomed in agricultural spaces, another primary way these farmers have to negotiate their safety is through decisions about how visibly queer - or simply how visibly different from people’s expectations of who a farmer is - they can be. Returning to my conversation with Em provides a clear illustration of this. They tell me they recently moved back to Indiana from the Pacific Northwest, and they describe how jarring it is to be back in a place where markers of queerness and difference are less common, making them much more visible in a state like Indiana. “I can't stand being looked at because I feel like I'm being judged just for being in this kind of state, this type of area where people have [more conservative] views,” Em explains. “In the summer, usually when I'm out here working really hard, I wear Carhartts and a baseball cap, right? But in the fall, I actually will just look normal every day. People will walk by and say, ‘Wow, she's got her hair down. Look at her. Oh, look.’ I can't tell you how terrible [it feels], like wanting to peel my own skin off just because I didn’t wear a baseball cap and Carhartts. I don't want to be seen. I'd got used to it being like, oh yeah, everyone wears everything and anything. It's not anything to comment on.” For Em, like for many other trans and nonbinary farmers I talked to, any perception of difference - even if not explicitly “queer” - can become a point of tension, often leading to feelings of vulnerability.
Queer farmers often go to great lengths to control their appearance so they can mitigate unwanted comments about or behavior toward their gender or sexuality. During our interview together at their dining room table, Robin, a nonbinary bi-gender(7) farmer in Ohio, tells me about the vastly different experiences that they have when interacting with cisgender, heterosexual farmers in their area than their wife does. “It is a lot easier for her to engage with the straight world, period,” Robin explains. “In the straight world, it is amazing, especially when we're together, how much people don't see me and just look right past me. Especially as a short person, they look right over me and only make eye contact with her. Even when I speak to them, or they ask a question about me and I answer, they will continue not to acknowledge me in any way.” Encountering visible discomfort from non-queer people presents additional obstacles for trans and nonbinary farmers as they engage in their work. Robin goes on to describe the effort they take to “walk the line” with cisgender or heterosexual people, where they have to gauge how masculine or feminine they should be acting in order for someone to acknowledge them. This kind of “chameleon” strategy often results in trans and nonbinary farmers having to perform as a gender they are uncomfortable with, just to ensure that others don’t comment on their appearance or ignore their presence altogether.
This experience of deciding how safe it is to be visibly trans or nonbinary begins even before queer farmers interact with coworkers, bosses, and customers. As Miles, a queer and trans farmer in Ohio, tells me during our virtual interview, the process of searching for farm jobs is complicated by wondering how potential employers are going to react to applicants who are visibly gender non-conforming(8). “Finding a job where I was going to be paid enough to live was difficult,” Miles explains, “but also trying to figure out whether people will be open to me working for them because I am gender-nonconforming, and I don't know whether somebody's going to actually be quite conservative.” In a field where fairly compensated and stable jobs are already difficult to come by, trans and nonbinary farmers are also forced to consider how their gender identity might narrow available positions because of an employer’s acceptance of trans and nonbinary identities.
Questioning through queerness
While many of the stories I’ve gathered highlight the difficulties of being a transgender or nonbinary farmer in agricultural spaces, I don’t want to overlook the generative and imaginative ways that queer farmers are rethinking what it looks like to farm. For so many queer farmers, queerness is an opportunity to question why we do things the way we do and to wonder what other opportunities are available to us. As Sai, a gender-nonconforming, non-binary, and xeno-gender(9) farmer of color, told me, “When people are moving from this mindset of, ‘Production, production, production, work, work, work, we need to get this done,’ I think queerness brings more of that care and that love. Especially when people are burnt out and being more transient, coming to spaces where people have been there for years and are in these extreme cycles of burnout, it helps to bring a fresh perspective.” Queerness becomes a framework for not just questioning one’s gender or sexuality but questioning other long-standing systems that might not be working anymore - or that maybe never worked in the first place.
Looking toward the future of food and agriculture, we can listen to farmers deeply engaged in questioning our current system practices for opportunities to imagine different agricultural practices that account for the safety, inclusion, and belonging of all humans and more-than-human beings—the land, plants, animals, and fungi that we live alongside. A good starting place for making trans and nonbinary farmers feel safe and welcome in agriculture is to create a culture where everyone shares and respects each other’s names and pronouns, creates room for many different examples of what a farmer looks like, and celebrates the diversity of gender, sexuality, race, and other experiences that farmers bring to the table; we can go even further by questioning what values are at the root of the practices we employ. Sage, a queer livestock farmer from Illinois, paints a roadmap for this kind of questioning work: “I spend a lot of time analyzing why are people doing these things this way? Why has it always been done this way? Should it continue being done this way? Just because something is an accepted norm doesn't mean it's actually good for anyone. That sense of community, that ethos of care, is very influenced by how I understand queerness and how I understand my connection to queerness.”
As we embark on the project of radically transforming the way we grow food, we must take care to center the perspectives of folks at the margins who have been dreaming and enacting alternatives to dominant growing practices for centuries - queer growers, Black growers, Indigenous growers, undocumented growers, and so many more. When our growing practices and spaces begin to center the wellbeing of all the relationships in our agricultural webs - rather than the pursuit of profit, efficiency, and tradition - we can begin to create a world of safety, rehabilitation, and care for everyone.
Notes
1 To protect the safety and confidentiality of the folks I’ve interviewed for this project, I’ve changed all names of people and farms and only identified their locations broadly by state.
2 I use the term "queer" here to refer to people who are not heterosexual or cisgender (people whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth), including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary identities.
3 I use “transgender” or “trans” to describe people whose gender identity is different from their sex assigned at birth. I use the term “nonbinary” to describe people whose gender identity does not neatly fit into the categories of “man” or “woman.” Some, but not all, nonbinary people also consider themselves to be transgender. Throughout this piece, I use the phrase “trans(gender) and nonbinary” as an umbrella term for all interview participants whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth; however, I use each interviewee’s stated pronouns (at the time of the interview) and specific gender identity labels, where relevant.
4 “Two-spirit” refers to an Indigenous person who identifies as having both a male and a female essence or spirit. This term was explicitly created by and for Indigenous people to encompass sexual, cultural, gender, and spiritual identities.
5 “Transmasculine” is a term that refers explicitly to transgender people whose gender identity and/or expression is masculine but not necessarily male.
6 “Femme” refers to a person who typically presents feminine in dress, attitude, and behavior. Typically, femme is used in lesbian contexts alongside the term “butch.”
7 Robin uses the term “bi-gender” to describe themselves, meaning they see themselves as having both masculine and feminine elements.
8 “Gender non-conforming” is a term that describes people whose appearance and behavior do not follow gender stereotypes. This often includes transgender and nonbinary people but can also include cisgender people whose gender expression goes against assumptions of what one’s appearance should look like based on sex assigned at birth.
9 “Xeno-gender” refers to a gender identity outside human understandings of gender. It typically encompasses gender identities that are related to animals, plants, or other creatures.
Taylor E. Hartson (they/them) is a livestock farmer at Verdant Hollow Farms in Buchanan, Michigan, and a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. They can be reached via email at taylorhartson@gmail.com or via their website, taylorhartson.com.
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