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Brigitte LG Baptiste, director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Biological Resources Research in Colombia, is an award-winning biologist and ecologist. She was in Chile to speak about climate change at the Congreso Futuro (Future Congress) and what would happen in the event of cacao extinction. But this trans woman and expert scientist would have loved to talk about gender and try to answer the question that Latin America's largest science and thought festival chose for this year: "What species do we want to be?"

“With that question as an invitation, I thought it would be striking and interesting to look for spaces to talk about the construction of sex, because it is also a central theme in evolutionary biology and a central theme in contemporary cultural construction. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. I only dedicated myself to talking about climate change and other topics that are also extremely important,” Brigitte tells Presentes.

When she transitioned 20 years ago, Brigitte had to do so in front of a scientific and academic community where she already had a name and a solid career. She considers herself fortunate to be able to say that at the time, at 35, she had the full support of her colleagues and friends in that conservative world. After her visit to Chile, she was surprised that several people involved in that same world resisted her identity. “I was very surprised by that resistance to addressing me with feminine pronouns,” she said.

-If you had had the opportunity to talk about how science contributes to explaining trans issues, what would you have said?
-That would have been very interesting, but also quite a long conversation. I've spoken about it before, and I've always said that there are several interesting perspectives to consider. The most relevant ones are those from ethology or behavioral sciences, from primatology, developed by feminist women who have deconstructed the interpretations of primate behavior that had been used as analogies in psychiatry or sociology.

There has been fascinating work by people like Joan Roughgarden and her book *Evolution's Rainbow* , where she compiles studies on transgenderism, transsexuality, and parenting among wild species and demonstrates the absolute prevalence of heterogeneity and all kinds of arrangements that have existed for millions of years. I would also have mentioned another contribution from the social sciences: how the construction of rights and identity elements are identified as components of personality development, the evolution of the exercise of individual freedom, and as a substantial element of social development.

"This is where queer theory, which you keep talking about, comes in..."
"Exactly. When my wife Adriana told me about queer theory many years ago, I struggled to understand it, since the natural sciences are rigorous, often deterministic. We believe that the role of science is to reveal the truth, and that's not necessarily true. Queer theory fundamentally states that identity is a contextual construct that develops. This possibility of playing and combining, constructing and deconstructing identities is also fantastic for expanding the notion of what it means to be human and of roles. And when you study ecology extensively, you realize that this is exactly what happens in the world, in ecosystems: the identity of all living beings is defined through their relationships with other living beings. There is no stable identity, nor is any identity determined by their genes. The most obvious example is domestication, which creates identities all the time, even some that never existed before, and which constantly expand the notion of what life is."

"Has this been formally discussed or considered within science?"
"No. There's literature, movements, and art, but science hasn't thought about it or written about it, and that's the task I want to undertake: to provide support and arguments for the scientific community itself, which in some way rejects diversity or justifies determinism. What I like about this theory is that it questions the construction of identities and, above all, the erotic charge of identities, which is one of the least analyzed topics in contemporary science, leaving it to medicine and psychiatry."

"So you're in favor of deconstructing science's contribution to explaining trans issues…
" "Absolutely! Deconstructing science to address gender and sex is a crucial task. Ultimately, science is a social construct, so it has to constantly correct itself. The construction of nature has many biases, a lot of ideology, a lot of subjectivity, which isn't inherently good or bad, but rather part of the phenomenon or of our position as organic beings who come from the living world."

-If you had to compare yourself to a wild species, plant or animal, which would it be?
-Without a doubt, it would be a snail. They're hermaphrodites and they also have epic mating rituals, imagine that!

"Do you think there's a connection between your love for biodiversity and your daily life?"
"My current reflections are increasingly reconciling me with these issues. Reconciling me in the sense that I was a person full of questions, wanting to understand why human beings find it so difficult to accept diversity as something positive, why we always build discipline to construct people's identities, and how we use that to organize society. It always seemed to me that there were significant contradictions, or that we were being too deterministic, especially because it's so often repeated that homosexuality or adoption by same-sex couples isn't natural. And when I begin to understand that it does happen in the natural environment and in wild spaces, I feel a great sense of relief on the one hand, and a pedagogical obligation on the other. At least so that the arguments of naturalization that I've always been criticized for, and with which they've sought to limit the rights of LGBTI people, don't continue to gain ground."

-What things do they criticize you for?
-There is a sector that cannot understand how it is possible that the director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute, which promotes issues such as conservation, protection of nature and sustainable use of biodiversity, intends to change gender or "fake" a sexuality that has not been granted to her.

-How was your transition received by the scientific community in Colombia?
-I was studying in Barcelona; I had gone there to distance myself from my past. I had been there for a year when they came to find me from Bogotá. I remember that moment and it moves me because someone I greatly admire, who later became dean of a faculty, came all the way there and told me, "Look, I want you to go to the university and be a professor." I thanked him for the gesture and told him he should realize that I was a different person now. But he told me he saw the same person I'd always been and that the change I was pointing out wasn't an impediment. It was wonderful because when I returned to the Pontifical Javeriana University in Bogotá, a Catholic university, nobody cared at all. Or at least nobody said so. Those years I spent teaching, where my feminization became public, were very special and very positive, and I know I am privileged for that, because other trans women are not even close to being able to tell their story in that way, something that makes me very angry in this unjust society.

"You have two daughters and are married to a woman. What's it like living in a diverse family?"
– I don't like to define myself as a mother or father, but as a parent. My wife Adriana met me this way, and the family we started building began when I publicly came out as Brigitte. We've been very careful never to impose any kind of gender script on them, but of course, it exists at school and in the rest of the world, so we've always tried to help them not take so much of that burdensome stuff that comes from outside so seriously because it doesn't warrant it, unless it involves violence and we have to intervene. My daughters find the issue of gender somewhat irrelevant or trivial because they've grown up without any deliberate instruction on what it means to be a man, to be a woman, or to represent themselves in one way or another.

-In an interview you said that throughout this whole process, the only thing you weren't willing to change was your voice, why?
-Since my transition was so late, I went public at 35, there were many aspects of myself that I hadn't fought against. My voice had served as an anchor of joy, of expression. Besides, I was in choirs and for decades I sang as a baritone. It was something I really enjoyed. I like my voice as it is. I did do some voice change therapy sessions, though, and I didn't feel comfortable. Perhaps it's another element that one plays with, just as I keep the LG from Luis Guillermo in my name, because it's the name my parents gave me. It's a series of marks on my body that are important to remind me that I'm the same person.

-What experiences or lessons did you take away from Chile?
-Although this is a very conservative country in many aspects, I was very impressed by the presence of feminist discourse, the robustness of the arguments and the defense of these issues in public spaces, especially because there isn't anything similar in Colombia yet. Also, the way science and its use in society are discussed, because this is a country that is conventionally wealthier than the rest of Latin America, and that's evident in the way modernity and development are discussed.

-Most of the local media outlets that covered your participation in the Future Congress referred to you as an "expert" and not as a "trans expert." Do you think that's a benefit or a way of making your identity invisible?
-I hadn't noticed that detail; perhaps it's because I'm quite lenient about that, I'm not very demanding in terms of how I'm treated. Now, it does bother me when they change my gender to "expert" or refer to me as "gentleman," which has already happened several times while I've been here. Undoubtedly, when someone does that, they have an ulterior motive, and it's not a naive situation.