Addressing the raging climate crisis requires a just transition to a clean energy world; addressing the attacks on trans people requires a transition to a world committed to gender self-determination. These crises rage on, under the presumption that their respective movements do not have anything to contribute to the other. But in Washington D.C., queer climate justice dance parties and shutdowns of the fossil-fuel-supporting Wells Fargo float at Pride suggest otherwise. After the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, queer and trans staffers at climate organization 350.org wrote that if activists’ vision of climate justice did not include “justice on all fronts,” including queer liberation, that vision was not climate justice. How do queer and trans perspectives shape the climate justice movement?I use a qualitative multi-method approach that draws upon semi-structured interviews and content analysis of secondary sources. I interviewed activists primarily based in Washington D.C. and New York City who worked at the nexus of climate and queer politics (22 interviews) as well as staffers affiliated with four national-level organizations—the Sierra Club, 350.org, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and the National Center for Transgender Equality (17 interviews). I also conducted qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, magazine articles, blog posts, op-eds, publicly available interviews, emails, and Tweets & Facebook events. By triangulating among these data sources, I tell a more nuanced story than each source could reveal on its own. Existing queer and trans studies research analyze how LGBTQ institutions reinforce injustice, and yet, this same attention has not extended to environmental and climate injustice. By contrast, I examine the extent to which queer & trans climate activists contest and reinforce climate injustice. I argue that queer and trans activists and organizers queer the climate justice movement by substantively bridging queer & trans and climate justice strategy and tactics. Relying upon the content analysis, however, I find that two divergent frames are emerging. First, an LGBTQ climate change frame reinforces gender, racial, and class injustice. Second, the queer climate justice frame advances an intersectional framing linking queer liberation to climate justice, in addition to abolition and anti-imperialism. Zooming into the New York City People’s Climate March in 2014, I argue that intersectional climate justice narratives can exclude queer & trans people. Traveling next to Washington D.C. in 2017, I argue that the queer (of color) climate justice activists tell an intersectional story that disrupts green and rainbow capitalism. Finally, national organizations lingered on symbolic actions connecting queer & climate movements because of a perceived lack of evidence to support the distributional paradigm—that LGBTQ people must be disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis to warrant political resources—and unclear sense of how to substantively plan campaigns at the intersections of queer liberation and climate justice. More subtly, the confluence of neoliberal LGBTQ and environmental politics created an ecohomonormative politics that also threatens liberatory movement building. In summary, queer & trans perspectives bring new insights to the climate justice movement, in what I call queer climate justice, but several barriers stand in the way of its practice.

This dissertation examines how cisgender political elites work in allyship and build coalitions with transgender, non-binary, and intersex (TNBI) people, communities, and constituencies in California. Political allyship and coalition building are critical in expanding rights, which entails recognizing the disenfranchisement minorities experience in informal and formal political realms. Political recognition, especially recognizing struggle and hardship, brings value to human life and is a locus of liberal democratic processes. The concept of recognition can be hard to pin down, can be measured by its absence, and denial of recognition occurs because minority citizens become objects of political animosity. Although TNBI Americans have recently received some positive recognition through informal political processes, such as depictions in some mainstream media, TNBI Americans lack civil rights and liberties. The lack of rights is evidenced by the absence of TNBI specific and inclusive statutes at the municipal, state, and federal levels. Since state legislatures enact the bulk of TNBI inclusive and expansive legislation, this dissertation provides insight into political cisgender allyship formation among California's political elites. Moreover, California is commonly believed to be a bastion of progressive politics. Since policy and legislation formation begins outside of the statehouse, this dissertation also explores the origins of TNBI inclusive legislation and the activists, lobbyists, and bureaucrats of diverse gender sexual identities who work to enhance the political standing of TNBI Americans in California. This research ultimately spotlights solidarity, coalition building, and sustained allyship by cisgender people who seek to expand TNBI rights within formal political realms.