Essay by Eric Worrall
“Australia needs a national Human Rights Act to address the human rights impacts of climate change … but this will only be successful if policymakers listen to … queer people”
Queering a Human Rights-Based Approach to Climate Change in Australia
Ryan Vowles
The Australian Government should implement a national human rights framework, including a queered Human Rights Act.
Australia needs a national Human Rights Act to address the human rights impacts of climate change and to hold the State accountable for its contributions, but this will only be successful if policymakers listen to the lived experiences of queer people, and everyone else who has been deemed non-human by international human rights law. A Human Rights Act that is created in partnership with stakeholders that have historically been excluded or subjugated by legal institutions would be a radical departure from Australia’s current approach to policy, but this is exactly what is required of climate justice. This recommendation is supported by four underlying principles: participatory policy design, destabilising dominant knowledge systems, intersectionality, and urgent climate action.
Positionality Statement
Ryan Vowles (they/them) was born on the stolen lands of the Awabakal people as a descendant of British settlers. They recently graduated with a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Development Studies from the University of Newcastle and are aware how these disciplines are being used as tools of colonisation against First Nations peoples. Ryan is also especially conscious of the ways that settler colonialism and capitalist development are contributing to climate change in Australia. … Additionally, as a queer person in Australia, homophobia and transphobia have been present in Ryan’s life for as long as they can remember. They acknowledge that these same systems of oppression have also provided them with unearned privilege, and this has decreased their own vulnerability to climate harm. From this perspective, Ryan is interested in using their privilege to challenge harmful assumptions and produce practical solutions. Through a deep understanding of how their own liberation is intertwined with every other struggle for freedom, Ryan is committed to the ongoing process of decolonising their research so that their work is more intersectional. Crucially, Ryan recognises that oppression takes many different forms. At times, this report may be limited by its author’s incomplete understanding of the diversity of queer knowledges and lived experiences.
…
An option for legal reform is to grant legal rights to the environment itself. Rights of nature, or environmental rights, recognise that ecosystems are not solely the property of humans. Rather, a rights of nature approach understands that ecosystems are rights-holders with intrinsic value, regardless of their relationship to human beings.
…
Read more: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/research/centre/law-and-social-justice/research/social-justice-student-projects/student-projects/queering-a-human-rights-based-approach-to-climate-change-in-australia
Ryan Vowles, whose report is hosted in the University of Newcastle website, identifies as a first year law student at the University of Newcastle.
What can we conclude from this report? If you send your kids to the University of Newcastle, there is a chance that if they ever return to see you they’ll talk about being liberated, and use words like “intersectionality” while they accuse you of “unearned privilege” and being a part of the oppressive capitalist system. They may also try to explain in detail why a native fruit tree growing in the wilderness should have comparable rights to a human being.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You got to be Sh*tting me…
I’m not a tranny so i won’t.
I’m glad you don’t identify as “A small portable transistor radio receiver”.
Or a transmission.
I actually do, but they rejected to call by my pronoun Trump
and told me to tone down 50%.
So I changed my pronoun to Hitler – and everything was fine.
You mean the Socialist Austrian Painter who slept with a German Shepherd named Blondi and had a girlfriend who identified as Brown but was white and 23 years younger with two Scottish Terrier dogs.
It all started when they were allowed to marry their furry friends.
That’s a Coprophiliac’s idea of fun !!
your usual response, Billy Bob?
🙂
R V needs better padding on their room ??
😉
They is a fool.
He is a tool.
He doesn’t mind that Australia is sliding for years into tyranny and eroding human rights.
But at the same time when you are told that you’ll own nothing
the environment needs human rights.
Of course embedded in all the new fancy mandatory narratives as climate and queers.
And what else do we have?- yeah, colonialism and capitalism.
But what is the real intention of this nonsense?
Once you give nature these rights, you will no longer be allowed to enter nature, let alone built anything there or to grow food etc, as you’d offend nature and violate her rights.
(and isn’t it ironic and typically orwellian that a guy who denies his very own nature is so pro-nature)
Who has written this text for him?
The UN or the WEF?
An AI?
AI’s are way too young to be this crazy and corrupt.
If I remember correctly the natives would burn down vast amounts of that nature to make it suitable for their way of living.
Does anyone else have to re-read articles full of “they” in order to grasp exactly who the “they” is / are that’s being referred to in the current sentence ?
I mean, if your general plea is to be “better understood” by the public at large, stop confusing them with misused pronouns that complicate who’s who in the story.
I reached the first ‘they’ then gave up reading
You didn’t miss much.
Why are people like Ryan Vowles so self-congratulatory?
I used to subscribe to Analog science fiction magazine, which usually had the best ideas but the most amateurish writing. Then one issue came packed with woke terminology, as if some new editor had swept in and insisted on gender bending pronouns. The funny thing to me was that science fiction has been writing about space aliens for a century, and I am sure I remember some stories dealt with multiple sexes without having to go bananas. But not this one story.
That new woke editor decided that every reference to the aliens, whether singular or plural, would use “they”. Sometimes it matter whether it was one or many, but you could not tell except by reading ahead far enough to find out, than backtracking and rereading.
I think I made it halfway through. There was not a glimmer of parody or humor. It was just your bog-standard poorly written Analog science fiction story, except made incomprehensible by woke pronouns.
I found two other stories in the same issue with similar woke editing making them incomprehensible.
I haven’t read an issue of Analog since. Maybe it was meant to be a parody or protest issue, but if so, it was so poorly done that I had no interest in any further issues.
There was an issue of Asimov’s magazine in the 90’s like that. All the stories but one had homosexual main characters. The exception’s main character was a woman who was neutered with her breasts and reproductive organs completely removed. Apparently they’d saved up all the “queer” story submissions for a while to stuff into one issue.
What puzzles me about that is how they can possibly think a one-off issue like that can increase circulation. The regular readers will be offended, the queer readers who weren’t already subscribers won’t become subscribers.
I also had subscriptions to Asimov’s and F&SF. Asimov’s had the most polished writing, but the least sciency. I gave it up when one story was about a guy waking up from a dream about his rowboat being on fire, then going fishing and his boat catches on fire. I wouldn’t even call it a story, what with no ending, and it was neither science nor fantasy. That was its last straw. Must have been before their queer issue.
F&SF had too much fantasy and not enough science, and I eventually realized I was only reading one or two stories every month.
I’d like to find a good magazine like the old pre-woke Analog. But I canceled my Netflix account and haven’t tried any others. Too much woke nonsense that ruins the idea of trying some new unknown actors and cheap movies. When the entertainment world gets back to entertaining, maybe I’ll try again.
You don’t understand.
These people are not interested in being “better understood”.
It is all about narcissism and power.
The alternative pronoun(and the fancy fake names and aliterstions they use in later stage) is to show how special and knowledgable they are.
The power lies within the fact that they try to force this obvious nonsense (hasn’t existed anywhere in history) on everyone else to give in to their insanity.
And the real power lies within the absurdity that they can change their pronoun any second – and can therefore accuse you of hatespeech even if you use their made-up pronous because they changed it from they to shit.
The psychological trick behind this is that someone who bows down to this nonsense will accept every form of tyranny by minorities(just in case you don’t know why Obama happened and why all new dem political superstars who popped out of thin air since then are minorities/AOC/Kamala/Mam Dani)
and everything they throw at you(climate,vaccines)
That’s why many kings and queens spoke of themselves as WE
Aaaha ha ha.
“Through a deep understanding of how their own liberation is intertwined with every other struggle for freedom, Ryan is committed to the ongoing process of decolonising their research so that their work is more intersectional.”
Decolonising. Sounds like “they” might need a laxative for the best results.
Other than being an exercise in buzz word bingo, “they” are engaged in an equivocation fallacy. Use alternate definitions of words like “rights”, and it can be forced into almost being plausible.
Yes, the climate clowns are increasingly playing word games and making claims designed to be unverifiable.
To paraphrase Thomas Sowell – in every American disaster a Harvard man (er….person) has been involved in some manner. It is time to shut down the US Ivy League schools, a lot of the UK’s elite universities and of course the Aussie Newcastle joke. They can’t be fixed.
Keep in mind that most of these high-ranking personalities are married to cousins for centuries.
Look! They found another reason to fight AGW! How unique!
I’ll give $100,000,000 (from my first Powerball winnings) to the first person that can definitively prove that lowering ambient CO2 will
Make the Climate stable
Make the Weather better
End droughts
Stop flooding
Stop hurricanes
Stop tornados
cause more food to grow
End Famine
Make Coffee grow better
Make Cocoa grow better
Improve my hair line
Return my Libido
Cause children to be less afraid (ending their stupid constant gloom and doom messaging would do that)
Improve the teaching curriculum
Increase educator intelligence
You missed a few.
I recently encountered a peer-reviewed paper which claimed that climate change contributes to “antimicrobial resistance” (AMR).🥴 (Sams-Dodd & Sams-Dodd, 2025)
That one must be true because the microb(rains) writing these nonsense papers are definitely getting more prolific
And why Canada under a mile of ice sheet is a better place to live.
Let me guess, after we give human rights to the environment, we will see rocks suing mining companies to stop all mining.
Stalks of wheat suing the farmer to prevent harvesting.
And weeds suing to prevent crops from being planted the next spring.
Understand that humans now are numbers and numbers don’t have human rights.. Just try to identify with your name of birth in a bureaucratic system.
University of Newcastle used to have a renowned combustion laboratory. To see anthracite and lignite burners side-by-side was a sight to behold and unforgettable impression of the relative energy content.
They now offer degree course in “renewable energy” whatever that is. Do not know if they still have the combustion lab.
Grid scale wind and solar are now stranded assets in Australia and will never be replaced. Last 30 days, grid solar in South Australia produced 36GWh but curtailed 66GWh and wind 592GWh produced and 129GWh curtailed. And rooftops produced 322GWh but have only be getting installed in the last 10 years in any number.
Rooftop solar is the only source of generation in Australia that can grow. The grid is in economic demise and those who can afford to make their own electricity are.
So woke university of Newcastle is offering a course in what is now stranded assets. There is no renewable energy. They may as well be offering couses in other useless areas.
My battery addition to my solar system is due to be installed in December.
I am in South Australia where the blackouts, both short and long, are getting worse. Add in the expected price rises of power and we are at the stage of having to have personal, local solutions to the government making life less comfortable but more expensive.
Got your 10 kva generator all set up and ready to go as well?
I’m told you can even get remote-start controllers now.
How exciting – like waiting for Christmas morning to open our presents.
” … where the blackouts, both short and long, are getting worse.”
There goes the ice cream! I live in central Washington State where a Public Utility District buys power from the Bonneville Power Administration and routes it to customers. You can see the sources here — mostly hydro.
BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER
There have been very few outages in 35 years with the longest about 4 hours.
Didn’t the Biden admin start blowing the dams? How long before that power is very costly?
How does climate change uniquely affect homosexuals, simulants, and other queer individuals?
Because they’re highly emotional, and whackadoodle. A raindrop will send them over the edge.
Human rights has been notoriously steeped in Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry) and marked by performance of human rites with climate progress. #HateLovesAbortion
“Ryan Vowles (they/them) “
Obviously suffers from schizophrenia (a mental disorder characterised variously by hallucinations, delusions, disorganised thinking or behaviour, and flat or inappropriate affect ),
But at least they can talk to each other.
and give ‘themselves’ a reach-around?
Eeeeuuuuwwww.
Anyone who starts out bragging about being so naive and ignorant only shows how little respect the rest of his knowledge should be given.
“It” doesn’t know the difference between singular and plural and we’re supposed to pay attention to what “it”!?!?
(How many “things” does it have between its legs? Does “it” know what “they” are?)
Being enabled to publicly engage in this level of insanity without expectation of severe personal consequence is the height of privilege. I weep for the capital that was wasted on this person’s education that could have gone to solving a real problem.
As a human, I have the right to recognise only two genders.. Male and female.
And the freedom to refer to them as either he/him or she/her depending which biological gender he or she is..
“Them” is a collective noun, and unfortunately their are many in this clown’s collective / commune / fad / fetish…. whatever.
The English language has been down this unfortunate road before, of a plural word being misused as singular until the dictionaries caved and conceded the point. “You” used to be plural, only. “Thee” and “thou” were the singular forms.
Now, in the American South we have “y’all” to do the explicitly plural chore that “you” used to do.
But, but, but, “thee” and “thou” are religious words, no? Can’t deny separation of church and state.
Sheesh.
I recognize only two sexes, male and female, and three genders (at least in German): Masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Don’t think I’ve ever met a “neutered”.
Effeminate men, and butch females, and people who prefer the “company” of their own gender.
They are welcome to do as they like…
… but stop “pretending” to be a different gender than they were born with, so as to laud it over other people.
“Trans” is a physical impossibility.
Eunuch.
Guards the harem.
and neuter is a verb.
neuter is both a verb and a noun
The issue is gender and sex are not the same. Activists conflate them and try to force us to accept things like “assigned at birth” when reality is recorded at birth based on physical examination.
Sex is created at the moment of conception.
Gender is a container, a category, use for centuries is a language tool. Learn the base word, spelling and definition and gender and you mastered conjugation and declination (all standard by gender).
It got repurposed after WWII in social studies trying to determine what attributes were commonly associated with social roles (e.g., male was bread winner, female was domestic). The movie censorship made the word sex taboo and gender was inserted.
“He/his” are both masculine and neuter depending on context. If the subject is ambiguous (everyone), he was used in the neuter sense. Some people got offended and ignorance dominated.
We not have to take the “man” out of manual and manufacturing, even though those words are rooted in Latin “manu” (hand).
And it goes on.
What about the rights of ants, termites, mosquitos, cockroaches and other
pestscreatures?This obviously needs to be part of any climate policy.
Termites are climate criminals.
The termite population of the planet emits more CO2 than all of humanity.
What TF has what you elect to do with your tackle in private got to do with climate change?
Talk about “mission creep”!
Creeps on a mission.
We are not amused.
Oh yes we are !!! (:-))
They is not.
How pitiful.
queer. (kwēr) v.t. To spoil the effect or success of, as by ridicule; to throw a wet blanket on; to spoil.
(Copied from this dictionary. Seems right to me.)
“Them” has lots of issues but climate change isn’t one of them. The human rights impact of Australian government policies seems notoriously bad for everyone. Get rid of all government meddling in this realm and everyone would be better off. Ryan Vowles could then address their real problems.
I hope they/them’s parents didn’t pay for that “education” /indoctrination.
Of course not, the tax payers are going to end up paying for it.
And ultimately the communities and nation end up paying for it, because these idiots get into power with their ideology.
There’s so different genders, pronouns, and sexual preferences these days, is being a straight, white, middle-aged man who’s pronouns are he/him/none of your fracking business, the new queer?
Are we now a minority and how much can we claim for our hurt feelings?
You is not even a people who can get pregnant chum so dream on?
BBC host breaks rules after correcting ‘pregnant people’ to ‘women’ live on air | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site for latest headlines
Yeah, I spotted that. Pretty ridiculous that Croxall has been slated for stating the obvious than some convoluted “people with wombs” BS
Student (noun): A person who still has to learn a lot.
This is daft enough to make a little bird whisper in my ear: Sokal?