Lana Woolf from Edgeeffect.org joins Lars Peter Nissen to discuss how to create a more inclusive humanitarian sector for LGTBQI+ people affected by crisis.

This week's guest on Trumanitarian is Lana Wolf from Edge Effect. Edge Effect is a small organisation focusing on improving the humanitarian sector's ability to meet the needs of LGBTIQ people. So many of the countries we work in are quite hostile towards sexual minorities and it is actually quite a complex issue to understand how we as a sector can better meet the needs of this community. There's no doubt that we can do better than we are doing today, as you will hear in this interview. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation. I also think you should check out Edge Effect on the web and follow them on Twitter. Lana Wolf, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

You're one of the founders of Edge Effect. And why don't you tell us what is Edge Effect? What are you trying to achieve? What's your purpose?

Yeah, so Edge Effect is a small organisation that focuses on the inclusion of people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and expressions, and sex characteristics in humanitarian and development contexts. So from a very Western viewpoint, what we do is we work to include LGBT people in the humanitarian and development systems or the aid systems.

And the name Edge Effect, where does that come from?

Edge effect actually is a sustainability term. And it's a term that's used to describe that part between two different ecosystems. so for example, a forest and a grassland. That part where those two ecosystems joined together is called an edge effect and in that edge effect, there is more diversity of plant and animal species than either the two ecosystems. And so it's about just acknowledging the wonder of diversity and the value of diversity, but doing it in a way that's a little bit safer when we go into context where we have to really consider protection issues.

So the project is very much around diversity and I think we're many who who struggle to keep up with exactly the right acronyms or concepts to use when it comes to this discussion it... It can be a bit confusing (and I'm sure it sounds incredibly old fashioned here), but could you please just walk us through the different concepts and dimensions in this diversity or inclusion agenda that you are.. you're promoting?

I just want to say that it is really tricky and then, even in our short life as an organisation, we have used different terms at different times. And so this isn't about there being one right answer, but evolving as a sector as a community together to be more inclusive. So most people that would be listening to this podcast would know of the term LGBTIQ. And that's an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer. We don't use that term, because it is a term that is from the Global North. It doesn't represent all of the diversity that exists, particularly in lots of the places that we work in. So for example, in Fiji, vakasalewalewa, or in Tonga, leitis, or in Samoa, fa'afafine, or in Bangladesh, hijra, and the list goes on and on and on and on. And so it's... so LGBT has some... there's some issues with using that term. And sometimes... we then moved on to using the word sexual and gender minorities, and minority not as in a numerical position, but as in a position of it being minor inconsequence to acknowledge that people who are considered sexual and gender minorities are considered of having no consequence in the work that we do. And that was a real political term, one that other LGBT organisations and coalition's have used and we've used that, and occasionally in some work, we still do. But we've moved on to the term diverse SOGIESC so. So SOGIESC, the acronym, sexual orientation, gender identity, expression and sex characteristic. And what we're doing is actually talking about characteristics rather than identities. And we're talking about the kinds of characteristics that everyone has. I have a sexual orientation, I have a gender identity, I have a gender expression, I have sex characteristics, and Lars, you have all of those things too. We just might have different characteristics. And so it's a term that's much more inclusive, but then starts to get us to think, not about our actual identities or activities, but the norms that exist that create the exclusion. So for example, rather than thinking about lesbians or gays, we might be thinking about heteronormativity and the way the system makes assumptions about what makes up a partnership or a family. We might talk about binaryism, assuming that there's only males and females. Or we might talk about cisnormativity, the assumption that everyone who is assigned a particular gender at birth, always has that gender. So we get to dive deeper and deeper into the actual drivers of exclusion, rather than thinking about the actual identities of people. And as you know, from, say, for example, the HIV work you talked about, lots of people don't attach themselves to those identities. We might... people might use MSM for men who have sex with men within an HIV context because they don't identify as gay, or they don't identify as bisexual. So it's really getting down to those drivers of exclusion rather then the identities that aren't necessarily characteristic of the actions that people have in the world.

Yeah, when I read through the documentation you have on your website (and I'm obviously very square when it comes to all of these dimensions. I... It's just never been a question for me that I was a heterosexual man.) And one of the articles spoke about a galaxy of diversity, or something like that. And that really spoke to me. Because I was thinking, it's almost as if most of us are tied down by gravity, we sort of locked in that story, we've been told since we were kids about these things, and and just imagine if gravity was suspended. I'm sure that that we would somehow drift into that galaxy and take in much more diverse positions than what is the case today. And so I think it's really fascinating to hear you talk about the diversity and how to conceptualise it in a way that is useful and impactful when we talk about marginalisation and fighting that. And I think, for me, coming from the position I'm in, I think it's... I think it is very difficult for those of us who haven't, in our own lives, had to confront those things, to really empathise and understand with... understand what that is like. I think that is a difficult thing. And sometimes it seems like there's a barrier to engage with this conversation. You're... I mean, you're sometimes are almost afraid to say something wrong. And... because it is complex and difficult to understand. So how do you tackle that difficulty in actually engaging with people who want to understand, but may not quite get it?

I think that's a really good question. And I think that's a fear that a lot of people have. And I guess, being a small organisation, what we do is when we engage with people, whether it's in projects, whether it's in training, whether it's in webinars or podcast discussions, it's about creating a space where people feel comfortable enough to say, I don't know what the answer is here. And we have a discussion about it. And go, Well, you know, what do we think? What can we come up with together around... a way that will help inclusion in the work that we do together? Rather than it being something where it's like, Nope, you've done something wrong. Because I... even as someone who identifies as a lesbian, that doesn't mean that I know inherently all of the different things under the LGBT umbrella. They're quite different communities, quite different people, quite different experiences. but it's about coming together in a way that helps to create a world where people get what they need in a humanitarian context: where people get shelter, where people get food, where people get the type of clothes that they can put on that make them feel like they have a little bit of dignity or they're treated with dignity. You know, it is both really big things, but also, it's about really little things of just being kind to each other and being accepting of each other, whether it's knowledges as we have or don't have, or whether it's ways of being in the world that are unfamiliar.

So one of the ways in which we are trying to create a more inclusive environment is the whole discussion about pronouns, and people put on their Twitter profiles what their pronouns are, and so on. I haven't done that. Because it's... I've never found a way to make that feel natural for me, to be honest. But when I then looked at your website, I saw that that your team, only about half of you guys actually put your pronouns up there. Why? Why is that? Are you not supposed to?

That's a great question. And I'm not sure that I have a definitive answer. I haven't questioned all of our staff. But for me, the reason why I do it, is because it's really safe for me to do so and it shows allyship to the trans community. I can, as a person assigned female at birth, who understands themselves as a woman, can put my pronouns. Nobody's going to disagree with me or argue with me or contradict me around my pronouns, but it creates a familiarity in the world. For other people, they might not feel safe to put their pronouns down because people might argue with them, they might contradict them. And I also think it's really important to say that this kind of behaviour of announcing your pronouns is something that is more understood in higher OECD countries or the Global North. You know, my... most... half of my family is Fijian, my dad's Fijian, and in Fijian language, translating to English pronouns, even in everyday discussion, like... My cousin's birthday is next week, he's turning, you know, 50. People will get the pronouns mixed up just translating to English. So it's important to treat people with dignity and respect, but also not to get fixated on something that is... it's about, you know, interacting with people genuinely and compassionately, and not assuming that you're going to get everything right all the time. And I simply do it as a show of allyship to the trans community.

So how did you come up with the idea of Edge Effect? How did it start?

Effect Effect started by my co-founder, Emily, who at the time worked for a big INGO, and she received the 2O16, Humanitarian Good Practice Guide. And there was a bunch of us sitting around... just friends, not in a work context, but all who work in the system. And we all kind of went, I wonder what it says about LGBTIQ+ people in there. My background's primarily disability and gender. I'm not LGBT. And the good humanitarian guide, you know, a pretty substantial book, had a small paragraph. And it said, 'disaster managers at present do not understand the needs of LGBT people'. And as a small group, we kind of went, 'Hang on a second. That's not good enough.' And therefore...

[laughing] That was a good practice?

[laughing] Yeah, that's what it said.

[laughing] That's fantastic. You know what, if only we were that honest with all of our shortcomings. We might actually be better off.

And so we... Emily budget a lot. Come on, come on, we need to do something about this. And thus we started Edge Effect. Yeah, so that's really how it started. So we kind of started from a pretty clean sta-... slate of looking around. And there had been very small pieces of research. But they were very small. They were... Yeah. And so we started in 2O16.

Okay, so with a clean slate, where do you start? What's the first thing you do?

Well, the first thing that we did was try and find as much information as possible out there. And information is always important. So I'm going to give a little plug out to our website 42d.org where we have every English speaking piece of research that we can find on the humanitarian system in the international development system.

Why 42 degrees?

42 degrees is the angle where light hits water to make a rainbow.

Oh, beautiful.

So again, another little clever name. But the... so the first thing is about information. There was obviously a lack of information. So Emily and I were able to get the smallest amount of funding to go and do an evaluation after Tropical Cyclone Winston in Fiji. That was a really good first step because I understand Fiji culture, I understand Fiji, how it works, I'm there so often because of my family. So we did that. It was called Down By the River. And we then were able to utilise that to start having conversations with people and say, Look, this is a huge issue. We can show it to real issue. And working from there and advocating from that point.

So break down the issues for us. If you look at it from an operational perspective, what are the issues that emerge from your analysis?

Yeah, I guess um, looking a little bit more broadly, and also thinking about the work that we've just done with UN Women called The Only Way is Up, LGBT people experience pre-emergency marginalisation, and that marginalisation and discrimination is exacerbated in disasters. If we look at down by the river, we can see that in relation to, for example, religious disaster narratives, so LGBT people being blamed for the disasters, that the humanitarian system itself systemically discriminates. And I know those words kind of get thrown around a lot, particularly as a woman who's a person of colour, who's LGBT, the term systemic discrimination... I don't want to overuse that. But when we think about the humanitarian system, and those assumptions that we make about the world, for example, that there's men and women, boys and girls, and that makes up the gender spectrum, what does this mean for food distribution lines that are male and female? Or what does it mean when, for example, you will have rapid needs assessments that focus on hygiene kits for women and girls? What does that mean for trans men? In... and there's some great case studies, for example, from the Nepalese earthquake. What does it mean for people being able to access shelter? So most of my experience is in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. So in the Pacific, again, the strongest shelters that are used as emergency evacuation sites, are churches. And again and again and again, people will say to us, we won't go there because, either, we know that we won't be accepted in there, or we fear we won't be accepted in there. And so emergency shelters are out. That means that access to wash is out, which creates all sorts of other problems around additional vulnerabilities of where people are bathing, where people are doing all sorts of things down by the river, for example. And, you know, what does this mean for food distribution? What does this mean for water distribution? What does this mean for so many different technical parts of the cluster system?

So basically, what you're saying is that we have a group of people who are marginalised to begin with, who then sometimes actively are scapegoated or stigmatised as maybe even being the reason that we are in this mess now, who then are known by the community for being different and therefore excluded, and then on top of that, we bring in a system that doesn't see them as a category and therefore they fall through the cracks because they don't fit in either box.

Yes, and then an even more additional step, which is the first piece of research that I ever came across, which was from pincher, looking at the Indian Ocean tsunami in the Aravani community... because the Rapid Needs Assessment, you had to take male or female. Aravanis didn't consider themselves either male or female, they're Aravani. Because the local community then so the international community as discriminating, because they weren't able to access any of the response, because they didn't have the right ID cards, and they weren't able to be assessed according to the Rapid Needs Assessments, therefore the local community amped up their discrimination, because if the INGO in the UN communities can discriminate against them, then that reinforces even further the discrimination.

And so when you bring this to the humanitarian system, when you meet with the mainstream humanitarian actors and speak to them about this, what's the reaction generally?

Their reaction is really positive if we have people in... who are champions. Often it's LGBT people who are aid workers themselves in organisations, or they happen to be allies, for whatever reason, they just think that it's really important and that they want to... they want to progress this as well. And that's really awesome. And we have made some great headway working alongside our allies in their organisations. This is problematic because often they leave their jobs, they move organisations, our knowledge is centralised to one person, and so that's a little bit of an issue. I think, overall, though, I'm gonna say that a lot of the humanitarian system and actors have been quite dismissive or tokenistic of the work that we do. And they seem to think that if they do a two hour workshop, or you know, LGBT is in a footnote, or 'It's okay because we've got somewhere that we include marginalised groups', that it's going to be enough. And I think that overwhelmingly, I feel like that this area of work is not really accepted as a specific technical expertise and that's something that needs to be really considered and have a really particular skill base around.

So what's the grounds of dismissal? Is it a, 'Yeah, yeah, I hear what you're saying. But it's only a few people. It's not really consequential'? For the... What's the...

Yeah, yeah. So sometimes that happens, I have had people quite literally say to me, oh, there's no LGBT people in Indonesia is there. You know, a population that huge, I'm going to tell you that the population of LGBT people would be akin to the population of Australia in its entirety. Sometimes there's this kind of dismissive attitude of 'Oh, look, you know, we care about it, but it's too hard. We don't want to cause risk.' And I know that for certain circumstances that could be a really valid response, but when you have an organisation that's not considering what the legal, the social contexts are, what the local LGBT CSOs are doing... And, you know, I've worked with local LGBT CSOs, [inaudible] in a country like Tanzania. They exist. Work is happening. So if we're not thinking about the context, if we're not mapping the actual situation, but dismissively going, 'Oh, it's too risky to do this work anywhere', then I think that that's a really dismissive kind of situation, particularly when... you have to think about it, it doesn't have to be kind of a mainstream approach. You can work really quietly with CSOs in a really targeted approach, where they're, you know, just able to get enough access to resources to distribute fresh water or to distribute food or distribute appropriate hygiene kits. It doesn't have to be a big...

No, because I was going to say, I've worked in some contexts, in Africa, for example, where if I had brought this agenda to the partners we were working with on the main programmes, I'm not sure we would have gotten very far apart from maybe being sent out of the country, actually. I mean, there are very strong feelings about this around the world and so I think for some practitioners, it can feel like a choice of, 'Am I actually compromising the operation here by promoting this agenda?'.

Yeah. I I think that there are contexts where that happens, but I think that those contexts are also... the quantity of those places are smaller than we assume.

I think that that's a fair point. I think if you don't... if you just assume that the line is there, but you never test it out, I think we can we can sometimes constrain ourselves. I also think that what you said before around, you don't have to do everything with everybody is probably... you know, I think having having diverse strategies where you can push this forward with some like-minded organisations, but there will probably be others where it's more difficult to squeeze this in.

There are some amazing things that are getting done. So for example, today we were talking to our friends in Lebanon. We work with a local LGBT organisation there and also UN Women. And they, together, presented jointly at the Gender Cluster, or often the Protection Cluster, different places call it different things, about LGBT inclusion. And this is in Lebanon. Or there is a an LGBT working group within the Protection Cluster in Cox's Bazar, for example. You know, there are... and again, UN Women supports that with a local LGBT organisation that we work with. But... and I don't... and I worry about pigeonholing this work into gender or into protection. I'm very much in favour of looking at the technical clusters and the work that they can do to substantively ensure that people's needs are met, but at the same time, there are really lovely examples of people slowly but considerately working together to bring a light to these issues and to start making inroads into inclusion.

And so what I hear you saying is, on one side, you have champions strategically located in different parts of the systems. There are glimmers of hope in the field here and there. But if you had to compare to that report you were referencing which said that we have no clue what to do with this thing, how far have we moved on sort of institutionally since then?

Yeah. So institutionally, I don't think we've moved on very far at all. We don't have any substantive policy internationally. You know, there's a little mention in the Sphere Guidelines, but that's about it. There's... You know, if you look at... We... In that piece of work that we did, we looked at three different countries. We looked at Bangladesh, we looked at Vanuatu, looking at Cyclone Harold, and we looked in the Philippines in Mindanao and Marawi, so conflict. And if we look at the actual grey literature, if we look at the Rapid Needs Assessments, and all of that kind of thing, there's little or no inclusion. At best, we tend to be footnoted.

And so now you... you're from Australian Fiji, right? And the three case studies you you mentioned are all from Asia. Do you have any feel for how does it compare to the situation in Africa, Middle East, you spoke about Lebanon or say Latin America?

Yeah. We haven't done very much work in Latin America. One of our staff members has worked there previously, when she was with Stonewall. And another one of our staff members has worked in Africa, particularly with UNHCR in Kenya, and she's worked in Lebanon as well. And in Kenya, particularly in the refugee camps, UNHCR, IWC... you know, they have done quite a lot of work in LGBT inclusion. So I think they're the... they're the areas within the humanitarian system where they really have pushed forward. Outside of that very, very little at all. And there are small parts where things have been happening. So for example, in Lebanon... quite a lot really happens there, but it is... when things happen, often it's not announced. It's not out there. Because that then can create some of the protection issues that we have. Um, but that's also, you know, again, individual champions that we have in Lebanon or in different places, working closely with the local LGBT organisations. It's not about systemic inclusion. What has happened is because there is systemic exclusion, LGBT people themselves and LGBT communities and CSOs themselves, do the humanitarian work of providing food, shelter, SRHR, or as much as possible, the needs for their local communities and one of the ways that we have been focusing our work is to continue to support them to do the work and build their capacity to do that work, acknowledging that while we do the work supporting the humanitarian system, that that's not going to create changes overnight. And substantively, there's been very little change in the humanitarian system since we've worked. Again, it is really focused about specific champions and specific partners that we have.

So really, your strategy is on one side, to focus at the field level, try to see if you can push forward some of the work, strengthen some of the organisations that are doing sort of cutting edge work, and then on the other side, the heavy lifting at the global level, the policy discussion, all of that. So but what I also you're saying is that you're getting further in the field than at your own headquarters.

Yes, [laughing] it is.

That's depressing.

I remember having this vote before, but it was a couple of months ago, and then I get so busy with work that I forget that I've had that thought. And I think that... I think that it's bureaucracy. I think that I have people, say, for example, cluster shelters... shelter clusters, sorry, that say, 'Oh, do you know how long it takes us to do... to develop, you know, our guidelines around this? You know, it takes years to get it approved? We can't start again. You know, we can't do that.' And there's kind of always reasons why things can't happen. At the same time, I think that a lot of people have never thought about it. You know, in that piece of research, The Only Way is Up, we did do a deep dive into Shelter Cluster. And lots of shelter experts that we talked to went, 'Oh, you know, I've never considered it before.' And so there's still a long way for us to go to socialise.

And, as you say that I'm reflecting on having lived in countries where I've had friends who were gay, and really had to keep a low profile, because there wasn't too popular, and yet never myself putting those pieces together in my head that in my work, actually, maybe there's a blind spot there as well.

And I didn't do that either until 2O16. You know, I'd look around to me and wonder, Where are the LGBT people? I would be confronted every day when I go out and do work, whether it's I fly into the airport, the first thing that I do is I take my ring off my middle finger and put it on my wedding finger because the first question I'm going to be asked as I hop in a taxi is, am I married. And of course, I'm not married at this time, because it's illegal to be married, let alone, you know, actual personal details. And so every single day is reminded of my own... having to protect myself, and then working in a different space, whether it's women, whether it's people with disability, until I deep dive to myself, until I really committed to it myself, and really focused on the research myself, didn't really think about it.

So if you had one wish, something you could change about the humanitarian sector to scale the impact that you have begun creating, what would that one thing be? What what do you think the game changer is? How do we scale this?

I think that for individuals it is to become a champion, to say this is really important, I want to have a practice where I am ensuring that people have their needs met in humanitarian contexts that this is a part of our value base and we are going to work towards that. And in committing to that, in small ways or in large ways. I think for people who are champions, it's about finding ways to ensure that the work isn't in that silo of that person, that if they move on between organisations or they leave the sector altogether, that all of that hard work isn't lost. That it's about bringing a team or a network along to build that resource, to build that practice. I think for organisations, it's about having a really good, long, hard look at yourself, and understanding that if you're not thinking about this within your organisation, by doing nothing, you can be doing great, great harm. And so you can't be an organisation that says, 'Oh, I'm really worried about safeguarding' or 'I'm an organisation that focuses on doing no harm', but doesn't include LGBT people. And so thinking about what does that look like in a very internal level? Are my internal policies inclusive of LGBT people? Is the work that we're doing... You know, even if we can't be really open about it yet, is our work not creating further exclusions of LGBT people? Are we working in ways that further create harm? But once that policy is in place, we know that it's kind of middle management that creates the change. They need to be on board. So I think that it's about it's about training and it's about values clarification, as a sector. As a sector, are we actually gonna abide by the values that we say we hold?

Yeah, I do think that that is the million dollar question. And I wish you all the best of luck with your your project. I think it is an incredibly important agenda to push forward. It's yet another step in us telling a more inclusive story about what we actually do. It's us trying to, I think, get better at being truly responsive to the needs of the people we serve. And I know that that's a long and uphill battle that you face. And so I want to wish you the best of luck and all the energy in the world with that.

Thank you so very, very much. It's such a pleasure to have this conversation with you.