240 Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.
/Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a public health biologist and climate crisis expert. Sandra shares some of her personal story with us, and then the importance of knowing the interactions of both our biology and our adoptive environments on our health.
As a gay woman who came out later in life, Sandra now helps facilitate a queer adoptee support group, and we talk about the intersections and conflicts she sees between the LGBTQ community and the adoptee rights community. We've talked before on the show about the upstream issues causing adoption to continue, but have you ever thought of how the climate crisis may be impacting family separation? Dr. Steingraber will explain.
Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.
Let's listen in.
(Upbeat Music)
Haley: I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Dr. Sandra Steingraber. Welcome Sandra.
Sandra: Thanks for having me.
Haley: I have followed you on Twitter and I just have learned so much from you, but I would love it if you would share a little bit, please about your story with us.
Sandra: Well, sure. So my public story, I guess, is that I am a biologist, a PhD biologist, and I work in the service of climate justice.
So I work with a lot of frontline communities who are trying to stop oil and gas extraction and I'm also an adoptee. And I think those two things are actually sort of related to each other. I became very interested in biology very early on because I think it stood in for me as a, as my family tree. So, I studied evolutionary biology, taught Darwin for many years, and I kind of take the whole tree of life and the whole world of creation as my relatives.
And so looking at the way everything's connected in the ecological world and the harm that the oil and gas industry is doing to the stability of this giant family that lives here on earth is a kind of acting out, I would say in a good way. I've, I've turned the trauma of adoption into an attempt to hold together, join with others, in an attempt to hold together the integrity of, of life on the whole planet, for which I have a, a great deal of reverence.
So that's how the two things got related. And then before my life as a, a biologist, I was adopted. I was born in 1959, so I'm 63, so I'm a domestic, baby scoop era adoptee. So in some ways my story is typical. I was adopted out of a church-based agency called The Baby Fold in Central Illinois, and adopted into the Steingraber family.
And that couple, my adoptive parents were infertile and were members of the church that ran the, the, well, they called it 'the nursery' when I came from it. But prior to calling it the nursery, it was called the orphanage. Starting in 1902, The Baby Fold ran an orphanage about which I have more to say. So I came from this church-based, Methodist church-based orphanage into a Methodist family.
The only thing kind of extraordinary, I guess, about my mother's infertility is that rather than, as I've heard from so many of my fellow adoptees, rather than it being a matter of shame for her, it was another kind of story because the reason she was infertile was that she had become pregnant as a new bride and then suffered an ectopic pregnancy and nearly bled out and died on the operating table.
So the fact that her life was saved and then she lost her fertility, but her life was saved, was, was not the usual kind of shame that barren women of the 1950s experienced, I think. So in her whole very close knit, very Christian family, this story was that God saved Katie and here she is, and I was the gift from God that she got.
Right? So it wasn't all about filling up this shameful place. It was about something sort of another kind of miracle. So with that, I was baptized into the Methodist Church, and then spent many years in that church, and, and went off to college at Illinois. Wesleyan University, which is a, a Methodist college.
So I the sort of religiosity of my beginning story is kind of part of who I am too, although I left behind Methodism for a couple of reasons. One, I'm gay and the Methodist Church does not yet believe in marriage equality and hasn't done that work that some of the other faith communities have done. And the Methodist Church, at the beginning of my life, of course, sealed away my identity, closed my records, denied me knowledge of my parentage, my ancestry, and so on.
And so in two different ways, the Methodist Church has disrespected my identity, disrespected my heritage and my ancestry and my origin story and, and now as a gay woman, you know, I would not be able to marry in my own church, for example. And so I have, I have some words about Methodism.
And I think also what's a little bit unusual about my story is that just about the time that I began to shake off the fog of adoption and wonder who I was before I became the Steingraber's Methodist girl. That happened around age 18 or 19 when I went off to college. That part of my story is, so typical of I think baby scoop era adoptees, who when they kind of leave their parents' house and get out from under the myths under which they were raised, they have other kinds of disrupting questions, right.
It so happened that the Methodist College that I went to was down the street from the Methodist Adoption Agency where I had come from. So I could just sort of walk there or ride my bike there and sit down across the table and just say, so tell me who I am. Right to, "I want my records" to the, the social worker who sat across the table.
However, my story has a twist to it. So I did make that visit, and of course I was told what most of us adoptees are told. It was explained to me that records are sealed, that I could not have identifying information. And even though the person who sat across the desk held a whole file folder of who, you know, that I could have just snatched and ran out with, right?
That I was just gonna be given some non-identifying information. And in so doing, I was actually able to turn the non-identifying information into identifying information because I correctly guessed from details I was given that they must have been college students at another university, university of Illinois in Champaign, at the time of my birth.
So I was actually able to go there and just using the research skills I had as a young biologist, kind of sleuthed it out. And there weren't so many privacy laws then. So I got some help from the alumni administration. I had a kind of pretend story about why I needed to get ahold of these two folks. And it turns out that my birth parents had married each other a couple weeks after my birth.
So finding one meant I could find the other. So then by the end of the summer, I spent a whole summer doing that. Summer of 1979, went back to the agency and said, okay, I think this is who they are. Can you confirm or deny. And they were shocked that I had been able to do that. That was not their intent.
They were very displeased. But suddenly everything, the plot twist. The plot really changed, which is that a couple weeks later, I myself started to bleed out in the middle of the night. I was not pregnant. I didn't, wasn't having ectopic pregnancy. I had cancer. So I ended up going to the ER, suddenly I was a cancer patient and I was diagnosed with a rare cancer. A rare for a 20 year old, bladder cancer. It's usually a disease of old men.
And my, diagnosing physician had lots of questions for me, both about my possible environmental exposures to toxic chemicals, but also about what kind of things ran in my family. So suddenly the everything I had been leading up to doing that summer, which was to write a letter to my birth family and ask them if they'd like to connect with me and that I wanted also medical information. Suddenly, that took on an urgency I had not expected at all. And so some part of my life is crystallized in this one month period of time where I was both diagnosed with cancer and I discovered who my birth parents were.
Like those two things for me are absolutely intertwined because they were kind of one, all one experience. And so I think for me, the trauma around becoming a cancer patient, which is a very disrupting identity that makes you feel like you do not belong, especially when you're young and with a rare cancer. You do not belong anymore to the generation of which you're part, which in the 1970s was, you know, 1979 was after Roe v. Wade before the AIDS epidemic. So life on college campuses, even for us very serious biology majors who spent Friday nights in the organic chemistry lab. It was kind of a wild sexual carnival. And the kind of cancer that I had pulled me away from that.
There were lots of scar tissue and parts of your body that you don't think should have scar tissue. There were very invasive, medical surveillance, lots of hours spent up in the stirrups. And so I became, medically traumatized, sexually traumatized, terrified I was gonna die. Of all human cancer's, bladder cancer is the one most likely to reoccur, so I had to go in and outta the hospital every three months for five years.
So between age 20 and 25, I've lived this highly medicalized life and I felt so un- belonging. So alien to the concerns of everyone around me, these other high-achieving biology majors who are planning for grad school, who are getting married, who are going off to med school, and you know, planning your future is what you're supposed to be doing at 20 to 25 years of age and you're supposed to figure out your sexuality.
So I didn't figure out my sexuality. I didn't realize I was gay until, and until years later in my fifties actually. So that part of my development really got stuck in that place. So I think the bewilderment about that all adoptees have about who we are was compounded then by the cancer diagnosis. And the idea that I also might be queer, which is another sort of alienating identity, was just not even, it was beyond the bounds of my thinkable thought.
That was something that I couldn't take on board at all. And so the problems that I had as a sexual person, with men, I attributed it to all the surgeries that I had, all the scar tissue, all the infections, all the, you know, the, I had to be treated in a different way and, and I wasn't thinking, I was just, that was part that was true, but it wasn't the whole story.
Right. So it's taken me kind of, my whole life now that I'm 63 and I'm the mother of two kids and it's taken me a long time to, well, I guess find myself, is the, is the kind of slippery, easy way, way to say it. Yeah, so it's been a long, it's been a long journey.
Haley: There are so many things I wanna ask you about.
And before we talk more about identity, something I learned from you by watching multiple lectures and watching documentary and reading a lot of your work. I know it sounds like stalkerish, but then I remember I'm a podcaster and like well- researched. That's more what it is. Yeah.
So, But one thing I really wanted to mention, because honestly this was the first time it had ever like occurred to me. You, you know, all, all adoptee rights advocates talk about this access to our medical history and we really wanna know. And we go into the doctor's office and we say, we don't know. I don't know. I don't know what runs in my family. I don't know. I don't know. In your case, you had members of your adoptive family that also had cancers occurring.
And I find it so fascinating that like I never thought about the environmental impacts it can have on us. And that's what I've learned from you. I really wanna just give you a chance to kind of educate us on that as well, because I think so many of us are fixated on the medical history that we don't have.
We also need to do some advocating for ourselves on our adoptive family's history and our doctors to tell them, though, actually that does matter and this is why.
Sandra: Yeah. Well I've written a couple books about all this, so let's see how I can, can explain it. I, I have a nuanced position on all this, and I th and I, and that's because I think the biology is complicated.
So as I see things, our environmental exposures and our, the DNA that lies inside each of our cells are like two partners in a dance, and neither one is driving the other. So on the one hand, the old thinking about DNA which you know is a spiral molecule that's contained in 46 chromosomes in each of our cells.
It used to be called the master molecule and we thought it was just kind of tucked away safe in the nucleus, which is kind of like this throne and giving out orders. You might remember from seventh grade biology, you know, to the ribosomes to make protein and so forth. Right? So it's the, it's like the, the big blueprint for everything, who we are. And we inherit those 46 chromosomes, 23 from our mother, 23 from my father. And those of course would be our birth parents. Whether we're kept or whether we're adopted.
Well, it turns out that the new biology in the last 30 or so years shows that rather than being the, the mastermind, that our, our 46 chromosomes are more like keys of the piano and the environment is the pianist.
So there are messages coming to you through the environment. Let's say your exposure to sunlight affects a hormone called melatonin, and that production of melatonin goes into your cells and alters how the genes are turned on and off, right?
And so if there's a toxic chemical, like a pesticide or what I'm studying now are chemicals that come out of gas stoves, actually. And part of the, the whole group of scientists who are looking at how harmful gas stoves are to an environment, there are chemical carcinogens like benzene and formaldehyde that we inhale because they come off of our stoves as combustion byproducts. And that can damage our genes in certain ways that, begin the process of tumor formation.
So, most of the mutations or what we call epigenetic alterations that happen to our genes for the sake of the story of cancer, most of those errors, genetic errors don't come from the genes we've inherited. They come from injuries to our genes that happen during our lifespans.
And we even know that identical twins, the more time they spend apart from each other, the more different their DNA looks. Right? Identical twins are born with the same DNA but if they, they move around in different environments, if they move, oh, you know, across the world from each other, instead of living as neighbors side by side for their whole life, their DNA starts to look very different from each other.
So we know the environment shapes our genes, but we also know that our proclivity, our vulnerability to certain bad things happening to us, and our genes over time have a lot to do with who we inherited them from. So it's still really important to know who your ancestors were and what kind of problems they had.
And of course, cancer is a problem that I had, so that is what I study as a biologist. But of course there are other things like high blood pressure and problems that have even more, are tightly correlated to fa family history. So it, it turns out that, I went on to, in my thirties, have colon lesions and happily, because I'm under such tight medical surveillance, things were caught early.
But I was certainly on my way to colon cancer and I have continued to need colonoscopies way more often than most people. And there is a, a syndrome called Lynch syndrome, which means that I, as somebody who's had both expiratory cancer and colon issues may be a, a candidate for, which is an inherited predisposition to several big ticket malignancies including ovarian cancer, brain cancer, uterine cancer, and so on. And that's because people with Lynch syndrome can't repair genetic errors as well as people who don't.
So if I weren't exposed to anything that caused my genes to be damaged, I wouldn't need to fix them. Even if I had Lynch syndrome, which I, and I don't know if I have, cause I don't know my family history, it's still the case that I need more, probably more environmental protection than anyone else because my DNA is more fragile than other people's, right?
It's more prone to environmental injury. So environment can have a hundred percent, be the a hundred percent cause of my problem, but the reason it's a hundred percent causing my problem is because I inherited a certain type of DNA and so. What I say as a biologist when I'm doing public policy and as an activist is like, look, we can't change our ancestors, whether you know who your ancestors are or not, but we can do everything about keeping inherently toxic chemicals out of the environment.
That's a choice, and it doesn't really matter who our ancestors are. We should protect everyone no matter how fragile our DNA is. And if we can swap out our gas stove for something like an induction stove, which works just as well and doesn't fill up the air with stuff that gives the kids asthma and contributes to heart disease and also chemicals that are known to be linked to leukemia, then we have a moral obligation to do that.
So I don't need to talk about your ancestors to have that conversation. On the other hand, I, as a cancer patient, in order to get my insurance company to pay for the kind of tests that I need, I have to be able to say, this runs in my family. I have a first degree relative, I have an aunt with breast cancer. I have a first degree relative with, with colon cancer.
Otherwise, I, the insurance will not pay for me to have a colonoscopy at age 35. So in a practical way, the knowledge that is being legally held from me is still messing up my life, whether or not the environment or inheritance is the cause of my problem.
So that's why I say it's nuanced. It's not that, oh, I inherited some bad genes from my ancestors. That's why I need to know. It's because I know I'm a medically fragile person. I tend to have health problems and I need access to medical care. But the way our medical system is set up, it over determines the role of family history and under determines the role of the environment. So I need to know who my parents are so I can get access to the healthcare I need.
Nobody asks you on the intake forms, did you grow up next to a dioxin emitting trash incinerator, even though that's just as important in the story of cancer as, Hey, did your mother have breast cancer? But they don't ask that. They ask all about genetics because there's money to be made by giving you genetic tests.
There's no money to be made by cleaning up and closing down the trash incinerator. So I'm focused on the trash incinerator as a biologist, cuz I wanna save people's lives and I want the world not to be this toxic place. So in a way, as a biologist, I'm operating on, on how important the environment is in shaping who we are.
But I'm still very much an adoptee who believes very strongly in the human right for all of us adoptees to to have the story of our ancestry.
Haley: Thank you. I think that's so important to know.
Sandra: Long answer.
Haley: No, no, it's wonderful. And I know you've written much on the subject, so we will link to all the things in the show notes so people can learn more from you about that. If they're like, oh wait. Wait, what?
Okay. I wanna talk about how you are an advocate online and you talk a lot about climate change and your teaching folks on Twitter, and then you also, as you said more recently, came out as gay. And so you're a member of the LGBTQ community and in recent years, this has become a very, strange place to navigate as adopted people who are calling for adoption reform or the end abolishment of adoption.
And I was just having conversation with my friend, Sullivan Summer. She's been a guest on the show before, and we, we , we went into this whole thing about is there a right to bear a child or not to bear a child? And a right to raise a child and then deciding who can exercise these rights, right? So this is like this really complicated conversation, especially in the present moment.
And you've shared before about having an abortion and, and talking about that online as well, publicly. So, what are your thoughts on that? As a member of a community that may not be able to have a child the heteronormative way, you know, husband, wife, or just man, woman kind of thing, and are looking to family- build through either adoption or other reproductive technologies.
This is a challenge, cuz you hold these both hats.
Sandra: It's a really fraught, yeah, it's a very vexing and fraught issue. Right. It cuts a number of different ways, and I have to say that one of the, I am happy that I made the decision kind of early on to show my, all my colors on Twitter, so I don't, I haven't branded myself.
I mean, I began, I was one of the leaders in the anti-fracking movement here in New York as a public health biologist. And so I started my Twitter feed to serve that community, to help us understand that oil and gas extraction.
And then I came out as gay on Twitter. And then during the pandemic, I kind of discovered adoptee Twitter, you know, the way we were, we were, I was all alone in my house, kind of locked down with my two young adult children for a while, but then they went back to college and it was, I was just bereft.
I just never felt so alone. And I think there's another topic we could talk about sometime, which is the experience that adoptee parents have, especially as single moms, when our, when our children leave us. It reiterates the loss that we felt as adoptees. I think that kind of feeling of abandonment was just hugely triggered and I was able to recognize, oh, I, I'm really feeling that lost adoptee part of myself with the only two people who I've ever met who are, are related to me are my own two children, and now they're out in the world and not in my home in a time of the plague, right? So I'm just terrified. I'm bereft. So I turned to the adoptee community for some fellowship and support and was, I hadn't dipped into it for a while. I've moved in and out of adoption activism and so I was thrilled to discover it.
And so I decided after just doing a lot of listening, that I wanted to be part of the conversation as an adoptee. So yes, my Twitter feed is about the climate crisis is about LGBTQ Q issues and about adoption because that's who I am.
But what I discovered by casting my net so widely is that there's some really interesting intersections among all three of those things, and one of them is the intersection between the queer community and the adoptee community.
And so on the one hand, I listen to my adoptee brothers and sisters rightfully take on the LGBTQ community for their pro- adoption, this is our alternative way of building a family because there are blindnesses is that the LGBTQ community has about the history of, of adoption and, and some of that is willful blindness. I think.
You know, wanting to believe that there are actual orphans in orphanages and that they can rescue them. And so there's a conversation that needs to be had with the queer community around the history of adoption. And on the other hand, there's a conversation I'm trying to have with my adoption community around, Hey, wait a minute. There's a way to talk to the gay community that's different than what you're doing, but you need to understand the history of the LGBTQ community too. And one of that very painful pieces of history is that, we lost our children. Our biological children were adopted out from us because we were queer.
We lost custody of them as lesbian women, as gay men. And in some cases, lesbian couples were made to adopt their own children before marriage equality. And so adoption was a way around the failure to have marriage equality. So unless you understand the, how it felt to be a woman in the 1970s who came out as a lesbian who, who might be a mom. She could lose her own biological kids. You know that, before you talk to the the gay community, you need to know the ways that the historical injuries in the same way that I think the l LGBTQ community should be a lot smarter about the political economy of adoption and who it serves.
I mean, my adoption agency is just got a big award from the pro-life Republicans in Congress. So they're no friend to the gay community. So when you go to these adoption agencies and demand equal treatment, the same as heterosexual couples, you are supporting a whole institution that is not supporting you and is taking away reproductive justice rights, profoundly racist, and it engages in deception and coercive practices.
So I feel like both adoptees and LGBTQ communities have gone through this experience of being otherized and in some cases, literally thrown out of our families. Like all of us as adoptees were severed from our families, but some of us were severed a second time when we came out to our adoptive families. My, my own partner, Diane D'Angelo, has such a story. She was disowned by her adoptive family by coming out as gay, so we've been severed twice over.
And so there's a, there's a way that our, I feel like there's, a solidarity and a, and a, a commonality that the gay, the, the sort of LGBTQ queer community could have with the adopted community. In a way we're like on the island of misfit toys, you know, we're despised, like we're, we're poor little things, but if we stand up and ask for our rights, we're just, it's we're seen as, you know, we're flau-, it it for the gay community we're flaunting it.
For the, for the adopted community we're showing up on doorsteps. You know, we're, we're tracking down, you know, we're predatory, right? And, and the like, the predatory gay male, the predatory adoptee there, there's some trope here that could, we could make a powerful coalition. We could be really affiliated.
So I, I'm like, I feel like the messengers between the LGBTQ community and the adoptee community need to be gay adoptees who are talking back and forth. Because as long as we're talking to each other as if we were each straight non-adoptees we're just gonna keep triggering people. We're just going riding roughshod over the ways our human rights have been violated and, and there's a respectful way that this very difficult conversation can happen, and I'm very interested in it.
Haley: You have this really amazing thread from December of 2021, where you go through all of these multiple points and you're asking folks to join along and become allies in educating. And I just find it so amazing, the activism you can do on Twitter in conversation, and you've managed to balance this line of saying it how it is and not pandering. And also being, you know, a little feisty and calling people out sometimes when they need to be. But like, you know, I said to you before we started recording, like, I, I go on Twitter, but I lurk cause I don't have the capacity to engage.
But I, how, how have you seen, like, have you seen like real connections? Have their opinions changed based on what you've shared?
Sandra: One-on-one. Yeah. And I, I pretty much believe in my ability or the ability of other queer adoptees. And I should say here that I belong to a queer adoptee community and we have Zoom calls, kind of peer support zoom calls, where we explore these very issues every Tuesday. So, and if anyone wants to DM me on Twitter and learn more, they certainly can.
And so what I've learned from the conversations I've had, but also my fellow queer adoptees is that one-on-one. Yeah. Yeah. We've changed hearts and minds in, in both directions, right? Adoptees talking to LGBTQ folks, and then as gay people talking to adoptees.
I think one of the things that I see the adoptee movement, as a community, suffering from is just a lack of political power. And I was, I was deeply involved in the early nineties and I, and that was when Bastard Nation was kind of ascendant. That's when I first met Janine Bayer, who was a lesbian adoptee who really started this conversation and had a newsletter in the eighties and nineties, I think, where it was really a two-way conversation between lesbians thinking they wanted to adopt and Janine in her very evidence-based but gentle way, revealing things that they might not have thought about, but also talking to adoptees about queer issues and how, how complicated that our lives are as queer adoptee.
So I, I met her and was introduced to her work at the time, I think it was her master's thesis that became this book, Growing in the Dark, about Sealed Records.
And I, I really, assumed in the nineties that this movement was about to take off and become very politically powerful, that we were, you know, records in Oregon were opened, and I thought that would probably be the beginning of a wave of things, but that's not how it worked out.
It kind of, the movement has kind of gotten retrenched and I and I see, , sort of in a same place as we were in the nineties, which is to say that there's a kind of a branch of the adoptee rights movement that's really focused on trauma and the primal wound and the way we're triggered, and, and that's really important because we all have to kind of and I know I'm, I'm in trauma therapy.
I'll just say it, you know, I have trauma from this. And we, we can't fully be ourselves and even have the strength to kind of engage in the arena of public activism if we're just constantly being triggered and we, and if we turn on other fellow adoptees, right? And so we have to like get our weather together and learn and be able to self-regulate and things like that.
All the things. And for me, my whole struggle is to feel like I'm even here at all. I tend to just dissociate and feel like I'm an observer and, and part of that's because my, my birth parents don't acknowledge my existence. And part of that is as a cancer patient, I got so used to dealing with really gruesome checkups where scopes were being stuck up inside my most sexual parts by just kind of disappearing outta my body and, and being on the ceiling tiles.
And I learned how to do that really early on. It's a, it's a great tactic. And it, it allowed me to like, you know, to be brave and go and get through really awful medical situations, but it comes at a price, and I think it's reinforced by the fact that I don't feel like I'm all here, and I'm just a character in the story about myself, but I'm not in, in my body.
That comes from adoption too. So the cancer and the adoption sort of force each other in this way that is m my challenge to kind of overcome, right? So that's all an important project, but also we have, aside from any of that, no matter how we feel, no matter how damaged psychically we are or not, we still have these civil rights.
So there's still these issues about birth certificates about medical records, about having ancestry and not living in such a way that we feel like we're somebody's secret. That has psychic damage to us as individuals, but it's also just an injustice, right? Like anything else, like the way immigrants are treated or like marriage equality for gay people.
I mean, fundamentally I see the adoptee rights movement as a civil rights movement. And so there are these two strains, the kind of psychological strain of a adoptee activism and then the kind of political and legal stuff, and I think both are equally important and have to work together. But to build political power, we need to be making allies.
And I see that I have a role to play just to, because of who I am, I'm a good messenger to the LGBTQ community about these issues. You know, there are other folks who came out of the foster system. That's not my, part of my story, so I can't be that person. I am listening hard to tho those folks, people who were basically trafficked as transnational and transracial adoptees. I'm listening really hard to those stories, so our stories as adoptees are not all the same and our, our human rights, way our human rights have been violated, are all different.
But we, to unite, to create a powerful movement where we can get some laws overturned and kind of expose the injustice that lies at the heart of adoption, the misogyny, the, the way, poor women are preyed upon by adoption agencies. I mean, to, for, to do that, we need to build a powerful movement, and I'm really interested in, in participating in that.
Haley: This is reminding me of a quote I wrote down from the documentary Living Downstream, which is based on one of your books. You say, "How much evidence do you want before you begin to do something different? Do you want an inkling of harm? Do you want absolute proof? Do you want something in the middle? And who gets to decide?"
And I, I was thinking about, I mean, I'm, I'm watching this, watching you as an adopted person and you know, thinking we're gonna engage about, of course, both topics, but as an adopted person, but you're talking about what's happening in the environment and, do you wanna talk a little bit about this intersectionality from your work as a climate change researcher biologist?
Sandra: Yeah. So yeah, this is another intersection I see, right. So we've been talking about the intersection between gayness and adoption and, but the, I also kind of work in this borderline between the climate crisis and adoption, and here's why.
So we know that adoption is predatory and we know that adoption agencies prey upon families that are in crisis. That's how they get the babies. And climate crisis is creating the kind of social crises are the perfect conditions for adoption agencies to swoop in. So, for example, and in fact I just, before we got together, I tweeted a thread out about so-called orphans because a lot of adoption is justified by "what about the orphans?"
So that the, I really wanted to take on the orphan justification for adoption in this thread. And so, it turns out that most orphans are, that are in orphanages or some institution, and therefore adoptable with quotation marks around it are not orphans at all. 80% of them have a living parent of some kind, and sometimes they end up there because there's been some kind of social upheaval and a mom needs to put a child there temporarily. Sometimes the, the babies are stolen and placed there and so forth.
But the, those places then become, they're the supply chain for infants that are adopted, mostly black and brown infants that are adopted to white couples in the western world. And climate change is actually accelerating that. Climate change contributes to poverty, to, crop failures to warfare and violent conflicts that uproot families, leading them to refugee camps, leading them even to the border of our own nation, where we saw a lot of Guatemalan asylum seekers whose crops have failed over and over again, show up at our borders only to have their children taken from them. Shamefully. And in, in some cases, those kids, we think were adopted out.
So this is gonna just accelerate as the climate begins to destabilize further and people are not just gonna starve in place, they're gonna start moving. And once they start moving there, there's chaos and there's an ability for those kids to be taken and adopted out.
And kind of renamed as orphans. It's kind of this manufacturing of the orphan, right? Which is a, as soon as you call somebody an orphan, then you, you just immediately sort of justify finding a forever home for them. So the, one of the things I've learned is that it all started in Greece right after World War II, there was a violent civil war in Greece and , that was when the United States first piloted this idea of mass airlifting infants from an area of conflict.
So thousands of of infants from Greece in the late 1940s were brought to the United States and then that became the kind of blueprint for how we did it over and over again in Vietnam, Guatemala, Korea. And so it's, it's kind of like disaster capitalism, but it's like disaster orphan making. So you take advantage of the kind of, you know, Haiti had an earthquake in 2010 and we know that children got separated from their parents in then resulting chaos, and a lot of those kids were brought to the United States and adopted out and, and we know that they weren't actually orphans.
Because there's money to be made to, to adopt a child out, there's not money to be made for reunification efforts. And so I am seeing and monitoring as a climate scientist, all the kinds of places in the world where the agricultural conditions, or even right now, what's happening in the oceans is beginning to crash.
We're acidifying the oceans, meaning that there's not as many zooplankton, which means there's no little fish, which means there's no big fish? So all of a sudden, communities that are maritime communities are being fished out. And fishing communities that used to be sustainable are no longer. So those people are on the move, rising sea levels, paying attention to what's happening in to indigenous communities around the world who live in polar areas, for example.
And so anytime communities are disrupted and they're displaced, And they're desperate there, there are the possibility for kids to get sucked into the adoption system. So I feel like I'm a climate scientist who is an adoptee and know firsthand the trauma of adoption and the injustice of it, and I wanna shine a spotlight on that.
Haley: Thank you for your work. I wanna do our recommended resources and I really encourage folks to follow you on Twitter. I am gonna share this essay that you wrote for Terrain. Always Knew I was Adopted Just Found Out I'm Gay, which is so good.
Sandra: It's my pin tweet, so anyone can just go to my Twitter feed and find it.
Haley: Perfect. Perfect.
Sandra: That. Yeah, that was how I came, that was my coming out essay. So, you know, in, I figured I was gay in 2016, so I was embarrassingly old. 56 years old and so I had to come out to my teenage children that were first. So that was a strange experience and a very loving one. And I realized that being gay was sort of like discovering you're adopted in some way. Like it's another identity that separates you from kind of who you thought you were. And but standing in the truth of who I am, both as an adoptee with another history that people have tried to deny me, like I reclaim that. So I'm also reclaiming my sexual identity and my identity as a, as a queer person. And you feel better when you do that. So that was my first attempt, that 2019 essay, to kind of, and I had this cheeky title, Always Knew I Was Adopted, Just Found Out I'm Gay. But it's gotten a lot of attention and, and people have really, it really moved people. Both people who don't know anything about adoption but are part of the queer community. And then people who are adoptees but don't understand the complications of coming out as gay.
And so I felt like that was an essay that I could make this kind of loving connection between two parts of my life.
Haley: Hmm. Well it's so beautifully written and I mentioned before that I watched a few different lectures you gave that are all available on YouTube and you read poetry at the end. That's just so moving. You're just such an amazing, amazing writer. So we'll make sure to link all your books as well and, um, yeah, I'm just thankful for your work. I learned so much yesterday. I was telling my, telling my sons, I have a grade three and grade five sons right now. I was gonna say how their ages and then I went with grades, I don't know.
Anyway, I was telling them at supper, I was like, oh my gosh, tomorrow I get to interview this really amazing scientist. And I was telling them a couple of the things I learned in, one of the documentaries I watched, and their eyes were like big and I was like, wow. Do you, do you have any questions for Dr. Steingraber? And they're like, no. I'm like, okay. That's great. That's great. Good anecdote. Anyway, I said No problem. I have all the questions for her. What did you wanna recommend to us today?
Sandra: Well, I understand that you have recommended this before, so I'm, I might let you do the, the whole bigger adoptee reads thing and tell people what that is, but there's a book that I mentioned early on that I just wanna put another asterisk next to, which is Janine Bayer's good book, Growing in the Dark. So Janine is a queer adoptee who is also an amazing researcher and historian. So it was part of her research. She's lifelong Californian as well. To understand why in 1935 the state of California sealed its records, I mean it seemed like a little bit of a mystery, right?
Cuz it's a kind of a progressive state and yet very conservative. And continues to be with this absolute secrecy around adoption records. And uncovered using all kinds of primary documents that are not like she had to really dig around to uncover exactly what happened. And of course, Georgia Tan will be named known to a lot of adoptees, plays an outsized role in that story.
The need to create secrecy for certain celebrity adoptive parents and the the ways in which secrecy allowed stolen babies, allowed all kinds of corruption and on coercion to go on. She really traces that whole story back. And I think even though it's specific to California, I go back to that book all the time because it really explains a lot about, because the way that happened in California then was sort of replicated all, all over.
So I think it helps us really understand how we came to this bizarre place. And I think Tony Tony Corsentino who's another adoptee who I follow really closely talked about the absurdity of adoption. And he means it as a kind of existential absurdity. But you know, it's also the legality, the absurdity in this day and age where we can all have our DNA revealed to us through commercial testing. That this kind of 19th century cloak and dagger secrecy still prevails. So I feel like the, that Janine's book, Growing in the Dark does the best of any book I've seen at kind of explicating how that came to be.
Haley: Wonderful. I can't wait to check that out. I know I follow her, but I have not read the book cuz some of the back list titles are a little harder to find around here.
Anyway, you mentioned Adoptee Reading, which is this really great website run by Karen Pickell. And she has curated, I think it's gotta be hundreds and hundreds of adoptee authored works. So we will link to that as well so folks can find those books on Karen's site and yeah. Thank you.
Sandra: You're very welcome.
Haley: Where's the best place for us to connect with you online?
Sandra: Twitter works. So my first initial and last name, SSteingraber1. And I guess I should say that I have, I know names is something that, kind of animat e issue for adoptees. And I have chosen to keep my adoptive father's last name Steingraber because he actually was a German American who at age 18 was called to war, World War II and fought against, was trained to fight against German tanks and his experience fighting Nazis, trying to rid the world of global fascism was the greatest thing that he'd ever engaged in. He believed. So, he really did teach me that you have to do the right thing, even if it looks like you might lose, and so I kind of carry his name Steingraber around for that reason. It's part the environment that I was raised in and the the values I was raised in. So my dad would say, when you carry around a name like Steingraber, you can't be a good German. If there are signs of atrocity, you have to kind of speak out against it.
I mean, that said, he was a very conservative man. He did not support me searching for my identity. I had to hide that from him and. There's something about being brave that's very important to me. That's kind of my core value. And so keeping my adoptive name kind of speaks to that. So that's a kind of older thing to do. I think I see younger adoptees choosing their own names, and I, I totally am in enamored and in awe of the way people are reclaiming, their reclaiming identities, but also shaping identities in this very oth they're, they're like the author of their life. Completely respect that. But I'm happy with Steingraber and so, you can find me at s Steingraber one and Twitter.
Haley: Perfect. I love knowing that little anecdote about you.
Thank you for your work. I've learned so much from you and will continue to do so, and I hope folks follow along and message you if they're interested in hearing more about the Queer Adoptee support crew.
Sandra: Well, thanks so much, Haley. I just love this conversation.
Haley: Okay, one more sell: Dr. Steingraber is an amazing follow on Twitter to learn all things. I can't wait to read more of her books and learn more from her. And also she has guested on several other podcasts. I'm gonna link to one in the show notes if you wanna hear a little more of her adoptee story and her interest in orphan trains and like... cheering you on, Sandra, hoping we will read more from you about your thoughts on the intersectionalities of adoptee rights and the climate crisis and the history of orphan trains and all the things.
I just find it so, so fascinating. I am thrilled that we get to talk to amazing people like this on the show. So thank you so much to our monthly supporters on Patreon, you help this show to continue to exist in the world.
And if you wanna join us and have more like friendly chat podcasts, it's called Adoptees Off Script. We have Monday episodes. Episodes go up every Monday on Patreon for monthly supporters of this show. And we also have Adoptees Only Book Club events, and we have some awesome stuff going on right now.
You can go to AdopteesOn.com/community or AdopteesOn.com/bookclub if that's more your vibe. We would love to have you join us. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
