This month is not just about coloring the urban landscape with vibrant flags. It is also about illuminating the dark areas where violence lurks. A multifaceted violence: symbolic, physical, political, economic, and perhaps the most insidious of all—epistemic. Because when we deny someone the right to know and to produce knowledge, we deprive them not only of their voice, but also of their full and complete existence. And this is undoubtedly one of the cruelest forms of exclusion.

LGBTQIAPN+ people and organizations construct culture, science, art, and thought. But the question is: does science recognize them as legitimate producers of knowledge? Some schools of thought insist that scientific knowledge must be objective , neutral, and devoid of subjectivity. According to this perspective, there should be no room for personal affections, desires, or experiences in the production of knowledge—as if science could emerge independently of human, social, and historical contexts. 

Yet they forget that science is a human creation—and therefore a cultural one. There is no science without humanity. And if this is the case, we must ask ourselves: who are, historically, the humans who have been recognized as having the right to produce valid knowledge? Who occupies this position of authorized knowledge?

It is essential to remember that the production of knowledge should not be reserved for a single category of people: all intelligences, all experiences, regardless of gender, social origin, or emotional orientation, are necessary to enrich science and knowledge. This is where the power of Donna Haraway’s (1944) thought comes into play in her article ” Situated Knowledge: The Question of Science for Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective  ” (1988). She reminds us that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge, no universal knowledge: all knowledge is situated. In other words, it is born from specific bodies, experiences, histories, and social positions. Knowledge is an embodied verb. And whoever produces knowledge matters. Immensely.

Coming out as  LGBTQIAPN+ often means choosing to live with the possibility of erasure. Not only socially, but also epistemicly. It means having to keep one’s epistemologies in the closet. The thinker Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) brilliantly described this structure in her famous essay The Epistemology of the Closet (1993): the closet is not just a hiding place; it is a regime of power, a filter that determines what can be said, known, acknowledged. Entire bodies of knowledge are locked away there, kept in an enforced silence.

Rediscovering the trajectories of LGBTQIAPN+ people who have contributed to science is therefore not just an act of remembrance: it is an act of justice. Shining a light on these figures means breaking the structured pact of ignorance that seeks to make them invisible. It also means broadening our understanding of what science is—and can be.

Let us take the example of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) and Sara Josephine Baker (1873-1945), two women whose lives, even without explicit proclamation of their sexual orientation, are part of queer and feminist logics of knowledge.

Florence Nightingale has gone down in history not only as the founder of modern nursing, but also as a woman incredibly ahead of her time in many areas: public health, statistics, epidemiology, hospital management, and even health education. During the Crimean War, she observed that the majority of soldiers did not die from their wounds, but from diseases like typhus, cholera, and dysentery, all of which were preventable with better hygiene. To prove this, she used statistics in a very rigorous way (which was rare at the time) and invented super-visual graphs, like the famous “polar sector diagram  ” (the “coxcomb chart”), to get her message across to the government and public opinion. Thanks to this, she managed to influence the British Parliament and push for important reforms in military hospitals.

But she didn’t stop there. In India, she mapped mortality rates in different regions and showed that the lack of sanitation, clean water, and waste collection had a direct impact on people’s health, particularly on infant mortality. She proposed very concrete solutions, such as building sewer systems or installing health posts. In terms of hospital architecture, she completely redesigned hospitals, imagining well-ventilated, bright wards, organized by type of illness: an idea that served as a model for a long time, as in the Royal Herbert Hospital.

In 1860, she also founded her own nursing school at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she established a serious training program that combined theory, clinical observation, and scientific rigor. She wanted nurses to be recognized as true professionals, trained and competent. In her book ”  Notes on Nursing ,  “ she gives plenty of very modern advice: let daylight into the patient’s room, avoid noise, be attentive to the slightest signs (such as a change in complexion or behavior), change the sheets regularly, and insist on hygiene—things that seem obvious today, but were not in her time.

She also interacted with experts, such as statistician William Farr, with whom she discussed methods for collecting and analyzing health data. During her lifetime, she wrote more than 200 reports and publications, always based on facts, observations, and data. Her approach, highly scientific but also deeply human, helped transform public health and nursing, showing that science could (and should) be used to concretely improve people’s lives.

More than a nurse, she was a true health scientist. She never married, rejected the social role imposed on women of her time, and devoted her life to her profession as a way of desiring differently. In a functional closet, she produced knowledge with profoundly transformative power.

Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician who truly changed the way children’s health was addressed in the early 20th century. She worked primarily in New York City, where many children from poor families and immigrants were dying from preventable diseases. To combat this, she established a system of regular child health monitoring, with home visits by nurses who explained to mothers how to properly care for babies, particularly regarding hygiene and breastfeeding.

Thanks to this, illnesses like diarrhea and infections were greatly reduced. She also created centers where families could obtain safe milk, heated to kill dangerous bacteria, which prevented many poisonings. Another of her great ideas was to impose vaccination cards for children in schools, which helped stop epidemics like smallpox or diphtheria. Scientifically, she analyzed data on diseases and mortality to understand where and how best to intervene. She is also known for having worked on the case of “Typhoid Mary,” a woman who transmitted typhoid fever without being sick herself, and Baker helped limit the spread of the disease thanks to epidemiological techniques that were very advanced for the time.

On top of all that, she was one of the first to champion the idea of ​​family planning and science-based sex education, which was not at all common in her time. Sara Josephine Baker showed that science and medicine could truly change people’s lives, especially the poorest, by improving public health and making healthcare accessible to all. Baker shared her life with Louise Pearce, a relationship we can now understand as a lesbian emotional and intellectual partnership. Her work, while remarkable, was only possible because her sexuality remained in a gray area between known and unsaid. Publicly ignored, but privately tolerated.

Both challenged the dominant model of science, demonstrating that knowledge is not born solely in laboratories, but also in the field of life. Nightingale did science with numbers and compassion. Baker, with listening and action. They embedded their knowledge in concrete contexts, touching reality with sensitivity and rigor. Donna Haraway teaches us that objectivity is not about eliminating the subject, but about recognizing their position. And that is precisely what these women did: producing knowledge from their margins, from their dissident bodies, from their singular experiences. They expanded the boundaries of what we consider “scientific.”

Reading their stories through the lens of Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet and Haraway’s situated knowledges  is not just a theoretical exercise. It is a political act. It is to affirm that LGBTQIAPN+ pride is also a matter of intellect, method, critique, and science. It is to reject the idea that legitimate knowledge exists only within norm-conforming structures.

Let us remember—and keep reminding ourselves—that knowledge is also an act of love. And that each time a dissident body dares to think about the world, it also reinvents the possibility of existing in it.

Written by Daniel Manzoni de Almeida and edited by Intan