Photos by Annie Flanagan

CHICAGO Precious Brady-Davis sterile, fluorescent-lit office in the densest part of Americas third-biggest city is a far cry from the grassy backyard in Omaha where she started her story. After four hours of recounting her life one afternoon in late April, from her troubled childhood in Nebraska to becoming a nationally recognized activist and speaker, it started to feel a bit like a courthouse deposition. She paused for a moment, growing quiet and pensive, before suddenly reemerging with the confident grin of a stage performer.

She gestured toward a framed photograph of her and her husband with former President Barack Obama, marveling at the surreality of her own life story.

This is me, she said.

Brady-Davis, 33, is perhaps the most visible transgender woman of color in the climate movement today. Shes part of a new generation of environmentalists unmoored from the Patagonia-clad treehugger archetype and radicalized by global warmings exacerbation of societys worst inequities. As once-disparate social movements are awakening to climate changes ubiquity, Brady-Davis, a top press secretary for the Sierra Club, is drawing on her roots as a queer African American from a pious family in a deep-red, rural state to build bridges over troubled and rising waters.

Her path from drag performer in Chicago to prominent LGBTQ activist to her central role at one of the countrys oldest and most influential environmental groups mirrors a nascent shift in the climate movement toward tactics long employed in civil rights struggles. It also highlights how much the effects of global warming on historically vulnerable communities remain underappreciated.

Whether its a womans right to choose what she does with her body, a trans womans right to walk down the street without being murdered, or protecting clean water and air from pollutants, its all public health issues, Brady-Davis said. To not have a more well-rounded view of justice is just perilous.

Broken

Brady-Davis life was difficult from the start. She was born in 1985 in Omaha to a mother who suffered from mental health issues. Child service records note finding her as a toddler waddling unsupervised in the streets and wandering into neighbors yards. At 6, her maternal grandfather, Andre Davis, and his second wife, Linda, adopted her.

The family included five children the grandparents two kids, plus Brady-Davis and her two siblings. Andre worked nights as a disco and funk DJ and spent days recording radio commercials for artists such as Brandy, Salt-N-Pepa and Da Brat. Linda, who worked a telemarketing job, was their primary caregiver.

The family attended a nondenominational church, and the fiery, Pentecostal-style sermons in which entranced worshippers spoke in tongues excited Brady-Davis. The church provided the community and structure she had always longed for. She led Sunday school classes, made crafts and performed in puppet shows. More than anything, the music transfixed her, and she joined the choir.

Brady-Davis understood from an early age that something was different about her gender and sexual identity. She loved to play with dolls, and occasionally wore her sisters high heels around the house. She longed to be a little girl specifically, a little white girl.

I didnt want to be a little black girl or a little black boy, she said. I identified early on that race was tied to economic privilege.

As early as fourth grade, the bullying began.

People would say, Are you gay? Are you gay? Brady-Davis recalled. I didnt even know what gay meant. I did know my grandmother would say, Stop swishing. I didnt know what that meant. I had no clue, but she was referring to how I moved my butt.

Soon, the social pressures began mounting. She wanted to take up music, but her grandparents couldnt afford to rent instruments. Then, on Christmas Eve that year, her sister accused her grandfather of touching her inappropriately. He denied it, and while the allegations never amounted to legal charges, the incident shattered her grandparents marriage and rocked the family forever. Brady-Davis grandfather left. Her older brother got into drugs and wound up in jail.

Brady-Davis says she was a broken child. I saw all the men in my life, one by one, be shipped off.