Theme: Transecologies

The public discourse on trans existence in US society is misrepresented and fraught at best, and violent and genocidal at worst. Despite this, we believe there is something spectacularly queer at the heart of nature—something erased by colonial and industrial society. Accordingly, we seek insight from the voices of our Appalachian trans siblings as we work to reshape our collective understanding of nature and society.

Bodies weakened and minds foggy from the residue of ecological grief, we are nevertheless here. There is a lingering sense of emptiness as we gaze at the bare reality of ecological degradation. betrayed. lost. abandoned. We are immersed in the remainder, the void.

Sure, we are here, but what is “here” as the earth becomes uninhabitable? To protect our future, we must find a way to transition. We exist within a transecological junction. wild nature — as we once imagined it, distinct from human artifice and society — is no longer plausible. We could ruminate in the freeze of trauma for a lifetime, fearfully waiting on what catastrophic outcomes may befall us.

Or we could read the signs like an injunction: “Transition now!” Or we could reframe the old dictum, “Just transition!”

Transition is not only a movement from one physical state to another, it is also a psychic and societal operation. It is the enfleshment of hope, possibility, and self-determination. What else might the queerness of Appalachia teach us about our hills and heritage? Can we lift the veil of separation hanging between our desire for a new future and the currents of our bleak reality? Can we project another world, another future, into the void left by industrial capitalism — a world characterized by ecological reciprocity.

Can we transition? Will we transition?

The old colonial definition of “nature” is wielded like a weapon against trans people. The geography of queer bodies has become the archetype for what many deem “unnatural”—a metaphor we reject outright. So, as we cloak ourselves in grief at the passing of the holocene—as we seek insight from the people wounded by the ill-wrought vocabulary of “nature” that laid the groundwork for colonial violence and domination within the Holocene—we seek to build a new vocabulary, one of reciprocity, deference, and care.

When faced with the grim realities of ecological collapse, we defy the sedentary logic of despair, apocalypse, and inaction. We receive the appearance of the void upon history’s horizon not as the apocalyptic impossibility of a future, but as an opening for the creation of futures here-to-fore unimaginable. There is a challenge at hand, though — how do we deconstruct the colonial image of “nature” as something wholly other than human society? Then, as we move through the grief of losing that once treasured ideal, how do we inaugurate the process of producing new futures?