A decade after Nicole Seymour's chapter “Trans Ecology and the Transgender Road Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, following Susan Stryker’s foreword to the 2020 book Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature, and after TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly’s November 2024 issue on trans* ecologies, which built on the Queer and Trans* Ecologies (QTE) Interdisciplinary Initiative symposium that drew more than six hundred participants, transecology as a field needs a comprehensive reference handbook. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology will be the first such volume: covering 38 topics, organized across four sections moving outward in scale from the molecular body to the deep-time planet. See the full list of topics with descriptions at the end of this CFP.
Members of H-Labor may be especially interested in Topic 7: Transecologies of Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition and Topic 14: Black Transecologies: Fugitivity, Racial Capitalism, and the Nonhuman. Regionally specific agricultural traditions give labor studies scholars a direct route into the gendered organization of farm labor, from sharecropping to migrant agricultural work. Racial capitalism's construction of Blackness as subhuman and nature as extractable property speaks directly to labor history's own analysis of how enslaved and low-wage labor has been racially organized.
All 38 topics with descriptions are listed at the end of this CFP.
Trans embodiment reorganizes our sense of time and scale — through hormonal transition time, community time, and geological time — and this clustering is reflected in the Handbook itself. To preview the Handbook’s overarching structure, a short Foundations section comes first, gathering topics that examine transecology's own genealogy and disciplinary boundaries. Chapters in this section stand outside any single scale — they are about the field's history and self-definition, not about a body, a community, or a planet. The three-part structure of the rest of the Handbook then begins. Part I opens at the molecular and individual scale: chemistry, sensation, the single body. Part III closes at the planetary and deep-time scale: the atmosphere, the ocean, the epoch. Part II is the connective tissue between them: community, region, law, and culture, the scale at which intimate experience becomes shared knowledge and shared knowledge becomes political. By spanning scales ranging from the body to the planet, with the mediating communal scale between these extremes, the Handbook emphasizes that transecology's center of gravity is not the isolated body or the abstract planet, but the connecting community.
The senior editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology, Douglas Vakoch, has edited over two dozen books, including Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature (2020), Transgender India: Understanding Third Gender Identities and Experiences (2022), and The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature (with Sabine Sharp, 2024). Vakoch also serves as the general editor of four book series in environmental studies and transgender studies for Bloomsbury Academic: Ecocritical Theory and Practice, Environment and Society, Critical Plant Studies, and the recently launched Trans Studies.
Submitting Your Proposal and Timetable
Interested authors should submit a 300-word abstract, a 200-word biography, 5 key scholarly references, and a sample of a previously published chapter or article to https://bit.ly/Handbook_of_Transecology no later than November 15, 2026. Proposals submitted by email will not be accepted. Abstracts, biographies, and scholarly references should be combined into a single Word document, and previously published chapters or articles should be submitted as PDFs. Both Word files and PDFs should contain the author’s name in the file names. Please include your email address in your Word document so we can contact you with our decision about your proposal.
Your abstract should clearly state which of the Handbook’s 38 topics is most relevant to your chapter, listing both topic number and name (see full list below).
All chapters must have specifically transgender and ecological dimensions, and not merely a more broadly queer focus.
In addition to the Handbook, we will also be creating standalone books on topics for which we receive an especially strong response of outstanding proposals. Your proposal will automatically be considered for both the Handbook and standalone volumes.
You are welcome to submit more than one abstract. If you decide to submit multiple abstracts for different chapters, please add a note at the top of each abstract to indicate whether you wish to be considered for writing only a single chapter, or whether you wish to be considered for writing more than one chapter.
The most competitive proposals will detail the author's argument. It is not enough to describe what you plan to do in your chapter. You should summarize what you will conclude.
Authors will be notified whether their proposals are accepted by December 15, 2026. Partial first drafts are due by March 1, 2027; solid first drafts of full chapters are due by May 1, 2027; and final versions that cross-reference other chapters extensively are due July 15, 2027. All authors must have completed a PhD. In your 200-word biography, please note the year and university where you earned your doctorate. Only previously unpublished works will be considered.
38 Topics in Transecology
Field Genealogy and Historiography
1. What Is Transecology? Field Formation and Contested Boundaries
Transecology's emergence as a named field — the conditions under which environmental humanities and transgender studies converged — is itself a contested intellectual history requiring critical examination. Contributors might explore competing accounts of the term's coinage and early uses; whether transecology names a method, an object of study, a political commitment, or all three; or how founding narratives shape which questions become canonical and which scholarly work gets excluded. Relevant traditions include transgender studies historiography and field-formation studies in history of science. This topic establishes the conceptual ground on which all subsequent topics depend.
2. Before Transecology: The Queer Ecology Canon and Its Afterlives
Transecology builds on queer ecology while also contesting that inheritance — attending to what trans embodiment specifically adds, alters, or requires abandoning. Contributors could investigate which canonical queer ecological concepts have been carried into transecology without sufficient revision once trans embodiment is centered. They might equally well explore what is gained and lost when transecology narrates queer ecology as an enabling precursor rather than a contested interlocutor. Relevant traditions include queer theory's engagement with nature-writing and urban political ecology. This topic distinguishes transecology's genuine departures from a field it inherits.
3. Contested Inheritances: Ecofeminism, Trans Critique, and the Politics of Nature and Gender
Ecofeminism and transgender theory share one of the most contested relationships in feminist thought: the gender essentialism of some forms of ecofeminism — connecting women's reproductive bodies to the Earth — provided conceptual and rhetorical resources for trans-exclusionary feminism, while trans theory's denaturalization of the sexed body challenged ecofeminism's foundational assumptions about nature, womanhood, and ecology. Contributors could interrogate the intellectual history of this antagonism and what it reveals about the limits of biological essentialism in environmental thought. Or they might explain what a trans-informed critique requires ecofeminism to revise to serve as a resource for transecology. Relevant traditions include feminist intellectual history, trans studies, and ecofeminism.
Part I: Intimate and Embodied Scales
Molecular, Biochemical, and Reproductive Scale
4. Permeable Bodies: Toxicity, Contagion, and the Politics of Exposure
The body is ecologically open rather than bounded — exposed to chemical compounds, viral agents, and hormonal flows that cross its supposed borders — and this permeability is differently structured by race, gender, class, and trans status. Contributors might analyze how sex-panic discourse frames both hormone disruption and viral disease in ways that stigmatize non-normative bodies. As another option, they could show how a trans-informed environmental justice framework adds to existing toxics and viral-exposure literatures. Relevant traditions include feminist science studies, environmental justice sociology, and queer HIV/AIDS historiography. This topic integrates chemical and viral exposure literatures that have historically developed in separate scholarly silos.
5. Fungal and Microbial Transecologies
Mycology's disciplinary history has been shaped by anxieties about classification, mating-type multiplicity, and unnatural reproduction that parallel the anxieties organizing binary sex biology — making fungal science a queerer discipline than its institutional self-presentation admits. Contributors will examine how fungal multiplicity offers transecological theory resources distinct from plant taxonomy or animal companionship, as well as investigating what fungal transformation contributes to molecular-scale transecological thought. Relevant traditions include mycology, philosophy of science, and queer science studies. This topic opens transecology to its smallest living scales and most fundamental challenge to biological individuality.
6. Trans Reproductive and Biotechnological Ecologies
Reproductive biotechnology embeds trans bodies in industrial-scale biological production — cryopreservation, IVF, and genetic screening — with ecological consequences that transecological theory has not yet systematically examined. Contributors might study how cryopreservation connects individual trans reproductive decisions to planetary cryospheric ecology, or they could ask what milieu-embedded trans reproductive ethics requires once reproductive choice is understood as constituted by chemical, ecological, and social environments. Relevant traditions include feminist science studies, reproductive ethics, and political ecology. This topic connects the most intimate scales of trans reproductive life to planetary biological systems.
7. Transecologies of Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition
Food systems are profoundly gendered, racialized, and ecological, yet their specifically trans dimensions — hormonal agricultural chemistry, gendered food labor, and trans food justice — remain theoretically underdeveloped. Contributors will examine how cisheteronormative household structures organize food distribution systems in ways that marginalize trans family formations, or they might ask how agricultural hormones and endocrine-disrupting pesticides create hormonal pathways connecting trans bodies to food ecologies. Relevant traditions include environmental history, feminist geography, and trans studies. This topic also invites attention to regionally and nationally specific agricultural and culinary traditions, recognizing that food's gendered and ecological politics take distinct shape in different national contexts. This topic opens an understudied intersection where trans studies and food systems ecology must be developed together rather than as adjacent literatures.
8. Trans Vegetal Ecologies
Plants challenge the foundational assumptions — about the boundaries of individual organisms, binary sexual reproduction, and self-contained subjectivity — that binary gender systems and conventional ecology share, making vegetal life a theoretically generative but underexplored site for transecology. Contributors will explore what plant philosophy's reconception of distributed subjectivity contributes to transecological theory, and they will examine how the history of plant-derived hormone chemistry connects botanical ecology to trans pharmaceutical supply chains. Relevant traditions include critical plant studies, feminist botany, and plant philosophy. This topic extends transecological analysis to forms of life routinely excluded from animal-centered frameworks.
Individual Embodiment, Health, and Sensation
9. Tranimacies: Trans Lives, Animal Bodies, Nonhuman Genders
The coupling of transness and animality that scholars have termed tranimacies generates transecological analysis across three registers: humanities-based theories about the trans-animal interface, empirical animal-companionship research, and the political stakes of analogizing trans life to animal life. Contributors might explore how trans-animal companionship functions empirically in clinical, familial, and everyday life. Alternatively, they might explain how evolutionary biologists narrate sexual diversity in nonhuman species. Relevant traditions include animal studies, multispecies ethnography, and feminist science studies.
10. Trans-Crip Ecologies: Disability, Debility, and Environmental Belonging
Disability and transecological thought share an undertheorized structural affinity: both critique the assumption of an original normal bodily state, and both analyze what happens when environments fail the bodies they are supposed to sustain. Contributors could explore the curative imaginary — the logic of returning to presumed normative states — as it operates in both trans medicalization and ecological restoration. They might also consider how conservation biology's normative investments parallel the normativity that trans and disability politics together challenge. Relevant traditions include crip theory, disability justice, and environmental humanities. This topic forges transecology's most urgently needed alliance with disability studies.
11. Performativity, Trans Embodiment, and Ecological Aesthetics
Performativity theory — extended from feminist philosophy — offers transecology a framework for understanding ecological processes as enacted through material-discursive practices rather than given as natural facts. Contributors might consider what it means to think of ecological processes themselves as performative, or they could choose to investigate how trans embodiment enacts gender through and alongside ecological environments in ways that transform the environments themselves. Relevant traditions include feminist performativity theory, trans cinema and literary studies, and ecomedia analysis. This topic opens transecological method to a wider range of cultural and natural objects than previous frameworks have addressed.
12. Ecological Environments and Trans Mental Health
Ecological environments shape trans mental health, well-being, and healing in ways that established clinical frameworks are poorly equipped to address — making the intersection of ecotherapy, disability studies, and transecological theory an urgent but undertheorized domain. Contributors might explore how ecological grief resonates with and diverges from the forms of loss trans people navigate in transition. Alternatively, they could ask how companion animal relationships buffer the compounded stresses of cisgenderism and environmental vulnerability. Relevant traditions include ecopsychology, trans studies, and feminist disability studies. This topic opens psychological and ecological dimensions the field has insufficiently addressed.
13. The Pleasures of Re-Embodied Environmental Attunement
Transition restructures sensory experience: affirmed bodies encounter temperature, season, water, and landscape differently, grounded in re-embodied attunement that extends beyond social affirmation to the more-than-human world itself. Contributors could investigate how trans writers, artists, and scholars describe the specifically ecological dimensions of the sensory recalibration of transition and the pleasure of inhabiting outdoor and natural environments in an affirmed body, as well as how these experiences differ across trans communities in the Global South, Indigenous contexts, and non-Anglophone traditions. Relevant traditions include trans phenomenology, ecocriticism, trans memoir and auto-ethnography, and environmental psychology.
Part II: Communal and Regional Scales
Regional, Decolonial, and Community-Specific Ecologies
14. Black Transecologies: Fugitivity, Racial Capitalism, and the Nonhuman
Black trans and queer thought theorizes ecology through the linked frameworks of fugitivity, racial capitalism, and antiblackness's historical construction of the human — a construction that simultaneously defined Blackness as subhuman and nature as property to be extracted. Contributors might explore how cisgendering is itself an ecologically charged racialized construct, or they could analyze how Black feminist ecological practice constitutes knowledge that the broader field has not yet integrated. Relevant traditions include Black feminist theory, Afropessimism and its critics, and Black queer performance studies. This topic also extends to the racialized structure of mass violence, since the same logics that construct Blackness as subhuman have historically organized genocide and other forms of collective racial violence. This topic insists that Blackness and transness are co-constitutive categories within ecological thought.
15. Non-Anglophone and Global South Transecologies
Transecological thinking has developed independently across multiple non-Anglophone traditions — including such varied examples as Colombian biodiversity science, Brazilian ecotransfeminismo, French activist ecology, South African queer ecological theory, South and Southeast Asian ecofeminist traditions, and Pacific Indigenous gender-ecological knowledge — generating frameworks that cannot be reduced to regional applications of Anglophone theory. This topic welcomes scholarship from any non-Anglophone tradition, including but not limited to the Global South, since non-Anglophone transecological thought has also developed within European, East Asian, and other linguistic contexts not typically classified as Global South. Contributors could investigate the breadth of non-Anglophone transecological scholarship on its own terms, focusing for example on African queer ecological frameworks, Asian engagements with transecological thought, Māori and Pacific Islander gender-environment relations, and Brazilian, Chilean, and Caribbean decolonial ecotransfeminisms. They might also ask what is concretely lost in conceptual precision, political commitment, and genealogical complexity when transecological frameworks are translated between languages or dominated by Anglophone institutional production. This topic requires contributors to engage non-Anglophone scholarship directly rather than through secondary summary, and challenges the handbook to model the global reach of transecological thought it documents.
16. Decolonial Ecofeminism and Trans Traditions: Gender Variance, Land, and Resistance in the Global South
Non-Western ecofeminism — Vandana Shiva's chipko ecology, Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, Latin American pachamama traditions — and non-Western trans traditions — hijra, two-spirit, travesti, muxe — both emerged from resistance to colonial impositions of Western binary gender and extractivist land relations. Contributors could explore how decolonial ecofeminism and Indigenous trans traditions share genealogies of resistance to colonial land dispossession and binary gender enforcement. Alternatively, they might ask what transecological knowledge these convergences generate that Anglophone ecofeminism and trans studies cannot produce. Relevant traditions include decolonial ecofeminism, Indigenous studies, and Global South trans theory.
17. TransCaribbean and Latin American Ecologies
Transecological thought emerging from the Caribbean and Latin America — where plantation history, hurricane ecologies, and disaster capitalism structure the relationship between gender variance and environment — requires frameworks not derivable from Anglophone settler contexts. Contributors might explore queer Caribbean speculative fiction's ecological imagination, investigate how decolonial ecofeminisms in the Southern Cone theorize trans environmental belonging differently, or consider how urban intimacy, migration, and colonial violence collectively inform transecological belonging. Relevant traditions include decolonial theory, extractive-zone critique, and Caribbean literary and cultural studies. This topic insists on language and region as organizing categories in their own right.
18. Two-Spirit and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge Beyond the Settler Frame
Two-Spirit and Indigenous ecological knowledge cannot be adequately engaged as antecedent or parallel to Western trans categories — it requires engagement through its own theoretical genealogies, which refuse the nature/culture and body/environment separations that Western transecology typically operates within. Contributors might explore reciprocity-based plant and land knowledge as an independent epistemological system, or they could investigate how Two-Spirit memory critiques settler queer politics as itself a colonial formation. Relevant traditions include Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and Two-Spirit scholarship. This topic positions Indigenous ecological knowledge as a foundationally generative theoretical source.
19. Transecologies of Place: Geography, Home, and Belonging
Where trans people live, move, and flourish is fundamentally an ecological and geographic question — different environments produce genuinely different transecological possibilities, constraints, and communities. Contributors might consider how geo-affective theory reconceptualizes the spatial analysis of trans place-making, or they could ask how rural, urban, suburban, and wilderness transecologies structurally differ in what they generate and foreclose for trans life. Relevant traditions include queer geography, feminist urban studies, and environmental justice. This topic also extends to specific regional and state-level place-identity, since attachment to a particular region or state can shape transecological belonging as concretely as the rural/urban/wilderness distinctions above. This topic insists that transecological belonging is always spatially produced, politically contested, and materially consequential.
Cultural, Literary, and Screen Production
20. Trans Ecopoetics and Environmental Literature
Literary and poetic practice has been among transecology's earliest and most productive knowledge-producing sites, generating ecological understanding that scholarly argument alone cannot achieve. Contributors could explore trans ecopoetics as a distinct aesthetic mode with specific formal properties — non-linear temporality, dissolved subject-object boundaries, and ecological personhood. They could equally well ask whether transecological literature constitutes a recognizable genre with both formal and thematic coherence. Relevant traditions include ecocriticism, trans literary studies, and comparative literature. This topic asks what literary form contributes to transecological knowledge that theoretical argument cannot produce.
21. Trans Ecocriticism, Medieval to Contemporary
Trans ecocriticism spans at least a millennium of literary history — from medieval romance's gender-variant nature imagery through early modern natural philosophy to contemporary trans poetry — testing whether transecological reading holds as a method across radically different historical contexts. Contributors could investigate how premodern literary texts figure gender variance through ecomaterial metaphor, or they might decide to ask what continuities or ruptures exist between medieval and contemporary trans ecopoetic strategies. Relevant traditions include ecocriticism and medieval studies. This topic insists that transecological reading is not a contemporary invention but a method with deep literary precedent. This topic also welcomes attention to specific national literary traditions, since gender-variant nature imagery recurs across distinct national canons in ways that a purely period-based history can overlook.
22. Transecological Narrative, Genre, and Experimental Cinema and Television
Narrative film and television — from art cinema to genre drama to experimental and animated forms — construct transecological imagination at temporal scales that nonfiction cannot achieve, and this topic welcomes contributions on fictional, hybrid, and experimental screen work across world cinema traditions. Contributors might explore how narrative and genre conventions figure the relationship between trans life and ecological environments, or they could analyze how fictional forms — including horror, comedy, melodrama, coming-of-age films, fantasy, musicals, and animation — enable distinct transecological imaginaries. Relevant traditions include trans film theory, narrative theory, genre studies, and ecocinema studies.
23. Transecological Documentary and Activist Screen Media: Global Nonfiction Forms
Documentary and activist screen media make available to transecology what fiction and scholarship cannot: showing trans people in actual ecological relations with specific places and living systems. Contributors might investigate what transecological documentary provides across nonfiction genres — feature, short, web-distributed, activist media — drawing on any national or regional context. They might also consider how documentary traditions from Global South, Indigenous filmmaking communities, and non-Anglophone contexts — such as Brazilian trans documentary, African queer ecology films, South Asian gender-variant nature cinema, and Pacific Islander environmental media — construct transecological witnessing distinct from Western conventions.
24. Monstrosity, the Nonhuman, and Transecological Visual Culture
Transecological visual and literary culture has reclaimed monstrosity as an affirmative aesthetic and theoretical category — proposing that what has historically been viewed as unnatural about trans bodies constitutes an ecological critique rather than a stigma to overcome. Contributors could explore how trans monsters challenge the natural/unnatural binary in fiction, horror film, and genre screen drama. As another option, they might trace how the history of monster imagery reveals transecological dimensions in visual culture that earlier criticism missed. Relevant traditions include Gothic studies, trans nonhumanism, and visual culture criticism. This topic suggests that the monstrous and the ecologically abject are affirmative transecological positions.
25. Celebration, Beauty, and Delight in Trans Ecocultural Production
Transecological joy is produced in and by trans cultural practice — art, performance, ecosexual activism, trans nature poetry, and collective trans ritual in outdoor and ecological settings — and this topic examines what those cultural forms specifically enable when they center joy rather than suffering. Contributors might investigate what aesthetic strategies trans cultural producers use to claim ecological joy, or equally well, they could explore how trans joy as cultural production is evident such diverse forms as Tourmaline's Black trans joy cinema, Brazilian trans carnival ecology, South Asian hijra performance traditions, and Afrofuturist ecological celebration, among others. Relevant traditions include trans aesthetics, performance studies, ecocriticism, and cultural theory. This topic also extends to sport, festival, and embodied public celebration, since these communal, physically expressive occasions can enact transecological joy as fully as art or ritual can.
Law, Agency, and Temporality
26. Transecological Jurisprudence and Rights of Nature
Rights of Nature jurisprudence and trans rights jurisprudence both extend legal standing to subjects historically excluded from legal personhood — a structural parallel that transecological jurisprudence can examine with precision and political consequence. Contributors might consider what these parallel legal transformations reveal about each other's underlying assumptions regarding subjecthood, or alternatively, they could ask how decolonial and Indigenous legal traditions challenge both ecological rights and trans rights frameworks built from settler liberal foundations. Relevant traditions include environmental law, trans legal theory, and postcolonial legal studies. This topic also extends to citizenship status, human rights frameworks, and international and diplomatic legal regimes, since these too determine which subjects a legal order recognizes as bearers of standing. This topic argues that by studying ecological and trans legal transformations together, we can gain insights not accessible to either separately.
27. Beyond Essentialism and Constructionism: New Materialist Ecofeminism and Trans Theory
New materialism has transformed both ecofeminism and trans theory: where early ecofeminism's gender essentialism and trans theory's social constructionism once seemed irreconcilable, feminist new materialism — Barad's agential realism, Haraway's multispecies kinship, Hird's queer non/human — creates shared ground where both traditions engage bodies, matter, and ecology without naturalizing or denaturalizing gender. Contributors could choose to explore what a new materialist synthesis of ecofeminism and trans theory looks like, or they might ask how these frameworks enable ecofeminist-trans dialogue across non-Western, Indigenous, and Global South contexts. Relevant traditions include new materialism, feminist science studies, ecofeminism, and trans theory.
28. Animacy Hierarchies and Transecology
Animacy — the differential assignment of liveliness, agency, and subjecthood to different kinds of bodies — structures ecological thought in ways that systematically disadvantage trans, racialized, disabled, and nonhuman bodies simultaneously. Contributors might consider how animacy hierarchies organize ecological science, conservation practice, and their cultural representations, or they could investigate how transecological analysis reveals and contests animacy arrangements that determine who counts as an ecological subject. Relevant traditions include trans feminist materialism, animacy theory, and environmental humanities. This topic insists that who and what counts as alive for ecological purposes is a political and theoretical determination, not a natural fact.
29. Trans Temporality and Ecological Time
Trans embodiment reorganizes temporal experience at multiple scales — hormonal transition time, social community time, and geological ecological time — making trans temporality a productive resource for environmental humanities. Contributors might explore how trans temporal experience generates ecological critique unavailable from frameworks that treat time as universal. As an alternative, they could ask how the relationship between trans time and geological or evolutionary ecological time can be theorized across literary and screen media. Relevant traditions include trans studies, queer temporality theory, and environmental humanities. This topic also extends to biography, oral history, and commemorative practice, since these are sites where trans and ecological temporalities visibly intersect in how a life or an era gets remembered. This topic proposes that trans temporal experience can serve as an analytical tool for ecological thinking at every scale.
30. Hope, Utopia, and the Future of Transecological Worlds
Trans joy is irreducibly forward-facing — it is joy in what is not yet but might be, joy in imagining transecological worlds that do not yet exist — and this topic examines transecological joy as a form of hope, futurity, and refusal to accept crisis as the only frame for transecological imagination. Contributors might explore how trans speculative fiction, solarpunk, Indigenous futurism, and queer utopianism imagine transecological flourishing, or they could ask how ecological joy as futurity is imagined in such diverse forms as Brazilian ecotransfeminismo, Afrofuturist joy traditions, West African ecological utopianism, and Asian trans speculative imagination. This topic claims joy as transecology's most generative temporal stance. This topic explicitly names utopian and dystopian political and literary traditions as relevant precedents, since transecological hope draws on and revises a much longer history of utopian thought.
Part III: Planetary and Deep-Time Scales
Atmosphere, Ocean, and Deep Earth
31. Trans Atmospheric Ecologies: Air, Breath, and Climate
The atmosphere — increasingly destabilized by greenhouse emissions and industrial chemical pollution — has emerged as transecology's most urgently contested elemental domain, entangling trans bodies with chemical exposures, respiratory vulnerability, and the politics of breath. Contributors could investigate how atmospheric chemical exposure disproportionately exposes trans communities to elevated chemical burden, or they might ask what the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about atmospheric vulnerability along race, class, and gender lines. Relevant traditions include environmental justice, feminist science studies, and climate humanities. This topic connects the molecular scale of trans atmospheric exposure to the planetary scale of climate politics.
32. Aqueous Transecologies: Water, Rivers, Oceans, and the Blue Humanities
Water — rivers, watersheds, oceans, tidal zones — has become transecology's most generative elemental domain, in part because water's formal properties of transition, permeability, and state change resonate across trans and ecological theories simultaneously. Contributors might explore how different water bodies configure different transecological possibilities and constraints. In addition, they could consider what Indigenous freshwater knowledge, Black trans feminist ocean ecology, and blue humanities each contribute to this domain. Relevant traditions include hydrological science, blue humanities, environmental law, and trans studies. This topic also welcomes attention to specific national and regional hydrological histories, since a particular river, coastline, or watershed can anchor transecological analysis as concretely as a global elemental frame. This topic argues that water's material properties make it transecology's most productive elemental medium.
33. Trans Geological Ecologies: Deep Time, Minerals, and Transition
Geological deep time — operating at scales of millions of years — provides transecology with temporal resources that transition narratives calibrated to individual human lifetimes cannot supply. Contributors might explore how geological temporality reframes trans becoming as part of Earth's longer history of material transformation, or they could trace how trans pharmaceutical supply chains are concretely entangled with lithium mining and hormone-precursor agriculture. Relevant traditions include geology, trans studies, political ecology, and environmental humanities. This topic also welcomes attention to specific national and regional geological histories, since a particular mining region or mineral economy can ground transecological analysis as concretely as a planetary deep-time frame. This topic extends transecology's temporal horizon from individual human lifetimes to planetary deep time.
34. Trans Subterranean Ecologies: Underground Life and Becoming
Underground ecologies — mycorrhizal networks, soil microbiomes, cave systems, and deep aquifers — constitute one of transecology's richest and least theorized domains, offering figures for trans becoming that operate below the surface-visibility epistemology that has dominated the field. Contributors might investigate how distributed fungal networking models for transecological community differ from organism-centered alternatives, or they could consider how decomposition and regeneration as primary biological processes help us understand transecological becoming in ways that developmental metaphors miss completely. Relevant traditions include mycology, feminist science studies, and trans theory. This topic asks what transecology learns from what happens below the surface.
Planetary Futures and Speculative Cosmologies
35. Transecology and Science Fiction: Alien Life, Posthuman Biology, and Ecological Imagination beyond Earth
Science fiction's biological imaginary — alien life forms, posthuman evolution, biotechnological embodiment, interstellar ecologies — directly contests the naturalistic assumptions about sex that trans people face in their healthcare, legal systems, and daily lives, making SF a uniquely powerful resource for transecological thinking. Contributors might explore how SF's imagined biologies produce transecological knowledge about non-binary sex, mutable embodiment, and ecological relations beyond the human. They could just as well consider how SF genre conventions from Japanese SF to Chinese 科幻 to Nigerian Africanfuturist fiction give trans characters and gender-variant ecologies formal possibilities unavailable in realist literature. Relevant traditions include SF studies, biology, and trans studies.
36. Transecological Climate Fiction: Speculative Responses to Planetary Environmental Change
Trans people are among the most climate-vulnerable populations — unhoused at higher rates, dependent on pharmaceutical supply chains, subject to violence in evacuation centers — and climate fiction's engagement with planetary ecological change therefore always carries specific trans stakes that this topic makes central. Contributors could explore how climate fiction across eco-dystopia, solarpunk, Indigenous futurism, and speculative realism imagines trans survival, community, and flourishing under planetary collapse, or they might ask how climate speculative writing from Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania centers transecological futures differently from Anglophone production. Relevant traditions include cli-fi studies, trans literary and film studies, and visual and plastic arts. This topic insists that climate futures are always specifically trans futures.
37. Transecological Thought and the Naming of the Epoch
The ongoing debate over naming our geological-ecological epoch — Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene — is among the environmental humanities' most politically consequential controversies, and trans theory contributes a distinctive question: who is the anthropos? Contributors might explore what trans analysis reveals about the gendered subject of planetary harm, or they could consider how trans matter and materialities reconfigure ecological futures on a planetary scale. Relevant traditions include feminist philosophy, decolonial theory, and trans studies. This topic connects the most intimate scales of trans embodiment to the largest questions in environmental humanities.
38. What the More-Than-Human World Offers Transecology
The more-than-human world is a vast archive of trans-affirmative biological abundance: fungi with thousands of mating types, fish that change sex in response to social conditions, plants that reproduce outside binary categories — and discovering this diversity generates a specific trans joy that transecology is uniquely positioned to theorize. Contributors could explore how trans people find affirmation and ecological belonging in the biological diversity of nonhuman sex and gender, or they might ask how these discoveries resonate across trans communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous traditions with their own accounts of gender-variant nature.