Trans Milieus

Abstract This essay considers queer ecology's engagement with transness with the goal of clarifying what it is that trans ecology, in particular, has to offer: a centering of trans people and phenomena, a more radical reworking of the concept of “nature,” one entangled with the field's treatment of “biological sex,” and an attentiveness to questions concerning home, habitat, and milieu. To develop this argument, the essay analyzes important works of queer and trans ecology, from Catriona Sandilands and Bruce Erickson's Queer Ecologies (2010) to writing by Oliver Baez Bendorf, Susan Stryker, and Marquis Bey. Finally, the essay outlines how the writing of the twentieth-century French physician and philosopher, Georges Canguilhem, underread in trans studies yet influential among scholars of disability, provides a helpful framework for trans ecologies as it departs from both empirical and new materialist approaches.