The Transthropocene: Trans as Contagion, Pollution, Toxicity

Abstract: In this essay, I propose that, far from being distinct phenomena, environmental pollution and social transphobia need to be thought together through a concept of phobic discourse that I term the transthropocene. In the transthropocene, transgender people are imagined as a form of pollution at once ontological, theological, and material; as foreign, human-made objects that contaminate natural categories of gender and sexuality, at once caused by and causing toxic pollution in our ecosystems, contagious materially and socially, that need to be hygienically removed from social life and perhaps existence as such. Using a 2015 encyclical letter from Pope Francis entitled Laudato Si': Of the Holy Father Francis On Care For Our Holy Home , statements from anarchist radical feminist environmentalist group Deep Green Resistance (DPR), and Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein , I show how the constitutive entanglement of technology and gender has been a property of modernity since its beginning.