Making space for a radical trans imagination: Towards a kinder, more vulnerable, geography

Abstract

This essay makes a two-fold argument. First, that in failing its trans constituents, the discipline of geography falls short of its ethical, intellectual, and imaginative commitments. Second, that the task of developing a concept of space adequate to the diversity of trans experience offers an opportunity to tackle long-standing tensions in the discipline. Taking trans experience seriously requires a transversal conception of space, preferencing neither individual bodies nor societal structures as the principal site of meaning, but situating meaning instead in the ongoing, transformative, and mutually constitutive encounter between an individual and its – their – milieu. 1 The second part of this essay sketches out the provisional contours of such a trans concept of space. Both strands of this argument come together in a call for a kinder, more vulnerable, and more solidary discipline. In his deeply moving and powerful essay, Gieseking (2023) sums up some of the ways that geography as a discipline is failing trans people; the ways geography is failing to step through the door that is opened up by what we could call the current ‘trans moment’ (with scare quotes, because this has in fact been a very long, drawn-out, and painful ‘moment’ for many of us and thus we should – following Jules Gill-Peterson (2018) – perhaps speak instead of the long trans century 2 ). I am pleased to note that there was a strong trans presence at this year’s American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, where Gieseking first delivered his essay as a talk. When I last attended the conference in New Orleans in 2018, there was virtually nothing trans-related in the programme. But as Eden Kinkaid (2020, 2022), among others, has pointed out, this heightened visibility is a double-edged sword for both trans scholars and trans people more generally (Gosset et al., 2022). 3