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 prinicipal 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, Jack Gieseking (2023) sums up some of the ways that geography as a discipline is failing trans people; 2 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 shouldfollowing Jules Gill-Peterson (2018) -perhaps speak instead of the long trans century 3 ).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).4 The paradox of visibility is something we also see in the current rapidly escalating political, media, and legislative attacks against us, which Gieseking (2023) illustrates.1 This argument draws on a trans re-reading of the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (2020 [1964]); a reading I elaborate in more detail elsewhere (Brice, 2020, 2021).An individual in this schema is not necessarily human; the same terms of individuation apply to all entities.For an anthology of process-ontological perspectives on trans, see Cremin ( 2022). 2 These observations were first presented as a discussant's response to Jack Gieseking's Society and Space Plenary Lecture 'Notes from a Cis Discipline' at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Denver, Colorado on the 26 th of March, 2023.The addition of expansive footnotes (please do read them!) enables me to name crucial links to wider literatures and struggles while preserving the integrity of the original script.Thank you Max Liboiron (2021) for modelling what 'good relations' in citational practice can look like.3 Gill-Peterson's concept of the "trans 20 th century" draws on medical histories of gender nonconformity to counter the illusion of novelty attached to 21 st -century trans lives.Gill-Peterson argues that historiographic preoccupations with the 'proper' demarcation of trans pasts are themselves "retrospective ideological effects of the medical model of transsexuality" which seek to impose an anachronistic binary on the multiplicity of historic trans lives (2018: 95; see also Heyam, 2022).4 The strategic and ideological consequences of (in)visibility present a persistent quandary for liberation struggles.See, for example: Moraga and Anzaldua (1983); Wallace (1990);

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