ABSTRACT
Despite recent legal gains and increased public awareness of transgender issues in some parts of the world, including the United States, statistics on trans health and safety are rather bleak. To focus on transgenderism as a result of environmental injustice, rather than on the extensively documented environmental injustices perpetrated against transgender people, seems like a major ethical and political misstep. Organic transgenderism, instead, focuses on gender transitioning as a self-directed, even spontaneous phenomenon akin to the life-cycle changes of plants or animals. One potential path for ethically thinking of the connection between transgender issues and environmental issues, then, is to consider how trans phobia, cis normativity, and cis sexism inform our views of, and work on, the environment. As transgender urban/regional planning scholar Petra Doan observes, 'the trans community faces a kind of "double whammy" consisting of lower incomes resulting from employment discrimination combined with overt discrimination in the housing market'.
