ABSTRACT
Through five semi-structured interviews conducted with trans individuals of various nationalities living in Berlin, this chapter examines how we inhabit, move through, and adapt to hostile urban environments that were not built for us, and how our methodologies and pedagogies can learn from and nurture these practices. Safety in public spaces, for many queers, requires us to self-inflict—and thus reproduce—the trauma of conformity in private before stepping out into spaces of visibility (i.e. spaces of potential violence). Learning to re-navigate these spaces as trans relies on the peer-to-peer sharing of knowledge, resources, and stories: we have to learn, and teach each other, to become extremophiles (organisms adapted to live in extreme environments). In light of growing normalization of homosexuality we must critique the racist, classist, cis-heteronormative, and ableist standards that such politics of recognition are built upon, and center the queer bodies homonormative politics exclude. Seeking to undermine cis-heteronormative notions of survival inflected by legacies of social Darwinism, Lynn Margulis’s evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis provides a basis for re-thinking and redefining survival in hostile environments. From a trans positionality—placing my interviewees’ experiences at its core—this chapter looks to re-frame the normal as the extreme.
