In this op-ed, Willow Defebaugh reflects on nature, evolution, and her new book The Overview: Meditations on Nature for a World in Transition.
The tree of life has unfolded in staggeringly beautiful and diverse directions over the last four or so billions of years, yielding creatures that swim and soar, shape shift and change color, metamorphose into new forms. More than two million species of organisms have been identified on our planet; the estimates of how many actually exist are far higher. When we scale back our perspective, we begin to understand that the story of nature is one of continuous change—life adapting and evolving into new iterations and expressions over time.
As a trans woman, transformation has become the lens through which I view everything. I fought mine off as long as I could, wrestled with my nature for as long as I could remember. Until my dysphoria was so deafeningly loud that I finally understood I had but once choice, what H. G. Wells once referred to as “nature’s inexorable imperative”: I could adapt, or I could perish.
So I adapted. I stopped fighting the person I had always felt like inside and accepted my authentic nature. For me, that involved changes to my biological makeup through hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to better align my body and mind, but transition looks different for every trans person. It can be physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, or all of the above.
Around the same time, I began writing a newsletter for the climate and culture magazine I co-founded, Atmos. Each week, I would turn to nature for a different lesson—some teaching I could tether myself to while undergoing this massive change. From corals, I learned that my survival would depend on symbiosis and community. From frogs, I learned to stay porous even while navigating newfound vulnerability. From butterflies, I learned that metamorphosis could be both brutal and beautiful.
Again and again, I was left in awe of the organisms and processes that evolution has produced. And I began to realize that I was not separate from that—that I was experiencing my own evolution. Inside my chrysalis, I liquified so that I might live. In the early days, I would often ask myself: why was I made this way? But as I began to emerge, I started asking a different question: why did nature make caterpillars when she could have just made butterflies?
The essays I wrote during that transformative time in my life are now being released as a book. Alongside rich photography of creatures and ecosystems around the world, The Overview: Meditations on Nature for a World in Transition gathers one hundred lessons I gleaned from the tree of life while navigating my own unfurling.
It’s not lost on me that this book is coming out at a time when attacks on trans rights and access to the kind of healthcare that saved my life are at an all-time high. As of December 2023, the ACLU had tracked 508 anti-LGBTQ bills in the United States. The specter of another presidency with Donald Trump—who has vowed to take on trans rights if re-elected this year—is particularly frightening.
In the face of such oppressive and borderline totalitarian policies, it’s imperative that we look at the beliefs that underlie them, the bigotry being disguised as law. One of the most common arguments used against trans people—and historically, queer people at large—is that we are “unnatural” because of how we were born. But how can that ever be the case when nature itself is an endless series of evolutions, matter forming and reforming in new constitutions?
I often wonder how much transphobia levied by conservatives actually has to do with gender and how much it is just about change: the idea that human beings, like our scaled and feathered relatives, can adapt and evolve. The ego wants to believe that it can remain undying, unchanging forever—but nature knows that’s not the case. Our species will soon learn that, too, if we don’t change the course we’re on. It’s no coincidence that the same political party that attacks trans rights also clings to fossil fuel infrastructure that traps us on a path toward perishing.
It can feel hopeless, this moment we are in. But if there’s anything I have learned from my transition, it’s that things can change—that people can change. And so I want to give others, even those who would wish me harm, the space to evolve, too. I believe that is a human right. One way or another, trans people will find ways to bloom. Queer people have always managed to thrive and adapt against adversity. I like to think that’s the role that we as trans people can play in this pivotal time for our planet: living proof that transformation is possible.
They can try to erase us, but as the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier once discovered, matter can never be created or destroyed—only changed. When we widen our view even further, it starts to dawn on us that the very elements we are made of have been contoured in countless other combinations. They were forged in the Big Bang, born in stars across the cosmos, only to end up in the shapes of us. When we die, they will transmute further into new configurations.
All of life is in transition. The question is: what are we becoming?
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