Etiological Hydro Disruption Report: Footnotes

At the beginning of the Etiological Hydro Disruption Report, I refer to the historical Myanmar oil production. It has been documented that some of the earliest hand-dug oil wells were found in the Yenangyaung Oil Field area, dating back all the way to AD 905. At that time, manual oil well diggers extracted oil, but when British colonial rule in Burma began in the early 1800s, the Burma Oil Company was founded, which started using machines for oil drilling. The European oil industry sidelined the hand diggers, who were also known by the names “Twinzayo and Twinza”. (Than, 2020) Nowadays, many tend to think of oil production mainly as a modern phenomenon, but Burma may have had the largest pre-modern hand-dug well industry in the world.

It’s worth noting, however, that the question of who first drilled and extracted oil—and where—is still partly under debate. It’s quite likely that China was among the earliest oil extractors in the world, and used various innovative drilling techniques. Ancient oil wells in China are said to date back 2,250 years. 

Before modern commercial oil production, oil was used mainly in lighting and for preservation of palm leaves by spreading oil on top of the leaves in order to protect them from insects. It was also used, for example, as healing balm and mosquito repellent.

The first commercial oil sites referenced in Etiological Hydro Disruption Report were located in North America, on stolen and colonized lands. One was on the lands of the Delaware, Erie, and Iroquois peoples—also known as Pennsylvania—and the other on the lands of the Chippewa, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples, in what is now called Ontario.

The historical era known as the Industrial Revolution, along with the ongoing, multi-sited expansion of oil and globalized industrial petro-capitalism, has been made possible through the destruction, extraction, and colonization of numerous Indigenous peoples and Native lands. The norms of the modern lifestyle sustained by oil—such as the gender binary, which many Indigenous cultures, prior to colonization, did not adhere to—have been deeply entangled with colonialism. The Western medical-industrial complex and the biologically-based binary paradigm on which our notions of “proper” and “pure” gender are built are all closely tied to white, Western, and Eurocentric colonialism.

The idea of a proper and pure biological (binary) sex is at the center of my artistic research. For years now, I’ve been addictively fascinated by a transphobic research in biology, ecology, and toxicology that claims environmental toxins are causing more trans people to be born into the world. This scholarly phenomena, which unsurprisingly has gained significant traction in populist discourse, can be summed up by research on what is often called endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs).

The term endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) refers to ”...natural or man-made chemicals that may mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones, known as the endocrine system“ (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, 2024).” EDCs (endocrine-disrupting chemicals) can be found in numerous products. For example, they can leach into the environment and accumulate in human bodies from clothing, furniture, electronics, many food and beverage containers, plastic wraps, toys, games, baby bottles, pesticides, herbicides, makeup, and other cosmetics.

A significant portion of EDCs originate from microplastics, which play an important role in Etiological Hydro Disruption Report. Microplastics are small plastic particles, and plastics are made from petrochemical processes using fossil fuels, usually crude oil or natural gas. In other words, EDCs are products of extractivist petromodernity and petrocapitalism — oil derivatives.

The studies that aim to show that transness is caused by environmental toxins, focus a lot on the effects of microplastics and EDCs on human bodies. These studies try to identify a correlation between the dysphoria experienced by trans people and exposure to EDCs during fetal development in the womb. I see this research coming from a conservative view of human nature. It tends to pathologize transness and obsessively seek out an ultimate “cause” for being trans. In this research, transcorporeality is linked to environmental discussions as a kind of “environmental disorder” or ecological disturbance — a form of embodiment said to be increasing in the world due to EDCs. In this way, transcorporeality is pathologized in relation to environmental pollution — framed as a contaminated and impure techno-mutation. 

As I’ve tried to make sense of this research linking transness to environmental toxins, my thinking has been supported by scholars who engage critically with the topic. Scholars like Malin Ah-King, Eva Hayward, Reena Shadaan, Michelle Murphy and Wibke Straube, among others, have been important voices in trans and feminist research investigating this phenomenon. Their thinking is united by a shared effort to highlight the eugenic — and at times ecofascist — features of this research. They critique its strong appeal in populist discourse, which shifts attention away from the genuinely deadly and inequitable effects of environmental toxins toward an individual-psychological framing that stigmatizes trans people. 

It goes without saying that this kind of speculation, observation, and ideological framing of trans existence as somehow wrong, impure, or contaminated is harmful — not only to trans people, but also to the broader ecological discourse. It undermines efforts to steer that discourse toward transformative action — action that, rather than drawing lines between marginalized people and the “normal,” might instead address what we are doing to this burning world.

We are currently living in an extremely scary and disorienting time of far-right discourses that occasionally produce deeply confused combinations. At the same time as our planet is heating up in a very blatantly obvious way, new kinds of climate denial authoritarian voices in the West are gaining momentum. There's a growing demand for more oil — “we drill, baby, drill” (Trump, 2025) — and little real effort is being made to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.

Conservatives want to continue using fossil fuels, and also seek to prevent minority groups from living good, dignified lives. Simultaneously, some of these same voices claim that fossil fuels—or the chemicals and byproducts associated with them—are responsible for the increase in certain minority populations, such as trans people, queer people, or autistic people. A recent conservative and populist example is Robert Kennedy Jr., who claimed in a podcast that chemical exposure causes “sexual dysphoria” in children (2023). Conservatives want increased use of fossil fuels, but not the groups of people that they believe emerge as a consequence. They contradict themselves and succeed in creating plenty of concerned populist confusion.

My personal relationship to this topic arises from my trans-specific embodiment — I ask: what kind of body ideal is maintained when discussing the “threat” factors of EDCs affecting hormonal systems, reproductive systems, gender, and sexuality? In Etiological Hydro Disruption Report, I have looked more specifically at how discourses surrounding EDCs trickle down and reinforce ideals of bodily purity (and the naturalisation of cis-ness) on concrete individual and interpersonal levels of everyday life. ​​

My aim is to bring transphobic discourse into view in a way that makes clear it concerns all of us — these are not merely “trans issues,” but questions about what kinds of humanity and embodiment we have been taught to see as “pure” and “correct” – easily categorizable.

I want to position my work in relation to the conversation around EDCs and gender, because the core of my artistic research is deeply interested in this discourse that demonizes human difference and diversity — and a discourse that eventually derails the conversation about ecological catastrophe into an individual-focused narrative. In doing so, it bypasses the fact that the time we live in requires active pollution mitigation and the development of ecological thinking across many areas of life, especially through critical examination in the global North.

To think about this from my own embodiment – the way my body has been categorized and how its hormonal, chemical, technological, and all-encompassing somatic nature is spoken about is not separate from the oil industry and its violent history. 

It’s not enough for public discourse to place responsibility on individuals (notably, when it comes to EDCs, this usually means women and other people with uteruses) for their consumption habits. Only a small portion of the world’s population can decide to stay “away” from toxins, for example by influencing their purchasing decisions. Only a few have the wealth to not consume products that secrete EDCs or have the knowledge about these issues to start with.

As Shadaan and Murphy emphasize, we must examine and bring attention to the origins of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and recognize that discussing them is fundamentally a feminist and anti-colonialist issue — they exist because of the oil industry and resource extraction, both of which are deeply entangled with Western colonialism (2020).

EDCs continue to cause environmental and bodily harm especially in low-income areas, on the lands of colonized Indigenous peoples, and across the Global South — regions that are targeted for toxic waste dumping and resource extraction by the wealthy countries of the Global North. It is crucial to understand, as Shadaan and Murphy assert, that “industrial EDCs are material forms of colonial and capitalist violence” (Shadaan & Murphy, 2020, 4).

We cannot limit the conversation to how microplastics might be avoided on an individual level or what they do to individual bodies. Instead, this discussion must be situated within broader structures of racism, colonialism, and petrocapitalism. Shadaan and Murphy remind that: “Each refinery, each factory, each pipeline in Canada and the United States is on the traditional territory of specific Indigenous nations and is made possible by a history of land theft and genocide, as well as ongoing colonialism.” (2020, 6)

The problems caused by EDCs are not individual problems, and the bodily “harms” they cause — which vary — include both fatal and serious conditions. It is purely speculative to claim that they truly pose dysphoric effects to the cis-heteropatriarchy — and even if they did, such effects would only be perceived as threats from a specifically cis-centered and transphobic perspective. 

Transness has always been a subject of speculation. Rationality, especially as it is understood in the hard sciences, is yet another form of speculation. Gender is a category, and categories are always negotiable, changeable and emergent. The idea of a de-categorized body and gender requires faith in speculation and imagination and their power to transform our ability to perceive humanity as much more incomprehensible than we might have imagined. 

Teo Ala-Ruona, September 2025

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