Prelude

It’s a warm afternoon in May, the kind of day that hums with the first promises of summer. In a quiet meadow just outside Weert, the Netherlands, a colourful group has gathered: a few artists, academics, cows, caretakers, filmmakers — and a striking drag queen named Soya, dressed in bright red, wearing cow ears and long black horns. The sky hangs low over the open land and the air is thick with the earthy smell of mud and grass. Under the shade of a tall tree at the edge of the meadow lies Piet, half-curled, their large body relaxed and still. The reddish-brown fur on their back — Piet is still shedding their winter coat — is warm to the touch, soaking up the day’s slow heat, and their face — a soft white, broken only by a brown patch over the right eye — appears peaceful, content. Summer flies buzz lazily around Piet’s muzzle and eyes. Every so often, Piet flicks an ear, swishes their tail, or rumbles with a low, blissful purr — but otherwise, they remain motionless. Piet’s massive frame takes up much of the space, yet there’s a gentleness in the way they sink into the grass, as if making room for the rhythms of the day to pass around them.

Soya the Cow, radiant even beneath the sun’s full gaze, steps into the meadow, carefully balancing as her heels sink into the hoof-pocked ground, still soft and yielding after weeks of rain. Leaning on caretaker Henk for support, Soya’s figure cuts sharply through the vivid green of the field. Long black sleeves, strapped with buckles and belts up to her elbows, recall a bird’s wings, giving her the strange, arresting presence of a creature caught between ground and flight. Usually, Soya’s flamboyant presence — a dazzling emblem of queer-feminist vegan drag — exudes theatrical command: larger than life, bold, and fierce as f*ck. But here, under this open sky, she moves differently. Slower, almost reverent. Before her lies Piet, their large form resting in the grass. Piet’s size could be overwhelming, with a bull’s broad shoulders and a frame that seems made to command attention, but instead, there’s something about them that holds space gracefully — a peculiar contrast to the vastness of Piet’s body. Soya approaches from behind, her movements delicate and deliberate, and places her hand on Piet’s back. The touch is tender, almost hesitant, as if she’s attuning herself to Piet’s presence. Around them, time seems to widen, the world caught for a moment in the soft gravity of their togetherness.

Piet and Soya walk together, sit together, lie together, their movements unfolding in quiet synchronicity. When Piet turns their head to the left, ears flapping, Soya follows, mirroring the gesture with careful precision. When Piet lowers their head and lets it rest on the grass, Soya does the same, settling beside them in shared stillness. Then, suddenly, Soya lifts her head again — and Piet, less than a heartbeat later, follows her lead. None of this is planned. There’s no choreography or fixed sequence of actions — what emerges instead is a form of attention: a caring responsiveness that is neither rehearsed nor staged but felt. Theirs is a dialogue of bodies — sensing, breathing, touching — a visceral call and response beyond the human–animal divide. At times, Soya sprawls across Piet’s broad back like a queen at rest; at others, she becomes unexpectedly small. Her usual stature — grand, dazzling, defiant — melts away as she nestles her head into the hollow of Piet’s shoulder. And sometimes, Piet playfully interrupts their silent dance to lick Soya’s face, sniff her ears, or nibble at her black-haired wig.

Soya sings.

Softly at first: a low humming rises from somewhere deep in her chest. The sound folds into the breeze, into the background hum of insects, birdsong, wind moving through the grass. Piet tilts their head slightly, one ear twitching towards Soya’s peaceful voice, as if listening intently. This song is not for human ears; it is sung at the threshold of species, a language without words, each note expanding the boundaries of being. The melody passes almost unnoticed, yet it lingers in the air, drawing a line of connection between Soya, Piet, and the other creatures present: Piet’s herd — including Cato, the mother cow who adopted them and who is growing increasingly impatient with this strange display — several humans, including the first two authors of this article taking notes, a PhD student, the filmmakers with their large camera equipment, and Piet’s caretakers — as well as the myriad unseen life forms inhabiting this meadow. All around, the grasses sway, insects hum, and the warmth of the sun envelops everything, drawing this queer moment into a hush of more-than-human presence.¹

I

Piet’s ears twitched as we entered the meadow. I — Leonie — stayed close, speaking to Piet in a soft voice, as I always do, naming each person as I introduced them. Daniel wasn’t yet in drag — not yet Soya — but already attuned to the place and the herd. Bart and Ari, the filmmakers, had left their equipment behind, meeting Piet first without a lens between them. Louis waited a little further off, hesitant, unsure how close to come. Piet stepped forward, sniffing, then licking their hands one by one. I wanted Piet to know who was entering the meadow. This place is not a set or a stage, but a home Piet shares with the herd. We are here as guests, and I needed Piet to feel that we knew that.

Piet came into my life five years ago, during sociolinguistic research I was conducting on the language of cows at an industrial dairy farm in the Netherlands.² In these farms, it is customary to separate the newborn calf from the mother within five to ten minutes of their birth. The calf is then confined to a small box, preventing any embodied social interaction with other calves — such as touching, licking, and grooming each other — to reduce the risk of infection and disrupt maternal bonding. Newborn bull calves are typically transported to calf-fattening facilities and slaughtered before the age of nine months. While I was helping the farmer bottle-feed one particular bull calf during my fieldwork, he mentioned almost in passing that this calf — with white socks, a white head, and a beautiful brownish spot around his eye — would likely be killed upon arrival at the fattening facility, as he was not expected to reach the minimum rearing weight of thirty-five kilograms.

The next day, with the farmer’s permission, I decided to “adopt” the calf. Since cows in the Netherlands are automatically classified as consumption animals, a formal adoption wasn’t legally possible — the calf simply changed owners on paper, from the farmer to me. Nor was it particularly desirable, given the colonial and racialized history of human adoption practices.³ Still, I needed to create a new system of care and kinship for this little calf. I didn’t take him away from his cow family, as he had already been separated from his mother immediately after birth and was spending his days alone in a wooden box. I visited him almost every week for three months, giving him a bottle of milk and sharing time with him in his box. The “adoption” — which in practice meant finding him another place to live — turned out to be successful. After three months, the calf was moved to live with a human couple who kept three adult cows and two of their calves in a large open meadow behind their home in Weert. He was named Piet by his sponsors — after Piet Meertens, the first secretary of the Meertens Institute, where I work. Naming is central to the act of making kin — and oddkin⁴ — as it helps transform an anonymous calf into a singular, recognizable being. This is something a calf adopted as kin has over all those nameless ones for whom there is no place in the dairy industry — either because they are bull calves (m), or because the farmer already has too many heifer calves (f).

When Piet was about six months old, the caretakers arranged for a veterinarian to examine him in preparation for castration — an intervention considered necessary to keep the meadow safe for horses and humans. But the procedure never happened. The vet discovered that Piet was intersex: born with a body that doesn’t fit typical definitions of “male” or “female”. They had two quarters of an udder, a penis positioned atypically, and no descended testicles — making castration unnecessary. Piet had been one of a pair of twins, but their sibling had died at birth. In such cases, the twins’ placentas may develop vascular connections — a process known as anastomosis — through which blood vessels fuse and allow blood and hormones to circulate between the foetuses. This hormonal exchange can affect development; when the surviving calf is female, she is typically infertile and referred to as a “freemartin” or, in Dutch, a kween — a queen. For centuries, freemartin cows have unsettled agricultural and scientific understandings of sexual differentiation, troubling the categories through which bovine bodies are sorted and valued and revealing how human anxieties about gender, fertility, and procreative value shape the shifting boundaries between productive, reproductive, and economically “unproductive” bodies within the logic of industrial farming.⁵ At the same time, farmers and scientists have repeatedly sought to recuperate this apparent lack of procreative value by putting the freemartins’ infertility to use within selective breeding regimes, for instance by employing them as “heat detectors” — living technologies used to identify fertile cows ready for insemination.⁶

In Piet’s case, the vet suspected a similar hormonal influence in utero, resulting in a mix of traits. But such bodily variance is rarely noticed in bull calves, who are usually killed before their bodies have had time to grow into — let alone reveal — anything unexpected. While the freemartin has a place in the farmer’s lexicon, the intersex bull does not — a linguistic absence that marks what Judith Butler, writing about the nineteenth-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, calls “the sexual impossibility of an identity”.⁷ Yet Piet exists. The unusual — we might say, queer — nature of their embodiment attracted attention from far beyond the meadow: the veterinarian even had to ask a colleague in Canada about this phenomenon. Spared from early death, Piet became a living exception — a queering of what farm animal life is usually permitted to be, and an invitation to reimagine kinship beyond the boundaries of gender, species, and animal categories. Over time, the “he” I first used gave way to the gender-inclusive “they” — not because Piet asked, but because something shifted in me.

Piet lives about an hour and a half away by train, and I try to visit them about once a month. Early on, I brought together a small circle of supporters who care about Piet and contribute financially to their food, medical needs, and overall well-being. At the time of writing, Piet is five years old. Over the years, I have come to know them more deeply, both as an individual with their own ways of being, and as part of their herd. Unlike bulls, who tend to separate from the herd as they age — if they age at all — Piet remains closely connected to the others, living, moving, grazing, resting, and responding alongside them. I’ve become very attached to them, and our relationship, our kinship, has grown. Along the way, new forms of multispecies knowledge have emerged: slow, reciprocal ways of learning how to be attentive to one another while unlearning human-centred bodily habits,⁸ how to listen, how to inhabit vulnerability and responsiveness across human-cow boundaries, and how to stay with the responsibilities of care in the name of a shared life.

II

When I — Daniel — travelled from Switzerland to this meadow in the Netherlands, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Would Piet like me? Would I like Piet? Would I even know how to be with them? I had heard so much about Piet since I had met Leonie a year ago, after a show I did in Amsterdam. But stories can only carry so much of a body, of who a person is, what makes them “them”. Standing at the edge of the field, I felt nervous — it was a bit like going on a blind date. But not just any blind date: a blind date for cows! I was in full drag, as Soya the Cow — long lashes, painted lips, a tall wig with horns tucked in, and a thick layer of makeup carrying a strong scent. We were unsure how Piet might react. Would the bright red dress, the buckled sleeves, the wig confuse them? Leonie reassured me that Piet, after our greeting ritual earlier that day, would likely sense the person beneath Soya’s surface. My cow-self stood facing their cow-self, in anticipation of what might happen. Would Piet recognize me as kin, or back away from this strange, sparkly creature?

In the six years leading up to this encounter, I had placed nonhuman animals and the injustices they endure — especially in the food, clothing, and entertainment industries — at the centre of my work as a theatre maker, performance artist, and activist. I had developed a practice of cow drag that combined elements of classical femme drag — exaggerated feminine features, wigs, high heels, corsets, jewellery — with bovine references: cow-print clothing, hooves, horns, udders. These elements never all had to be present at once; just a few details were enough to signal the double identity: both drag queen and cow. This playful hybridity allowed me to disrupt binary logics of gender and species while offering a human face to the cow — thus inviting audiences to consider her individuality and sparking curiosity for her perspective, one so often marked by extreme physical, psychological, sexual, and spiritual violence.

I created Soya as a larger-than-life alter ego — a force of nature born from deep discomfort with the normalized atrocities of our world — who could attempt the impossible and transcend human limitations: pop star and healer, activist and clown, present and future. Inspired by the radical energy of drag kings, queens, and in-betweens from queer club culture and shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, I envisioned Soya as bold, unafraid to speak uncomfortable truths, yet brimming with love and infectious joy. Animal drag, defined by Nicola McCartney as “an activist performance in which a human critically and consciously performs ‘animality’ in order to de-centre humanism, with dress and adornment as key aspects of its dissidence”,⁹ became central to Soya’s identity, allowing me to explore what it means to critique human exceptionalism while inhabiting other-than-human perspectives with both irony and care. Through humour, sensuality, curiosity, and concern, I bring Soya to the stage with the full power and ridiculousness of a cow-shaped desire to change the world, refiguring dominant scripts of the human and the animal into a more unruly, intimate, and liveable choreography of kinship.

As Nicole Seymour argues in her work on animal drag, “nonserious affective modes” — including humour, impropriety, and theatrical excess — carry an ethical force that can help probe “the trans-, or intersectional and interdependent, nature of human and nonhuman life”.¹⁰ In this sense, Soya also enacts what Seymour elsewhere describes as an “irreverent” environmentalism, one that turns to camp, frivolity, irony, and other seemingly improper affects to challenge the sense of earnestness, guilt, purity, and self-righteousness often associated with mainstream environmental discourse, opening more embodied, queer, and affectively flexible ways of engaging ecological politics.¹¹ In Emelia Quinn’s terms, Soya’s artificial stylization of species-being might also be understood as a form of “vegan camp”: an aesthetic practice that, without disavowing the horrors of industrial animal production, mobilizes camp’s failed seriousness — or what Susan Sontag in her “Notes on ‘Camp’” describes as “the theatricalization of experience”¹² — as a survival strategy for vegan individuals, one that “does not exclusively focus on revelations of violence”, but instead offers “an alternative mode of looking and witnessing”.¹³

Over the years, Soya the Cow has grown into a complex being who not only occupies most of my artistic practice, but also most of the space in my wardrobe, now stacked with shiny costumes, headpieces, and carefully sourced cruelty-free makeup. I have brought Soya to life in theatres, at music festivals, in galleries, on television, at gala dinners, during art walks in the streets, and at climate protests — always with a nod to cows and other farm animals. These performances challenge the human-centred worldview that subordinates nonhuman life, weaving together songs written from a dairy cow’s perspective with sharp arguments that extend queer-feminist concepts such as affirmative consent and gender dissidence to other animals. In doing so, my work restores what Carol J. Adams calls the “absent referent”,¹⁴ undoing the symbolic and material severance that enables humans to consume other animals by obscuring the relation between the “meat” on their plate and the living being it once was. Adams also traces how this logic is sustained through gendered and sexualized metaphors, linking the objectification of animals to that of women and other sexualized, racialized, and naturalized “Others” whose social and symbolic existence is likewise effaced.¹⁵ By embodying a vegan drag cow as a speaking, singing, feeling subject, I interrupt this logic of disavowal and erasure — framing ethical veganism as not only smart and sexy, but also as a political practice of solidarity and a moral imperative for our time. Soya reclaims visibility and voice, unsettling the norms and structures that render animal lives — especially the feminized bodies of dairy cows — exploitable and disposable, reduced to sources of meat, milk, and reproductive labour.

To maintain uninterrupted milk production, dairy cows are subjected to an unrelenting cycle of forced pregnancy and birth. As noted earlier, their calves are taken from them shortly after delivery — a practice that suppresses one of the most fundamental relationships: the caring bond between mother and child.¹⁶ As ecofeminist Greta Gaard poignantly observes: “Inside each glass of milk is the story of a nursing mother separated from her offspring.”¹⁷ To feel comfortable in severing these bonds, not only dairy farmers and milk consumers but the entire assemblage of agricultural policy, EU regulations, supermarket chains, advertising industries, animal transport systems, and capitalist market logics must participate in what Gaard calls a collective denial of “the web of relationships that defines healthy ecosystems”.¹⁸ This denial is embedded in gendered, racialized, and speciesist grammars of domination, where cows’ reproductive roles are framed as natural and necessary, reflecting wider societal mechanisms that control feminized bodies across species lines.

The dairy industry thus reduces cows’ maternal bodies to mere instruments of production — vessels for profit — while erasing their individuality, agency, and emotional lives. But the violence does not end with the mothers. Bull calves, deemed economically useless because they do not produce milk, are routinely discarded, killed shortly after birth, or sent into veal production.¹⁹ Their masculinized bodies are treated as disposable by-products of an industry built on the commodification of reproductive labour. This gendered bifurcation of value — where life is extracted from dairy cows through forced reproduction while bull calves are consigned to death through slaughter or neglect — reveals the patriarchal, anthropocentric, and “repro-centric”²⁰ hierarchies that underpin the treatment of farmed animals within what Barbara Noske has termed the “animal-industrial complex”.²¹

Cow drag confronts these hierarchies head-on by queering the figure of the cow — it enacts a becoming-cow that resists the brutal logics of disposability and control, not by imitating the animal, but by entering an imaginative, embodied relation with her. Yet when I stood in this meadow with Piet, despite everything I had tried in my journey of cow-becoming, I felt acutely aware of my own humanness. Suddenly, I was no longer making art for cows or about cows, but with a cow. I surrendered to the only guide I had left: instinct. I approached Piet slowly, as I had learned to do with animals throughout my life, especially while volunteering at the animal sanctuary Hof Narr in Switzerland during the first COVID lockdown. I let Piet come to me with their gaze and attention. And then it clicked. My worries that Piet might be distracted by my appearance dissipated. Piet knew exactly who I was — not through the superficial markers of clothing or wigs, but through something deeper: energy and presence. And there we were, two rather big queer mammals, lying side by side in a Dutch meadow, meeting one another with the gift of calm kindness and embracing the many possibilities of peaceful coexistence.

From there, it became an improvisation: a shared dance of movement, gesture, breath, and then — a voice. My soft humming became a thread of connection between us. I sang for Piet, and Piet honoured me with their listening, inviting me to remain in their world. It might sound naïve, but in that moment, I felt immense love for Piet — love bound up with resistance, and with a desire to honour their queer existence as someone who defies so much of our human-made world and its extractive logic. Piet, a survivor of the dairy industry and of thousands of years of domestication etched into every living cow’s body; a survivor of a world marked by gender violence, where bodies are disciplined into rigid binary norms; a survivor of an agricultural system that severs maternal bonds, denying calves the chance to grow up with their mothers and interrupting the transmission of care and culture across generations. And yet, despite all this, Piet welcomed me with a generous, open heart, offering us all a profound lesson in forgiveness.

The afternoon ended with me removing my makeup, changing into my out-of-drag, mostly-human self, and joining the rest of our human team for an early dinner at a nearby restaurant. As we left the meadow, my gaze fell on the large, flat building adjacent to it — a shed that usually houses chickens. I felt my chest tighten. Was this a concentrated chicken farm, forming the backdrop to our soft, poetic encounter? Who was living — and dying — in there? What were they enduring? How might we widen the circle of care so that they, too, might be included in our trans*species solidarity, rather than left unseen and mutilated behind closed doors?

This unease lingered during our meal. The restaurant, a lovely place by a lake, had no real vegan options, so I ordered fries and a salad while watching others choose cheese- or egg-based dishes — and some, pork, chicken, or fish. I struggled to swallow. Despite the discourse, love, and care expressed for Piet and their herd, that tenderness did not extend to other cows or chickens, whose suffering was deemed irrelevant in the post-experiment reality of a hungry team. Why do we keep justifying that another Piet must die so we can have melted cheese in our sandwich? Why is it so hard to translate care into action? What traditions must we give up? How much social discomfort are we willing to endure within human-to-human relationships? The dinner left a bitter aftertaste — and a sense of failure. I promised myself that next time, I’d be louder and bolder, continuing the fight so that the sweetness and sensitivity of our afternoon would stretch beyond the meadow, beyond the singularity of Piet, towards an ethic that refuses the logics of disposability altogether.

III

I — Louis — admit that I was apprehensive, even a little afraid, as I entered the meadow that day. I’ve always been wary of large animals. And I find drag queens rather intimidating too — as much as I admire them. So being there, among towering cows and alongside a bovine diva in full regalia, was not exactly my natural habitat as a performance scholar and care theorist. But then again, care, as I’ve come to understand it, rarely emerges from comfort. My work explores performance art as a mode of ethical worldmaking, engaging feminist, queer, trans*, decolonial, and ecological perspectives. I’m interested in how performance, particularly by minoritized artists and makers, both human and more-than-human, can challenge intersecting systems of oppression, generate counterpublic spheres, and cultivate a relational ethics of care oriented towards more just and liveable worlds. My questions are often theoretical, but my concerns are political, personal, and pragmatic — and both take shape through embodied practice, through performance as research.²² That day, I found myself lying against Piet’s warm back, feeling their breath move through me. A deep calm sank into my body, opening a space of love and grief — an attunement to a more-than-human presence both vast and particular. That moment stayed with me. It became a source of knowledge grounded in shared vulnerability, in staying present to what unsettles, and in yielding to what is unknown.

What does it mean to care for a more-than-human other? One of the most popular definitions of care, offered by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher, construes care as “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”²³ When we extend this definition beyond the anthropocentric “we”, the question arises, whose worlds are we maintaining, and whose are we ignoring, extracting from, or destroying? Whose lives are sustained in the webs of care that compose the world and whose are considered exploitable, expendable, edible? These questions expose the limits of traditional frameworks of care when confronted with multispecies injustice, inviting us to rethink not only how care is practised but also who is recognized as worthy of ethical care.

Feminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams have long taken up this challenge by extending feminist care theory to human–animal relations, arguing since the 1990s that an ethics of care must account for the lives, experiences, and suffering of nonhuman animals.²⁴ Their work has helped establish feminist care theory as a critical intervention in animal ethics, offering an alternative to abstract moral reasoning by foregrounding empathy, responsiveness, and situated relationality.²⁵ Building on this foundation, we might further reimagine care not as a strictly human or “species activity”, but as an interspecies or transspecies practice of sustaining life within more-than-human worlds — a shift towards what María Puig de la Bellacasa calls an “a-subjective notion of care”.²⁶ In doing so, we open up possibilities for ethical relations that recognize the ontological interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings across species and ecosystems, while also queering — and trans-ing — the anthropocentric assumptions that continue to structure much of care theory, troubling normative boundaries between human and nonhuman, self and other, subject and object.

For Puig de la Bellacasa, this shift calls for a “speculative ethical imagination” — a mode of creative thought and practice that attends not only to human concerns but also to “the many ways in which nonhuman agencies are taking care of many human and nonhuman needs”.²⁷ Interspecies performance — as a relational and embodied form of artistic inquiry — can, as our performance seeks to demonstrate, activate such a speculative ethics by critically reconfiguring uneven relationships of care and power, thereby creating pathways for imagining new, more egalitarian forms of coexistence and compassion in a multispecies world. Moreover, by approaching performance art as a modality of care, we challenge Tronto’s contentious claim that artistic creation — even when intended as care — “is not care”.²⁸ Whereas Tronto positions the arts as marking “the limits of care”,²⁹ we align with scholars such as James Thompson and Yuriko Saito in conceiving caring as inherently artful and artistic practice as potentially a form of care in itself.³⁰ From this perspective, art and aesthetics — including everyday creativity — emerge as vital acts of care that sustain and weave together the more-than-human fabric of what Tronto calls “our world”.

Staging an interspecies encounter between Piet and Soya the Cow began from the premise that queer, nonbinary, and trans* approaches to both theory and artistic practice hold unique potential for cultivating what I call a trans*species ethics of care. As collaborators, we bring a range of positionalities to this work: Piet, an intersex bovine living in a multispecies sanctuary; Leonie, a white cisgender woman from Limburg developing nonhuman animal sociolinguistics; myself, a nonbinary, queer, third-generation Dutch-Indo scholar working at the intersection of performance, care, and aesthetics; Daniel, a white cisgender male queer drag artist and activist from Switzerland; and De Transketeers, a collective of predominantly white Dutch trans men whose filmmaking and advocacy work, both transgender-led, centres visibility, storytelling, and social justice. While we do not conflate queer, drag, intersex, nonbinary, and transgender perspectives or experiences, we see value in bringing them into alliance, particularly for how they unsettle normative boundaries between bodies, genders, and desires, and in doing so, embody “a human possibility that redefines what counts as human”.³¹

The asterisk in trans*species draws on the use of “trans*” to “open up the term to unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance”.³² As Jack Halberstam explains, the asterisk “modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity”.³³ For Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein, the asterisk — a “diminutive astral symbol miming a starfish’s limby reach”³⁴ — is at once relational and ontological: relational in that it opens a suffixial space of encounter, reaching toward what trans* becomes with; ontological in that trans* names “the movement that produces beingness”,³⁵ not a stable thing but the generative process through which life itself takes form as a transversal force that cuts across established categories and reknots the threads between bodies, species, and worlds that have been forced into separation. Such an expanded understanding makes it possible to articulate transness with other modes of embodiment — such as Piet’s and Soya’s — that are rendered less than human through the differentiated yet intertwined processes of dehumanization and animalization, whether externally imposed or, in Soya’s case, strategically and affirmatively embraced.

If the asterisk serves as a way of “holding space for multiple attachments while visually symbolizing radiant, multipronged means and methods of entrainment”³⁶ — that is, modes of synchronization through which different bodies enter into relations of shared resonance — it also opens trans* onto the more-than-human entanglements that compose multispecies lifeworlds. Since transgender subjects “have never been fully human”,³⁷ as Hayward and Weinstein observe, a trans perspective allows us to interrogate how humanness is differentially produced as a biopolitical norm — coded through race and gender while passing as the unmarked universality of white cis-hetero masculinity — and how animality remains bound up with the oppression of those human and nonhuman lives that exceed or unsettle that norm. Steinbock, Szczygielska, and Wagner gather these lines of inquiry under the sign of tranimacies, a term that aims to “provide a specifically transgender informed and conceptually trans* shaped commentary on the ‘animal turn’” in current scholarship,³⁸ while asking: “What are the possible, imagined and visceral moments of intimacy between animal and trans studies today?”³⁹ Since such trans*species intimacies are neither innocent nor peaceful, tranimacies names not simply a celebratory crossing, but the affective and political entanglements of transness and animality, always shaped within differential orders of liveliness — what Mel Y. Chen calls “animacy hierarchies”⁴⁰ — and within the biopolitical and necropolitical ordering of bodies. Seen against the longue durée of racist, colonial, and speciesist violence through which humanness has been secured by animalizing racialized and gender-nonconforming life,⁴¹ any trans*species entanglement remains haunted by the very histories of subjugation and dispossession it may also help to unsettle.

I wonder how all this theory can reside in the body, how these dense conceptual vocabularies come to matter not only as abstractions but as felt orientations and disorientations within a lived more-than-human encounter, and how, from within that encounter, theory might begin to take shape as a transformative ethical practice. In our performance and film project, that practice unfolds as an open-ended and responsive artistic process: a trans*species aesthetics of care that resists “any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be”,⁴² and instead invites a more expansive, experimental relation to gender and animality beyond anthropocentric and cis-heteronormative frames. Trans* and queer ways of knowing sharpen our awareness of the instability of human-made categories and the porousness of embodiment, revealing how real violence is enacted when such categories are treated as fixed or natural.⁴³ At the same time, they disrupt the gendered, sexualized, and racialized structures that organize human-cow relations within capitalist regimes of extraction and accumulation, opening the possibility of a trans*species ethical imaginary grounded in practices of capacious care, fluid embodiment, and creative reconfiguration.

Piet’s nonbinary embodiment — as an intersex “bull” who remains the unnamed, perhaps unnameable, counterpart to the infertile kween/queen — renders them economically useless within the violent sorting mechanisms of the dairy industry and its rigid dichotomous logic of reproductive utility and disposability, marking this body, in Lucy Beech and Tamar Novick’s terms, as a “waste body”.⁴⁴ Yet the very processes that turn queerness, transness, and animality into objects of regulation and control also make them sites of unruly embodiment, resistant becoming, and what Stacy Alaimo calls “insurgent vulnerability”⁴⁵: the embodied grounds from which trans*species care and ethical worldmaking may emerge.

Set against the extractive logic that would render Piet killable, our performance stages an encounter between Piet and Soya — a kween of a different kind — bringing together divergent forms of queerness, transness, and species-being in an experiment in multispecies attentiveness and the intimacies of more-than-human kinship. This encounter does not seek to stabilize Piet or Soya within human identity categories, nor to treat queer animality as evidence of the naturalness of human gender variance, even if, as many scholars have shown, nonhuman life persistently defies binary conceptions of gender and sexual difference.⁴⁶ The point is neither to enlist animal transness in the service of human liberation struggles nor simply to collapse animality and transness into one another, which, as Marianna Szczygielska cautions, would too easily allow nonhuman animals to be “exploited for human politics and once again used for making sense of human social relations”.⁴⁷ It is, rather, to illuminate how more-than-human life is repeatedly drawn into the symbolic labour of naturalizing sameness and difference across hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, and species, while also opening a different register in which multispecies relations — or what Szczygielska calls “transpecies intimacies”⁴⁸ — can be apprehended otherwise. The encounter between Piet and Soya does not affirm equivalence; it stages relation across irreducible difference. It is there, in that space of asymmetrical attunement, vulnerability, pleasure, and responsiveness, that another ethics begins to shimmer into view: not one founded on human-centred virtues or moral values, but one sustained by a mutual willingness to move with, yield to, and care across the wide, wild differences of body, species, and lifeworld.

Through Soya, we encounter a playful yet profoundly political critique of anthropocentrism and gender essentialism as entangled systems of oppression. Yet when drag is performed with an other-than-human animal (Piet) and presented to a nonhuman audience (the herd), it unsettles the semiotic codes through which drag typically generates meaning for humans. The visual cues that animate drag’s gender play — and animal drag’s species play — such as Soya’s dress, shoes, makeup, and even her prosthetic horns, may be central to human accounts of transspecies drag, including McCartney’s,⁴⁹ yet they carry no meaning for Piet. Piet’s sensory world, while certainly visual, is critically attuned to scent: to the hormonal signals through which cows register and respond to differences in reproductive and social status — bodily cues that only partially align with what humans construct as sex or gender. This sensory difference unsettles the politics of irony and parody that so often structures drag performance as a form of gender subversion, shifting attention away from drag’s citational critique of social constructs towards more-than-human modes of affective and relational attunement.