In 2020 trans* organizations across global contexts found government and state support during the coronavirus pandemic to be considerably lacking (Summers 2020; Goshal 2020) and thus sought to provide the absent financial, social, and health-care support for trans* people (APTN 2020; ILGA World 2020).1 At the same time, trans* people all over the world have identified a prominent rise in transphobic rhetoric and legislation (Reid 2021; Deliso 2021). In the United Kingdom, the Bell v. Tavistock (2020) high court ruling, which asserted that under-sixteens were not able to consent to prescribed puberty blockers, and the governmental failure to amend the 2004 Gender Recognition Act were codifications of a deeply transphobic political atmosphere (BBC 2020; Murphy and Brooks 2020).2In this atmosphere—the pandemic, on the one hand, and the increase in the official writing of transphobia into state and public policy, on the other—we see a consolidation of trans*-exclusive feminist, or TERF, discourse expressing themselves through the tropology of viral and toxic threat, most evident in rhetoric that explicitly refers to transness in viral terms. In this brief and formative essay, I endeavor to examine the contextual and discursive positioning of transness as a parallel to, or vector of, viral threat. I propose that transness is figured as an endemic threat to feminism by TERFs in attempts to draw from the affective resonances of the pandemic. What does it mean for transness to be endemic during a pandemic? Rather than refusing the positioning of transness as threat, I argue that threat is foundational to a revolutionary politics and that trans* scholarship might instead embrace and embody the viral threat it is already figured to be as a means to destabilize trans*-exclusive feminism.Fears of a “social contagion” of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” among young people are widespread in TERF spaces (Littman 2018; Shrier 2020). Online forums such as Mumsnet are filled with concerns over the “colonisation” (Datun 2021) of “female only” spaces, the “infiltration” of feminist spaces by trans rights activists (Terfragette69 2018), and the “transmission” of and possible “vaccination” against “trans ideology” (Barracker 2021). Assertions that “feminism isn't the right place for” (Patrickharviesorganicmuesli 2018) trans rights advocacy work hand in hand with declarations that gender studies, trans*, and queer scholars aim to “poison” (LGB Alliance 2021b) public discourse and “directly target children” (Davies-Arai 2018: 26). These concerns derive from a belief that the legislation of trans* rights violates and threatens women's human rights, undoing over a century of feminist work (LGB Alliance 2021a). In these viral and contagious terms, transness is figured as an imagined entity unto itself, manifested through the trans* body, which haunts and plagues feminism.In a famously antagonistic essay, Andrea Long Chu declared trans* studies to be “over,” calling it out to be little more than an ancillary notion to queer theory (Chu and Harsin Drager 2019: 103).3 Taking issue with Chu's pronouncements, many trans* scholars have called “bullshit” on her “wilful misreadings of trans studies, queer studies [and] feminism,” and have instead argued that trans* studies isn't actually here yet (Halberstam 2020: 325; Adair, Awkward-Rich, and Marvin 2020). While criticizing tendencies for trans* people to be “exceptionalised by a certain strand of queer theory, serving as figures for a kind of anti-binary subversion of gender,” Gabby Benavente and Jules Gill-Peterson (2019: 24) point toward trans* studies' antagonistic start in works such as Susan Stryker's “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” (1994) or Sandy Stone's “Posttransexual Manifesto” (1992). Radical abstractions of bodily matter and reality by trans* studies scholars as monstrous (Barad 2015; Koch-Rein 2019; Stryker 1994), alien (Puig 2019), cellular (Brown 2015), alchemical (Lewis and Irving 2017), and viral (Chen 2015) have repeatedly demonstrated trans* studies' propensity toward aggressive and wild conceptualizations of trans* being, as opposed to a placating politics as Chu might suggest. It is this bleeding edge of imagining the body as a site of politics, while also abstracting metaphor from bodily experience, that makes trans* studies aggressive and assertive.As such, scholarly considerations of trans* in viral terms are not new but rather stem from histories of AIDS that beset trans and queer subcultures (Sedgwick 1991; Chen 2011). Jules Gill-Peterson, as a means to explain such haunting, highlights Michel Foucault's distinction between the epidemic and the endemic to show that, in an endemic, “death [is] no longer something that suddenly swoop[s] down on life—as in an epidemic. Death [is] now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it” (Foucault 2003: 244, in Gill-Peterson 2013: 279). For Gill-Peterson, AIDS shifts from epidemic to endemic as it becomes less immediate threat and more underlying. The endemic, if we understand it through Gill-Peterson's articulation of Foucault, is better thought of as an ongoing threat to life that never actually destroys but continually weakens.That trans rights activism, or trans ideology, is considered an ongoing and pervasive infiltrating threat to feminism demonstrates perhaps most effectively the appropriateness of the endemic metaphor. The figuration of transness as an endemic and underlying threat to feminism by TERFs indexes the cleavage between a specter of trans* threat and the lived reality of being trans*. In positioning transness as an infiltration, usurpation, and corruption of feminism, inasmuch as transness is considered a “social contagion” (Littman 2018; Shrier 2020) and “poison” (Davies-Arai 2018), transness comes to exist as an endemic threat to women's rights and, by extension, women's bodies.When we return this figuration to the context of the pandemic and align such threat with a model of toxicity and virality, we can see how this discourse of a trans* social contagion is made meaningful. Even prior to the context of a pandemic, the language of the endemic directly invoked the history of disease and contagion. As Alyosxa Tudor (2020) and Jacob Breslow (2020) have argued, TERFs exploit concerns over national security, such as during a global pandemic or a political landscape of increasing antimigrant sentiment, to codify a transphobic agenda. Assuring national security by way of securing women's rights at the expense of a racialized or, in this case, trans other is what has been described as femonationalism (Farris 2017), positioning that which is a threat to women as a threat to the nation (Sager and Mulinari 2018). In the case of UK transphobes, aligning a trans* threat with disease and virality in times of pandemic draws on such significance as a means to catch public and government attention.What happens, then, when we take the positioning of transness as an endemic threat to feminism as a site of politics? Can we embody threat in productive ways, and why is this significant?To answer such questions, we must pay attention to the decolonial and transnational critiques of theorizations of the inhuman. Trans*, queer, and posthuman studies have been rightly criticized for their failure to attend to the ways in which toxicity, virality, and animality have historically been used to discern a racialized other (Chen 2011; Roen 2001; Stryker 2019). Jin Haritworn (2015: 212) expresses concern over the ease with which metaphors of inhumanism have been adopted by queer and feminist scholars and asks, “How do inhuman ‘orientations’ intersect with different proclivities toward life and death? For whom might identifying with the nonhuman be too risky a move?” Zakiyyah Iman Jackson warns that movements beyond the human risk moving beyond race (2015) while also ignoring interrogations of the human made by Black studies (2013). It is thus that, in considering transness as threat, we must be mindful of for whom an embodiment of viral threat is a choice and a privilege, and for whom it is a process of subjectivization.At the same time, it remains necessary to engage with threat as a site of politics. Threat, I would argue, is at the heart of any transgressive, resistive, or revolutionary action and underlines all activism and scholarship that seeks to dismantle hegemonic power. To shy away from threat would be to shy away from the essence of seeking change. While understandings of transness as inherently transgressive have been criticized for erasing the complexity of trans* experience and refusing transness's non-transgressive sides (Prosser 1998), it is perhaps too rash to overlook the threatening potential of transness. At an inaugural moment of queer theory, Leo Bersani (2010) expressed a desire for gay politics to celebrate its potential for death and radicalism rather than placate a normative structure of rights discourses (Ahuja 2015). Trans* studies, as it seeks to change and disrupt structures and institutionalizations of transphobia, should not discount the value of such a stance.Trans* threat is what makes trans* studies a ground for a radical politics. While Chu and Drager (2019: 104) ask of trans* scholars, “why are we so nice to each other?,” others declare that we “must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange” in order to “fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate” (Halberstam 2006: 824). For Jack Halberstam (2020: 324), to be nice to one another is “not to draw hard lines between trans studies and queer studies but to recognize the shared spaces of study, practice, activism, and theory and to build on the work that has already been done.” Trans* studies, then, is a space in which aggression and respect may go hand in hand; certainly, Halberstam's own hostile rebuttal to Chu is in itself a sign of respect for her assertions.If we follow Mel Chen's (2011: 281) work on animacies, we might be able to generate a conceptualization of the virality of trans* threat as not only a political positioning of disruption but also a tool with which we can map the interactions between race, gender, sexuality, ability, and environment as they are invoked by discourses of toxicity. Such an acceptance of the viral may, in fact, “propel, not repel, queer love.” A model of toxicity and virality helps us engage with transness's threatening nature and offers space to consider the positioning of transness as endemic, as well as the interplay between such figurative viral status and the very tangible effects of a devastating global pandemic that has been felt along existing lines of race, coloniality, and nation. Embracing threat invites an aggressive politics that carves out a space for trans* politics and survival within a feminism that rejects transness. Indeed, it is only by such assertive politics and graft as Stryker's (2020) and Halberstam's that trans* studies has found a place within the academy.It is, of course, controversial and potentially dangerous to purposefully align transness with toxicity, particularly in times of pandemic, when trans* organizations are fighting hard to counter the institutional, financial, and social impacts of transphobia and the pandemic. Moreover, when capitalist structures work constantly to assume abjected bodies into forms of normativity as a means of nationalism and profit making, it becomes increasingly difficult to make room for threat. Trans-nationalist and homonationalist systems are prevalent and powerful, and many might consider an embodiment of threat futile, needlessly antagonistic, and regressive.However, it is perhaps because of this very contention that identifying and embodying trans* threat is a worthwhile exercise. In doing so, we may highlight our own tendencies toward assimilative and placating politics that render transness yet another normativity. Being a threat makes space for nonnormative bodies and refuses their consolidation into a category of other to be disposed of, staking a claim to the power that has been refused them. Being a threat rejects a generalization and normalization of transness. Transness is threatening not only as it figures in TERF rhetoric, but also because, at some level, transness threatens logics of gendered essentialism. Perhaps we need to pay further critical attention to the implications of the political strategies we use that might, in fact, neutralise the power of the threat we pose as trans* people and, instead, embrace and embody the threat we are already figured to be. At our very core, we trannies threaten everything held dear by a structure of normative sex and gender, and we are never nice about it.