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Paper short abstract

While extreme heat is increasingly studied across disciplines, gender-diverse people remain systematically overlooked. This ethnography examines how transfeminine bodies experience and adapt to heat through intersecting vulnerabilities, cooling poverty, and thermal injustice.

Paper long abstract

Extreme heat is one of the deadliest yet least visible consequences of human-induced climate change, disproportionately affecting socially marginalised populations. While growing scholarship documents the unequal impacts of heat across lines of age, race, class, and disability, the experiences of LGBTQI+ communities, particularly transgender individuals, remain strikingly underexplored. This paper addresses this gap through an ethnographic study of three transgender women living in Rio de Janeiro, a city increasingly shaped by recurrent heatwaves and unequal access to cooling. Drawing on their narratives, the paper examines how transfeminine bodies encounter heat at the intersection of physiological vulnerability, social exclusion, and infrastructural neglect. It highlights how hormonal therapies, chronic stress, discrimination in healthcare, and cooling poverty compound heat-related risks, revealing forms of thermal injustice embedded in normative climate adaptation frameworks. By queering dominant understandings of heat adaptation and thermal comfort, this research contributes to climate justice debates and calls for inclusive, embodied, and intersectional approaches to climate resilience.