Human exceptionalism has long structured dominant understandings of gender by assuming that sexual difference, kinship and identity originate within the human and are merely reflected in the nonhuman world. Golden's When They Come for Me unsettles this assumption by imagining Black transfeminine existence as emerging through ecological relations that exceed the human altogether. Rather than employing bees, birds, trees, flowers or migration as metaphors for gender, the poem relocates gender itself within multispecies infrastructures of becoming, where bodies, landscapes, seasonal rhythms and more-than-human agencies collectively produce transfeminine life.

Beginning with the proposition, "If we were born bees never would we wonder if we needed men tomorrow," the poem immediately suspends anthropocentric assumptions about sexuality and social organization. The bee colony, the trans seahorse, avian migration, the dogwood tree, roots and stems, and the speaker's desire to become part of a flower bed refuse stable distinctions between species while simultaneously challenging heteronormative genealogies. Here, migration exceeds both biological instinct and human mobility to become a mode of Black transfeminine survival, while home emerges not through nation, family or domesticity but through ecological kinship: "I made it home" only after inhabiting relations with insects, plants, ancestors and the earth itself.

Drawing selectively on Eva Hayward's account of transsexing and transspeciation as bodily metonymy, Banu Subramaniam's critique of anthropomorphic biology, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Black ecological thought, this paper proposes the concept of ecological gender to describe forms of embodiment constituted through reciprocal relations with more-than-human worlds. The poem's multispecies imagination simultaneously reconfigures Blackness, kinship and desire, replacing exclusionary human institutions with ecological communities of care in which holding another body, carrying Grannie to safety, and imagining oneself as root and stem become practices of collective survival.

Positioning Black transfeminine poetry as a site where queer ecological thought is already being theorized from within poetic form, the paper argues that Golden expands contemporary debates on gender-sexuality by demonstrating that gender is not simply represented through nature but materially co-produced across species. In doing so, the poem offers a non-anthropocentric account of Black transfeminine world-making in which gender functions less as an identity category than as an ecosystem of relational life.