Imagining trans futures

When we think and talk about trans futures, we love to imagine a liveable future for trans people, futures where we don’t just survive, but thrive and flourish. 

The trans experience is often seen through a very specific and medicalised lens, that trans liberation or happiness comes after a rejection of the past and a complete transformation to the present, something that exists only in the future once we’ve ‘successfully’ done, achieved, or fixed something.  

These narratives almost always centred medical affirmation processes, which ignores the expansive nature of gender affirmation and sees us living by the gendered constraints of the societies we are part of. The reality is that the trans experience has got nothing to do with what a person looks like, nothing to do with the bathroom we use, or the marker listed on our birth certificate. You can’t tell who is trans by sight, trans looks like all of us.

Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow.

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy 

Many Indigenous tribes and nations across the world, including in Australia, have celebrated and held culturally significant roles for trans people of all genders - roles that colonialism tried to dismantle. The trans futures we envision cannot exist without us recognising that the trans experience is ancient and deeply impacted by settler colonialism, white supremacy and cisgenderism1. 

In the same way we have spoken about the cyclical nature of the changing seasons, imagining trans futures asks us to think expansively, opening up to possibilities that come from embracing gender euphoria as an essential ingredient of trans liberation.  

But how do we do that?  

In developing Trans Vitality, we were inspired by many of the concepts of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy2. Her work uses concepts of nature to approach organising, advocacy, facilitation, and transformative justice work but also touches on personal wellbeing, healing, health and strategies for resilience.  

Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy 

Trans liberation is not possible without imagination. adrienne maree brown uses this idea of imagination to develop strategies that we can directly implement into all parts of our lives to transform, liberate and collectively create the futures we need and deserve. 

There are so many ways to imagine our trans futures, but we’ve got a few activities below to help get you started.