A Love Letter to the Future (from the Surgical Team of the Trans Sciences Collective)

Abstract

“A Love Letter to the Future” speculatively fabulates a future that has undergone a (the?) surgery at the hands of a team of trans scientists. Explicating the how and why of decisions to remove organs of oppression, systems that engender violence, and individual nodules of violence, the letter details the scientists' work in remaking the future into a space and place where trans thrives. The letter also delineates how the trans sciences that unite the collective—experiments in building and reworking the self/body through (re-)mappings of community, ways of being in the world, and networks of care that challenge larger social orders—involve unique temporal and geographical expertise. The letter details how this unique expertise, which emerges through ongoing labors challenging the construction of trans - “modern,” identifying the work of quick and slow systemic violences, and mapping community and connectivity well outside understandings that join family with blood with the domestic, led to the collective's nomination for the surgery in the first place. Finally, the letter details processes necessary to the future's recovery and also extends love to this future, the multitudes it contains, and its emergent connectivities between trans and justice.