Restorying trans futures: virtual world-becoming through VR painting and speculative storytelling

This article examines how transgender youth used virtual reality (VR) painting to critique harm and imagine more livable futures. Drawing on a 2018 linear and 360° documentary with three trans youth, I analyze their 3D VR paintings and narratives to show how they moved from recounting exclusion and constraint to envisioning futures grounded in joy, kinship, and belonging. I frame these creative acts as virtual world-becoming – a process of pivoting between lived histories and imagined futures while creating virtual worlds. The analysis brings together trans-queer phenomenologies, studies of trans joy, speculative approaches, and restorying to explore how youth storytelling resists erasure and constructs counter-narratives. While the project is presented through Big Tech infrastructures, the youths’ stories emphasized cozy, accessible, and communal technologies rather than sleek corporate futurism. Their visions highlight the importance of collective spaces where trans and queer people can thrive. This work contributes to educational research on fiction and digital media by showing how digital storytelling can function as both critique and possibility: revealing how technologies are entangled with inequities while opening space for collective imagination and trans-queer joy.