Warp-Speed Existence

The Physics of Queerness and the Freedom to Be

By Tamice Spencer-Helms

There’s a lie they tell you when you’re queer.

They tell you your existence is unnatural, that you are an impossibility, a contradiction to the fundamental laws of reality. They say you shouldn’t exist because the rules don’t allow it. That your body, your love, your way of being is an error, an aberration.

But here’s the thing about laws — whether they’re social, religious, or even physical: they only hold power until something proves them wrong.

Right now, physicists are wrestling with the idea of warp fields, a concept that upends what we thought we knew about movement, space, and what’s possible. If real, a warp field would allow a ship to move faster than the speed of light without actually violating the laws of physics. Instead of pushing through resistance, it would bend space around itself, existing in a pocket of freedom where the usual forces — gravity, inertia, air resistance — simply don’t apply.

A ship inside a warp field moves how it wants to move.

And …