Transa, a galvanising new music compilation in support of trans rights, was born out of tragedy. In 2022, the groundbreaking trans musician Sophie died after an accidental fall; the Transa co-founder Dust Reid had already been thinking about a project that centred trans and non-binary people, and this enormous loss kicked the project into gear.
“That loss was very visceral for me – when Sophie was lost, I was really acutely thinking about all the gifts trans people give to the world,” Reid says.
The producer reached out to a friend, the model, musician and activist Massima Bell, to ask whether she would be interested in working on a compilation, and together they have created one of the most remarkable, ambitious albums of the year. The vast project features more than 100 artists, including Sade, Claire Rousay, Ahya Simone, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Sam Smith and more, contributing to 46 songs that span three-and-a-half hours. “I was like – we need to create a narrative through this album that positions trans people as leaders in our society,” says Reid.
The compilation comes from Red Hot, the legendary music non-profit founded to benefit the fight against Aids. Over more than three decades, its albums have featured artists from Madonna to D’Angelo. John Carlin, Red Hot’s founder and CEO, believes a compilation like this can still have enormous impact, even in such a toxic political environment. “Music is a really powerful force – why did [Red Hot] start using music? The reason it’s so important, particularly in terms of transphobia in the United States, is that music crosses boundaries,” he says. “We need to reach people who are outside the tent, who don’t agree with us. It’s getting harder and harder everywhere in the world.”
Both Reid and Bell had been connecting with nature at the time they began working on the compilation, and they felt that it was essential to speak to the trans community’s connection with the natural world.
“This understanding of my own transness [is] so wrapped up in connection with the larger nature around me,” says Bell. “[We wanted] to create a project that really spoke to the naturalness of transness, and our connection with the earth. And I think that that really informed, then, how we structured the project itself, which was this meditative, sprawling journey.”
For Reid, Transa offers a perspective on trans life and art that isn’t always on offer in mainstream conversations. “[Trans visibility] was hyper-focused on aesthetics or sexuality, and Transa’s heart is really about how there’s a unifying spirit that connects all of us,” he says.
True to that idea, Transa features artists from across the musical spectrum contributing original songs and covers – the folk musicians Hand Habits and Bill Callahan cover Kate Bush’s Deeper Understanding, for example, while Sade contributes Young Lion, her first new material in many years. The experimental musician L’Rain collaborates with the New York Trans Oral History Project on a cover of two songs by the indie musician Anohni, who herself collaborates with Moses Sumney on a cover of Sophie’s Is It Cold in the Water?
There are threads that run throughout the compilation, including a set of new poems by the New York artist and downtown fixture Eileen Myles, one of which is read by the Euphoria actor Hunter Schafer over a track by the saxophonist Cole Pulice.
“It feels important to be able, be willing to say that, collectively, we think this matter is the social issue of our moment, of our gendered moment,” says Myles. “I think there’s something a little heroic about it – I can’t think of anybody else who’s doing anything at this scale, in terms of who they’re inviting, and what kind of attention they assume the project will get.
“What I’ve heard of the record, everything seems very experimental and queer and kind of magical – it seems to be in an aesthetic lineage that’s progressive and expansive, and it doesn’t feel like a commodified thing,” they say. This feeling, they say, reminds them of the downtown New York queer lineage in which they’ve long existed. “It feels like what I would want to be around, and what I feel like I’ve been around – it feels like a continuation of an aesthetic or a world. There’s a timeless quality about the cuts that I’ve heard.”
The rising artist Claire Rousay collaborated with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on a song titled How Sweet I Roamed, which pairs field recordings with a William Blake poem. Reid first approached Rousay about contributing a few years ago, and the idea of a collaboration with an artist who usually works outside her milieu immediately appealed.
“Pairing me with a middle-aged, straight white dude, I was like: ‘That’s super interesting,’” she says. “Nothing about the track that we did was even remotely about any kind of identity. I was stoked to do a collaborative project that’s like – the work that I was creating didn’t have anything to do with the project in a narrative sense.”
The freedom to make work outside the established theme of Transa speaks to an inherent tension of the compilation: many artists from marginalized backgrounds have rallied against the expectation that they only make work that speaks to their identities. “I think every time somebody talks to you about work … it’s imposing this idea that you have to talk about [identity] and have to be vulnerable in a certain way,” says Rousay. “They’re like: ‘We want to give you the space to talk about you.’ And [it’s] like, really, all you’re doing is basically reinforcing the power structures that already exist, where you are the ones that get to tell me what to do and how to do it. [People ask:] ‘How does identity impact your work?’ and it’s like, it doesn’t.”
Bell says she was conscious of this tension when working on Transa and worked to make sure that the compilation didn’t feel like it was exclusively recruiting artists for their transness. “Every trans person has a different feeling or way that they want to represent themselves, and I think with this project, one of the keys was just incorporating all different kinds of artists, and not having it just be trans people, and not just having it be cis people speaking for trans peoples’ experience,” she says. “The project does center around trans people in a really large way, and that’s what it comes out of, but I think we wanted to have a narrative that also spoke to the value of all these talented artists coming together and making something that wasn’t exclusively talking about transness.
“My hope for this project, with having all these trans artists on it, is to give them a moment where their transness is being seen as a gift. I think so often, any kind of artist who is trans or marginalized can see those things as being an obstacle to any kind of success or recognition,” she says. “My hope is to have a moment where instead of that feeling like an obstacle, it’s feeling like something that is such a gift, and it’s just part of the beauty of all these artists as a whole.”
Rousay says that, in an ideal world, a compilation like this could create some level of understanding among those who have previously misunderstood trans experience. “My hope would be that somebody not super familiar with the trans experience would see an artist that they really like that’s mainstream and popular rallying around it, and be like: ‘OK, if they can understand it, then I can also understand it,” she says. “People love to project themselves on to celebrity; [they could] be like: ‘If my favourite artist is into this thing, maybe I can look at it a little bit closer.’ That’s my hope, but I don’t want to tell people what to do.”
Myles thinks that while trans and non-binary people are “a target” in the United States right now, trans people still “feel and seem deeply empowered”. “This record, it’s everybody’s scene – it’s where people want to put themselves, in the same way that disco was so gay, and everybody was at the party,” they say. “Trans stuff feels that way today. I think that trans people are the explainers of the tribe, and are out front. I think that’s remarkable and beautiful.”
Carlin says that the joy and freedom of Transa is one of its greatest assets; he feels it is what will ultimately help the compilation change hearts and minds of those ignorant to trans existence. “One thing that I’ve always really believe in, in terms of Red Hot’s projects, was that if you don’t know somebody in a particular category, it’s easy to demonise them,” he says. “If you get to know them, it’s easy to realize that we’re just human beings. Maybe Sam Smith brings you in, or Sade brings you in, or anybody else on the record. And then all of a sudden, one day, you wake up and you don’t think that trans people are weird or different – you just go: ‘Well, they’re just people.’”
Transa is available from 22 November
