Draw us into your picture
The Grammy’s were last night, which feels like a very funny break to have in the midst of an eternal barrage of doomer news, but maybe it's just the kind of aside people need. Let us post about something else for a while. Give the Grammy for Best Rock Performance to a mostly-incomplete Beatles song Peter Jackson fixed with AI, and we can all look away to be annoyed about something entirely new and fully inconsequential. I will preface this by saying that I love and appreciate that anyone is taking the time to shine a light on transness for an international audience, but I have thoughts that won't go away.
Chappell Roan, who has faced insurmountable scrutiny for daring to maintain bold and consistent politics, rightfully won a Grammy last night for Best New Artist. With her time at the podium, she took an opportunity to draw attention to the need for the larger pockets of the music industry to start providing a more livable standard for artists, saying:
“Thank you to my fellow nominees whose music got me through this past year. 'Brat' was the best night of my life this year. Thank you all who listened to get me here today. Dan and Island Records, Amusement Records, my friends and my family, and, above all, my Papa Chappell, who I named myself after. I told myself if I ever won a Grammy and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels in the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists offer a liveable wage and healthcare, especially to developing artists. Because I got signed so young, I got signed as a minor, and when I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt and, like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in a pandemic and could not afford health insurance.It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system and so dehumanized to not have health[care]. If my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to. So record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a liveable wage and health insurance and protection. Labels, we got you, but do you got us?”
It is a rare and beautiful thing to see an artist win an award like this and use their time to give a voice to ideas that so often remain unspoken. This is an important, urgent conversation as the cost of living soars and the value of artists labour is diminished. Read more about this idea here. But it was her time on the red carpet that caught the most Instagrammable quote of the night:
“It’s brutal right now, but trans people have always existed, and they will forever exist, and they will never, no matter what happens, take trans joy away, and that has to be protected more than anything because I would not be here without trans girls.”
And look, it’s fucking great that she did this.
If you are somehow unaware, the United States, in direction from returning President Donald Trump and just some guy Elon Musk, has been systematically erasing the idea of trans people from all things they can touch and destroy. Information on healthcare is being erased, personal identification documents are being withheld or in some cases removed entirely, healthcare has become more precarious in nature. There is a manufactured culture of fear playing out live, right now, in an increasingly anxious and uncertain era of American politics. To take the brief moment of opportunity afforded to someone on the carpet to draw attention to the foundational support of transness that built to this moment for her is monumental. It’s just that those same trans people are not actually there.
We are not on the carpet and not given a voice to speak to our own joy that will not be erased so easily. Trans people become ethereal in moments like this, a topic on the lips of those who are bold and brave enough to call us to attention, but we aren’t there, not in body and not with strength, agency or power. Lady Gaga, in celebrating her own win for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance with Bruno Mars last night, shared a similar sentiment, saying:
“It’s such an honour to sing for all of you. I just want to say tonight that trans people are not invisible. Trans people deserve love.”
And again I will say, it is fucking great that she did this when not many others would – it is also often only queer artists and bold allies that will bear the risk of saying things like this at all – but it is funny to say trans people are "not invisible" to a room where we are also not materially present. They are beautiful and powerful words given to ghosts. It leaves me wondering when a trans artists will be allowed to stand from that same stage and say the same words to the same rapturous response.
I’ve written about this before, in an op-ed for Paste titled Always The Topic, Rarely The Voice. We are often the SEO friendly idea in a headline somewhere, and rarely seen or heard in the story itself. None of the stories about the few who called attention to our names mention the material lack of any trans people. so you can say we will not be erased, and this is true because how can we be erased from a picture we have never been fully drawn into?
Trans people do deserve love, and we will not be made invisible but a call to action is missing. Even the most well-intentioned and powerful words become hollow over time, like logs that sit in the forest and wait to be emptied of their bones. If we aren’t to be erased, the opportunities to call out our names needs to be delivered with a desire for more. Draw attention to the trans people that work in your studios, that have taken photos or designed merch for you. Name drop the young trans artists looking to make themselves heard, highlight the trans journalists struggling to find their feet. Bring trans artists on tour, connect them with your agents and your labels and your peers. Invite them into the industry that feels more comfortable talking about them than it does inviting them in.
There are so many trans people who work in music, that have poured foundations in all genres and in all corners of industry. Trans punks, trans indie rockers, trans country stars, trans pop stars, engineers, tour managers, photographers, journalists, publicists. The list rolls long. But we are only SEO-friendly as a headline, and the virality of our name only seems to take hold when we are not in the picture.
It’s not that it’s annoying, it’s just that it’s kind of annoying. This constant rinse and repeat cycle of infographics and well-meaning video snippets. Friends on Instagram share them because they are beautiful and heartwarming and I love them too, but there are rarely trans people in the headlines that bear our name. There are just these beautiful moments on red carpets and on stages, where cis people hold statutes and say trans people will not be erased to a room where trans people have never been made whole. Truth be told, I’m sure there’s one or two of us there because there always is, but the trans people in the stories about us are not on the stage. They are not the ones on the carpet stop-and-repeating with talking points and a sharpness on their tongue. We are so frequently just the idea of people, just words in a caption, never made real.
