TRAИƧA Casts a Potent, Holistic Light on Transgender Awareness

In 1989, John Carlin and Leigh Blake founded a 501(c) organization called Red Hot in response to the ongoing AIDS epidemic—which was ripping through the United States but especially in New York City, where AIDS was a completely preventable disease but, as the world was knocking on the doorstep of the 1990s, people forgot that. Red Hot’s primary goal was to raise awareness about safer sex and to change behavior, as Carlin puts it. “The secondary goal was, really, to change the narrative around LGBTQ+ rights,” he says. Carlin had been an entertainment lawyer in the city, until he saw many of his friends, including Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, become ill. “It was a very personal thing, at the time,” he says. “But there had been a lot of ‘celebrity musician benefits’ as live concerts, which were very successful—Live Aid being the gold standard. Before that, there were artists coming together to fight nuclear power, for world peace, South Africa fighting apartheid. But we felt that the live concert event was a little tired at that point, so we came up with this multi-media idea.”

That idea turned into Red Hot + Blue, a compilation album of Cole Porter reinterpretations by artists like Sinéad O’Connor, U2, Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry, Tom Waits and Neneh Cherry to raise money for ACT UP. Every song would be accompanied by video, and Red Hot tapped folks like Wim Wenders, Jonathan Demme, Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Neil Jordan to film the companion pieces. It may seem cliché now, to build a campaign around 20 pieces of visual media, but Red Hot + Blue came out during the height of the MTV era. Red Hot, in its earliest iteration and through projects that were relatively marginal in comparison to mainstream pop music, was able to generate millions of dollars through sales due to alliances with media outlets like MTV—a cultural entity that had a significant impact in not just the United States but around the world.

But a partnership like that just doesn’t exist anymore; the hottest television networks still around can’t move the needle like they used to. “The music industry is a beautiful thing, from a creative perspective, and artists, in some ways, have become the moral compass of our culture,” Carlin says. “But the industry, the business, is just terrible right now. And the fact that it’s dominated by streaming platforms, and that people aren’t putting their economic vote, muscle and might behind artists they like and the causes they like, has really disempowered things—compared to when we started.”

Carlin is transparent about how Red Hot’s longtime focus on the “L” and “G” is LGBTQ+ became old hat. “We felt like it was time to focus on the ‘T,’” he affirms. When he, Dust Reid and Massima Bell started working on the compilation that would become TRAИƧA, they had no idea how dire the modern political climate in the United States would become. During the 2024 presidential election alone, Republicans spent almost $215 million on TV ads attacking transgender people. On Sundays during football games, local stations in my home state of Ohio were especially heavy on cut-and-paste, baity clips of Kamala Harris “voicing” her support for free gender-affirming surgeries for felons. “TRAИƧA was designed and to—and serves the purpose of—pushing back against that and celebrating the trans community at a time when it’s under attack,” Carlin says. “It’s providing a positive beacon.”

Part of Red Hot + Blue’s success came from the hordes of supporters who cared about not just the gay and lesbian communities, but about fighting AIDS and mitigating the crisis around it. “But they were really like, ‘Well, what do I do about it?’” Carlin explains. “Some people marched on the streets or became members of ACT UP, but I felt like Red Hot + Blue was a lightning rod for people to feel positive about doing something and standing up, and I’m hoping TRAИƧA performs the same function for people of all stripes to really say, ‘Transphobia is ugly and mean-spirited and bad, and we want to stand up for something that does the opposite.’”

Looking at the TRAИƧA tracklist, it’s impossible not to feel seen by the amount of community stretching from track one to track forty-six. Some of the most important musicians of my lifetime—Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Moses Sumney, Hand Habits, André 3000, Kara Jackson, Adrianne Lenker, Fleet Foxes, Cassandra Jenkins, L’Rain—are here, putting a hand on the shoulders of many. But I look at these artists and I think, “How could their audiences be anything but supportive of trans people and queer people?” It’s a narrow train-of-thought to have, as transphobia lingers everywhere in this world, but it begs the question of whether or not a benefit compilation in the 21st century can make the crossover and land in front of the people who need perspective and education the most. How much of it is internal organizing, and how much of it is reaching the right people?

“The scope of the project, to give it a sense of importance that is bigger than just an album, was meant to bring people together—to do collaborations, because collaborations are key to any kind of activism or community organization,” Carlin says. “Speaking for myself, a cisgender, older man—it is about educating and reaching out. One of the things that really struck me about why I wanted to support this project was I feel like it’s very easy to demonize people, whether it’s trans people or Jewish people, Black people, Muslims, if you don’t know any. This project, and what’s important to me, with my limited background, is getting to understand trans people better and understanding that they are people, the same with everybody in the LGBTQ+ community. Trans people have always existed, and Red Hot really got behind that—it’s not the message that you’re hearing clogging the airways with hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising.”

Asher White, by Tayla Roberge

The origins of TRAИƧA stretch back to 2021, in the months after SOPHIE passed away unexpectedly at the age of 34 in January. The compilation’s two architects, Reid and Bell, found light in SOPHIE’s work and the way her boundary-pushing style continues to impact the modern culture of music. Alongside musicians like ANOHNI, Wendy Carlos, Laura Jane Grace, Jayne County and Arca, SOPHIE is one of the most important trans musicians ever—and some of those aforementioned names even appear on this project. TRAИƧA is “the universal human experience of transformation and change.” That’s what life is, and Red Hot is utilizing the voices of trans artists to immeasurably illustrate that narrative, because they’re the ones who are, in Reid’s view, “most acutely tapped into that.”

Bell and Reid met in 2020 while they were both involved in the shooting of a short film that was, in Bell’s words, “about returning to nature in Upstate New York.” “We connected really deeply on shared music that we love, particularly the music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland,” she says. “In the wake of SOPHIE’s passing, Dust was really wanting to honor the legacy and the beauty of trans artists and musicians and reached out to me, asking if I would help make this project that centered trans people. It was something that had been in the back of their mind, but that was the catalyst to be like, ‘Hey, this actually needs to be in the world and we can do this.’” “I don’t necessarily identify as a trans person, but there was a transformation happening within me,” Reid adds, “and the only people that I felt like I could relate to or resonate with were other trans people. I just felt like, disproportionately so in my life, that trans people were on the forefront and they understood what I was talking about and feeling, opposed to others that I knew. Trans people seem to be more connected with nature, more connected with themselves, had done more inner work. I was like, ‘These are the people we need to be listening to and following, as a society.’ And it’s ironic, because we’re doing the opposite. We’re making it harder for them to live.”

The initial conversations between Reid, Bell and Carlin were exciting, and the breadth of TRAИƧA is reactive of that by the way in which it spans all walks of life and encompasses many genres. It’s an album that centers trans voices while asking cis artists to step into the conversation, as well. “It helps take it out of this trans bubble and makes this message something that can reach more people,” Bell says. Tapping into that collaborative spirit that Carlin mentioned, Bell and Reid were able to orchestrate “dream ideas” that the trans artists on the record had going in, like claire rousay teaming up with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, or Laura Jane Grace doing a song with Jayne County and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, or actress Hunter Schafer reading an Eileen Myles poem over Cole Pulice’s arrangements. “Any liberation activist in history, whether it be James Baldwin or Martin Luther King, you name it, they’ll tell you that ‘our liberation is bound together,’” Reid adds. “The cis artists that we invited to be part of this project, it probably wouldn’t have been just anybody. Those were the people that had a connection to nature.” Bell includes that even the “ostensibly cis artists” she and Reid asked are reckoning with gender in important, profound ways—especially musicians like Adrianne Lenker and Perfume Genius.

Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas teamed up with Alan Sparhawk for a new rendition of his band Low’s “Point of Disgust.” Prior to the collaboration, Hadreas only knew Sparhawk from the music, but he’d written rather extensively about loving Low’s music and Mimi Parker’s voice, especially on songs she sang alone, like “Point of Digust.” Movement has always been so integral in every Perfume Genius composition, and Hadreas’s performance of “Point of Disgust” is nothing if not enriched by the act of motion—falling hard, falling fast. It’s like a ballet. “There is a real somatic quality to a lot of Low’s music,” Hadreas says. “When I first heard it, when I was younger, it was like this weird mirror—aspiration—to where I know my body wants to go.” He explains that doing a cover song is hard, because you want to be faithful while bringing yourself into it, but that he “felt very emotional” before even getting to the studio with Sparhawk. “I have such an emotional attachment to the song, and I just wanted to have that all be in there—the love I have for them and their music, and what it’s done for me, and how much I love Mimi’s voice and the lyrics.”

“Point of Disgust”’s refrain—“Mercy me, never last”—lingers, and Hadreas and Sparhawk didn’t have to decorate it very much. Getting choked up, Hadreas recalls how the two musicians felt very emotional when working together, and that their collaboration made for a healing, holistic formula. “Making music, for me, is hard,” he says. “Being in the studio is really hard, and that doesn’t always feel good. Performing it is, and your relationship with it afterwards, but the process can feel not spiritual or connected. Writing always feels very connected to me, I always feel like I have some throughline there that feels beyond me. But the studio can be so tactical, and there’s so many other people there, too, that it’s just harder for me to feel brave enough to go there. I always end up doing it, but it’s hard. But it was easy with Alan, to just go to this unspoken place really easily. That was really rewarding for me.”

Perfume Genius, by Camille Vivier

TRAИƧA is 46 songs long, reaching the four-hour mark in runtime. The project is broken up into eight chapters—“Womb of the Soul,” “Survival,” “Dark Night,” “Awakening, Grief,” “Acceptance,” “Liberation” and “Reinvention,” a choice meant to mirror the original pride flag’s number of colors. “With a majority of the artists, we talked about having a dynamic range in the sound—not always being locked on the grid,” Reid says. “Some of the songs that are locked on the grid are earlier, in the ‘Survival’ chapter, and then once you get to ‘Dark Night,’ things start to have a little more organic feeling. Tempos change. The ‘Awakening’ chapter further that kind of conceit, and then you come back on the grid again and it opens and closes and oscillates.” The idea was for TRAИƧA to be a work of art in and of itself, a lengthy, all-encompassing blueprint for future generations to be able to, as Reid so aptly notes, “find possibility, no matter how divorced from our inner-nature we get as technology progresses.”

“This is going to be a document of love and pure human expression,” Reid declares. “I go camping and I’ll program really long playlists for friends that we listen to, and I would want it to have this meditative experience that would challenge the people I was curating these things for. I would time them with the rising of a moon or a sunset. Through these experiences, you come out changed and you’ve reflected and you’ve explored yourself in ways that you didn’t know that you had these corners of yourself. I wanted TRAИƧA to challenge people in that way, and it needs that length to allow for that space and that time of reflection.”

Everyone on TRAИƧA is involved because they believe in the potency of trans voices. And the justice behind that is such a major, non-negotiable truth. These artists, all 100+ of them who took part in this compilation, aren’t just covering songs for a benefit—they’re making a piece of art that challenges people to reconsider the comforts that are outside of their own. “I don’t think of myself as an activist or a political person,” Hadreas says, “but just by nature of showing up and sharing things and talking about what’s important to you and who’s in your life, it ends up being a political thing. And that takes a lot of bravery. It’s such a weird time, and the stakes feel really high. But it also feels hopeless and that there are not stakes, it’s just on fire. So, you just try to carve out any space you can for hope, or to commiserate with people, or to burn something, or to protect something.”

The compositions feature a mixture of trans elders, like Jayne County, Eileen Myles and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and trans artists who are more green in the music industry, like Nina Keith and CLARITY. Bell and Reid didn’t put limits on themselves on what the compilation could look like. They knew they wanted it to be long and meditative, charting out a specific spiritual journey. “We thought really specifically about that kind of inclusion, because we wanted to help build this archive of transness—have this range of voices, chart our histories that have, often, been pushed to the margins,” Bell adds. “We wanted to draw these lines from the work of Jackie Shane in the ‘60s to the present day, and it informed the messaging: Trans people have always existed.”

Asher White, who performs a cover of Judee Sill’s “Down Where the Valleys Are Low” with Eli Winter and Caroline Rose, speaks greatly of the “reverence and integrity” lent to every single part of every single song that goes into a compilation like TRAИƧA. “I had always understood this, as a listener,” she says. “It was very thrilling to have this confirmed in the production of [‘Down Where the Valleys Are Low’] and every single stage of it. It’s been so thoughtful and intentional. It’s so the opposite of the cynical idea of a charity comp, where it’s about name recognition. Everyone I’ve interacted with, in any level of the project, is treating it like it’s their primary solo project.”

White chose “Down Where the Valleys Are Low” because of the “disquieting power” she found is Sill’s work, how it’s a hymn and a psalm that reaches towards spirituality and songwriting in both directions. Like a prayer, Sill’s lyrics are a way of “tapping into this enormous, cosmic network that transcends time and space.” To cover a song that is already predisposed to a timeless pursuit is a sacred and intense undertaking, and Asher, Winter and Rose saw the deep, internal liberation of “Down Where the Valleys Are Low” fitting perfectly in the arc of TRAИƧA and the chapter (“Acceptance”) it exists within. “It’s jaunty and there’s a levity to it, but it belies this abysmal darkness,” she says. “And the arrangement of that song is weirdly sparse. It sounds like a demo. There’s this kind of chintzy organ line and a bunch of spectral vocal harmonies—it’s effectively a gospel song, but Judee has a decidedly un-soulful voice. She has this very white girl, fake-Southern-twang thing happening. The cumulative power is totally disembodied, devastating. It doesn’t give itself fully to any of the directions that you would imagine it to. It is really amorphous.”

One of the biggest names involved in the project is Sade Adu, whose song “Young Lion” is this beautiful apology to her 28-year-old transgender son, Isaak. “Young man, it’s been so heavy for you,” she sings. “You must have felt so alone. The anguish and pain, I should’ve known, with such a heavy burden, you had to carry all on your own.” “The truth of that song is such a huge part of the project,” Bell says. The only person involved in the TRAИƧA production who worked with Sade directly was Heba Kadry, the project’s mastering engineer, but Reid and Bell both communicated with her longtime producer and bandmate Stuart Matthewman, who was involved in the Red Hot + Arthur Russell Live! event that Reid produced for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Bell had written Sade a letter that the singer became really moved by, and Sade would pay attention to Red Hot’s continuous updates to the mixes and change her song to compliment what the project was becoming. Sade also chose where “Young Lion” went in the sequence, placing it in-between Cassandra Jenkins, Bloomsday and Babehoven’s cover of Palehound’s “Aaron” and Moses Sumney, Sam Smith and Lyra Pramuk’s cover of Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

Kara Jackson, by Lawrence Agyei

TRAИƧA features André 3000’s voice on album, even though he’s speaking in tongues during a 26-minute fantasy. Julie Byrne, whose articulations of grief are among the most immense in all of modern music, radiates on “Come Back Different” with Nina Keith and Taryn Blake Miller. Sam Smith and Beverly Glenn-Copeland re-imagine “Ever New” into an even more grieving, mystifying work of awe. Wendy and Lisa from The Revolution sing a galvanized, reclaimed “I Would Die 4 U” with Lauren Alder. And whether it’s Yaya Bey meditating on “Survivor’s Guilt,” or Hand Habits and Bill Callahan performing Kate Bush’s “Deeper Understanding,” or CLARITY and Clairo singing “Many Ways” together through soft textures of Auto-Tune and distortion, the tracklist is adorned with originality in the context of reinvention. It is an ever radical and beautiful amalgam of the greatest performers and writers this modern and hurting world knows. “Every artist put their own stamp [on the album] that you couldn’t even design,” Reid says. “We could not have designed this. It’s a framework that they all imbued with their own creativity, and I think that’s what makes it greater than the sum of its parts.”

White meditates on this, too, citing how overwhelming the “diversity of what the trans voices are saying” was to her when she heard the compilation in full for the first time. “There’s no shortage of trans media,” she says. “I mean, there is, but the inundation of more trans stories—it’s about a wider breadth of them and a greater versatility in what those stories look like. I don’t think we are used to hearing trans voices be mundane or goofy. I think the trans voices that we typically hear—and the trans stories that we know—are sad and angry, and rightfully so. It is painful, a feeling of not being understood and of being alienated. And, to me, it’s unbelievable to hear so many trans voices in so many different modes and hear so many new, literally unprecedented roles that we’re hearing these voices in.”

In the past, many compilations have featured spare demos or live recordings that artists had lying around in a Dropbox folder, or someplace tucked away. They collect names, raise money and advocacy, donate those funds and then the records disappear from the public eye or get scrubbed from the internet for good (unless you purchased it). With TRAИƧA, none of the artists were ever going to be able to just dig into their vaults and make it stick. It’s a project that, by default and design, is going to open the floodgates for a new landscape of trans art through intentionality and liberation. “I think that has felt very narrow, at least as a trans musician,” White says. “I feel like I’ve always struggled to slot myself into the archetypes that I feel will be recognizable and already exist. Having this sprawling map of trans people with radically different experiences, who are in such enormously different musical environments, is so affirming. It’s such an amazing rewrite of a thus-limited scope.”

Kara Jackson, whose debut album Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? remains one of my favorite releases of this decade, punctures through dysmorphia with how she sings “shame is my shape” on “My Name” with Ahya Simone and Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth. She teams up with Bartees Strange and Anjimile for a take on TV On The Radio’s “Wolf Like Me,” too. “My Name,” however, is an original composition by Jackson, who was interrogating raw feelings of grief from engaging with the writing of Joan Didion and “pulling from being born into a society where a part of yourself and your identity is always being chosen for you.” “Choosing to be yourself, there’s a certain grief that comes with your body,” she says. “Even as a Black woman, just choosing to be myself is, sometimes, like a type of grief, because I know I can never really achieve a certain type of womanhood that is expected of me. You take the shape of shame in a lot of ways, and I think that all of us do it—across genders and across experiences.”

Also present is an Arthur Baker track, “Love Hymn,” featuring the late Pharoah Sanders. Sanders is one of two TRAИƧA artists (along with Jeff Tweedy) to have appeared on a previous Red Hot comp—having worked on the 1994 album Red Hot + Cool: Stolen Moments, which, in Carlin’s words, “proudly got to reintroduce Pharoah to a contemporary audience” at a time when he was largely forgotten. The inclusion of “Love Hymn,” a song that is 20, 25 years old (but sounds like it was recorded yesterday) and features contributions from players in New Order, Mogwai and Four Tet, came about while Red Hot had been talking with Baker about collaborating on a full project together. “My friend Bill Coleman, who introduced me to Arthur, played me a bunch of unreleased tracks and [‘Love Hymn’] just blew me away,” Carlin says. “I was like, ‘This is one of the best unreleased tracks I’ve ever heard in my life. This just has to be out there in the world.’ The fact that it has Pharoah Sanders is incredible, he’s playing like he’s in his prime. It’s just extraordinary.”

Carlin has watched TRAИƧA go on a journey of its own, becoming an extraordinary and inspiring spirit and spark of creativity that’s lent its focus on the trans community from the inside. But the world beyond the compilation was becoming bifurcated—a society becoming more progressive and vulnerable while hate grows. The identities of millions of trans Americans have especially become distorted, even before the recent presidential election concluded. “Many people, in the past week to 10 days, are coming to terms with the fact that things are getting worse in America in a very profound way,” Carlin says. “At the same time, certain values and moral responsibilities remain. I’m proud that we’re doing this project. I’m frustrated by where America is and where it seems to be heading.” In that sense, personal freedoms have been limited by the convenience of social media, online shopping and streaming platforms—all of it working together to disempower creative people.

L’Rain, by Alice Plati

But Red Hot has figured out how to keep its chin up amid all of the economic downturns the industry has gone through—and how it’s become part-and-parcel of the larger social and political problems that America is currently facing. “It’s incredibly rewarding that Red Hot has done this work, that I’ve been able to keep it going all these years and that it remains a platform for the kind of expression that TRAИƧA is bring to the world,” Carlin concludes. “Maybe not as many people want the flowers, but it’s still a beautiful thing to have the bouquet and hand it up.” The lives and causes of queer people have echoed through music genres and figures that span lifetimes and mediums, like George Gershwin, afrobeat, Fela Kuti, tropicália, Sun Ra and blues, via Red Hot compilations. From Red Hot + Country, to the Aaron and Bryce Dessner-orchestrated Dark Was the Night and Day of the Dead compilations, Carlin’s organization has offered exchanges of experiences from people who have contrasting perspectives on life. Johnny Cash and members of the Wu-Tang Clan exist in the same canon thanks to Red Hot, a particularly lovely synergy valuable to a niche group of people like myself—and one that makes the intentions and promises behind TRAИƧA all the more life-affirming.

There is a moment on TRAИƧA, during the “Awakening” chapter, where Taja Cheek—who makes music as L’Rain—performs a nine-minute song called “People Are Small / Rapture” with Voices from the NYC Trans Oral History Project. Interview excerpts are woven into her ambient, experimental composition. The track’s length is ironic, as it flirts with the 10-minute mark because Cheek aimed to de-center herself from the composition. She spent hours listening to recordings in the project’s archive, wanting to create something that would offer a “life for the work outside of the work.” “I felt like pointing to other thinkers and makers would give people something else to look into,” she says.

Cheek became fascinated by ANOHNI’s work on her label Mexican Summer’s 2023 compilation Blacklips Bar: Androgyns and Deviants – Industrial Romance for Bruised and Battered Angels, 1992-1995, and she used those compositions as a backdrop for her own construction. In a choir of conversations spliced into one euphoric and wounded sermon, one voice breaks through: “I don’t go to Gay Pride,” he says, “because it almost breaks my heart.” “I didn’t want to linger in a space of grief,” Cheek admits. “That felt irresponsible, but, also, it felt like it was something that is real and was real and is something that needed to be foregrounded in some way.” Cheek interpreted ANOHNI’s work to be a reflection on the AIDS crisis, and she wanted to find way of thinking about the ecstatic concept of a rapture that could be not abstracted from grief, but evocative of the other dimension of grief: resilience, joy and hope. “I work at an organization that was also being born at that moment; I’m surrounded by artists that are still thinking about that moment in history and how it impacted a place like New York,” she continues. “There’s still this gaping hole of all of the people that were lost and were abandoned by the government. It’s really real. I wanted to, somehow, honor that—because it’s an important moment in history, and one that is very much still a part of my present and our present.”

L’Rain’s presence on TRAИƧA is a critical one for me, as she was also on the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack earlier this year. As a non-binary person (and a L’Rain fan), seeing her support for projects that center trans voices is a profound, indescribable gesture—and Cheek finds her participation on records like these to be just as important and radical and communal. “I know that my audience is very queer, and I am in a lot of queer circles in my art-making and professional world. It feels really meaningful to me,” she says. “And, on a personal level, I feel like so much of my own construction of identity and understanding of myself and my own relationship to my womanhood has happened alongside queer and, specifically, non-binary people in my life. That has always been a shining light for me, and I feel like I received so much guidance from my queer, non-binary friends before they probably even had that language to describe themselves. That was what we were working through, and I didn’t really understand that at the time. But now that I do have the language, I’m like, ‘I understand now.’”

During the pandemic, Red Hot began hosting town halls on Zoom with its community—people who have dedicated parts of their lives to the organization—and Reid was suddenly holding conversations with people who found safety in those early ‘90s compilations. Red Hot + Blue was the first lighthouse of hope for a lot of queer folks around the world, and TRAИƧA is going to enter that lexicon immediately and become an invaluable text for more trans people than you, or I, or Red Hot could ever imagine. But TRAИƧA, too, is going to be a beacon of hope for humanity at-large. Reid and Bell certainly think so. “We’ve not really created a society that’s conducive for trans people,” Reid says. “It’s society that needs the hope. Trans people are going to find the possibility, regardless of the climate. We’re going to not lose hope but, hopefully for the sake of the rest of the world, they’ll start paying attention to trans people and the lives that they lead and the art that they create and the gifts that they give to the world.”

We hope that you’ll consider pre-ordering the TRAИƧA limited edition vinyl box set from Red Hot at this link.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.