Trans Country Artists—Making Music With a Conservative Following
Billboard's Country Music charts might suggest the genre is a bastion for white, cisgender men and conservatives without any room for LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender musicians, but nothing could be further from the truth.Not only do transgender country music artists exist, but they are thriving even as some claim the political and cultural climate in the U.S.
increasingly places a target on their backs.Musician Eli Conley ran a queer country night in San Francisco where "so many people could be unapologetically queer, but also unapologetically into country music because I think a lot of times their idea is that country music isn't for us," because, for many, it's associated with the rural south.He told Newsweek people were "explicitly looking for" queer country music and that was better than him "coming in the back door and saying I'm a trans guy doing country or folk music and having people look at me like I have two heads."But what does it matter if transgender people have a seat at the country music table?
For starters, it is one of the most profitable genres in the U.S. earning about $4 billion in revenue annually but has also been at the center of the cultural war against transgender people.This year has been a record-breaker for anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in state legislatures across the country— more than 500 and counting— so much so, that the Human Rights Campaign declared a "state of emergency" for LGBTQ people.
Almost half of those introduced bills target transgender people including access to often life-saving and gender-affirming care for minors, access to sports, dictating which bathroom they can use, and in Kansas, making it mandatory their driver's license and birth certificate match the gender.
