‘It’s 10,000 people saying – we’re with you’: inside Trans Mission, a night of solidarity and joy for a community under stress
Olly Alexander and Glyn Fussell’s starry, Live Aid-inspired shindig – featuring Christine and the Queens, Kae Tempest and Munroe Bergdorf – is a show of unity in a dark time for trans people
‘We wanted to put on something as big as possible,” says the musician and actor Olly Alexander. He’s talking about Trans Mission, a night of solidarity with the transgender community that he’s put together with Mighty Hoopla director Glyn Fussell in aid of the Good Law Project and the charity Not a Phase. The jam-packed Wembley Arena bill includes Christine and the Queens, Sugababes, Romy and Wolf Alice.
For Alexander, Trans Mission is about “celebration, joy, unity”. For Christine and the Queens, it will be “a place of collective empathy”. For Not a Phase founder Dani St James, “it’s basically a super sped-up Royal Variety Performance, but with me and Olly double-kissing them and not Charles shaking their hands”.
The concert was born out of a moment of dismay for the organisers. On 16 April last year, the UK supreme court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers solely to biological sex, creating shock and uncertainty in the trans community. The government has yet to approve or reject guidelines by the Equality and Human Rights Commission that could exclude trans people from spaces such as public toilets, but trans women and girls have already been forced out of institutions like the Women’s Institute and the Guides.
“That ruling made a lot of people wake up,” says St James. “It was not only damaging for what it was, but also for the confusion it caused, the social stigma it heightened and the anti-trans voices it empowered. It was really important to get on the front foot and do something.”
Immediately after the ruling, the musician and writer Tom Rasmussen began drafting an open letter calling for solidarity from the music industry. “I feel like trans people and queer people are always on guard for another serious attack on our rights,” Rasmussen says. “You’re sort of ready to go.”
By 2 May, the letter was online, with signatories including Charli xcx, Sam Smith, CMAT, Dua Lipa, Florence Welch, Self Esteem and hundreds of music industry professionals. “The names keep flooding in,” Rasmussen says. “The knowledge as a trans person that an artist you love loves you back is a big deal. That feeling can carry you through some pretty dark times. It certainly has for me.”
The supremely well-connected Fussell, who Alexander and St James describe as the Bob Geldof of the operation, had already been pondering a fundraiser for the trans community. The letter accelerated his plans and provided a longlist of potential performers, schedules allowing. “We quickly filled all the slots,” Alexander says. “We could have done multiple nights with the response we had.”
One inspiration, of course, was Live Aid in 1985. Another was the 2014 movie Pride, which dramatised the solidarity between LGBTQ+ activists and miners during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. The lineup duly combines trans artists (Kae Tempest, Jasmine.4.T) with cisgender allies queer (Beth Ditto, Adam Lambert) and straight (Beverley Knight, Sophie Ellis-Bextor). This broad coalition extends to the choice of speakers, from Munroe Bergdorf and Juno Dawson to Nicola Coughlan and Ian McKellen.
“I would say that’s the vital component,” says St James. “It’s wonderful that we can give some trans performers the opportunity to perform on such a globally known stage. But for that message to be amplified by high-profile voices that are external to the community is going to make people listen up a lot more.” As the Grammy-nominated artist MNEK puts it: “There’s strength in numbers.”
While the concert has a fundraising dimension, via ticket sales, merchandise and donations, its purpose is also to galvanise awareness and action. “Our tagline is ‘A Night of Solidarity for a Lifetime of Change’,” Alexander says. “I’m worried about this very loud anti-trans sentiment that is taking over mainstream media. I’m hoping that this is a beacon that will say: ‘Well, actually, there are lots of people who love and support trans people and we’re not going to be quiet either.’”
Not so long ago, an event like Trans Mission would not have felt so necessary. When St James began transitioning in 2009, “it was a completely different time”. As recently as 2017, Theresa May was promising to reform the Gender Recognition Act to legalise self-ID. “In the 2010s, there was an explosion in visibility, and it all felt quite glorious and exciting, but that also creates problems,” says Rasmussen. “There was a lot of hope and then resistance to that hope.”
Around the turn of the decade, negative coverage of trans people in the UK press increased exponentially, alongside a slew of well-funded lawsuits. Anti-trans activists, who had begun by focusing on women’s sports and women’s prisons, escalated to restricting trans healthcare and excluding trans people from all single-sex spaces. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, transphobia is the only form of prejudice to have increased in recent years, with those describing themselves as not prejudiced falling from 82% to 64% between 2019 and 2024.
“It’s crackers,” Rasmussen sighs. “I really don’t know whose interests it’s in to limit the rights of the marginalised. It’s hard to access employment and housing. It’s hard to maintain relationships. There’s high rates of suicide. Don’t get me wrong, trans life is amazing and beautiful. But walking down the damn street is still hard.”
Alexander is reminded of section 28, the Thatcher government’s notorious 1988 prohibition on local authorities “promoting” homosexuality. “Some of the things that are said about trans people are literally lifted from what was said about gay men back in the 80s – they’re not safe around children, they’re perverse, they’re deceitful,” he says. “Those messages have been used against queer people throughout history. I see transphobia as the cousin of homophobia, which is the cousin of misogyny. I think we’re all in this together.”
St James argues that trans people have become a convenient scapegoat in a time of political crisis: “It’s a classic case of the boogeyman tactic: it’s not us failing you, it’s these devilish trans people.”
Unsurprisingly, the solitary politician on the bill is the Green party leader Zack Polanski. The Labour government has banned puberty blockers, delayed a trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, introduced new restrictions on social transitioning in schools, and fudged its response to the supreme court decision. “I’d say it was cowardice,” says Alexander, who no longer votes Labour. “For a Labour government to be so scared to have a line on this just shows the spinelessness of our leadership.”
Given the dearth of supportive voices in politics and journalism, musicians and actors have become essential advocates for trans rights. “The music industry has always been a place where marginalised identities have had a chance to flourish,” Alexander says. “There’s more of a coalition there.”
Well, up to a point – many senior music executives declined to sign Rasmussen’s open letter. “That didn’t surprise me at all,” Alexander says. “My experience of people at major labels is they’re all very scared of losing their jobs.”
Christine and the Queens – the pseudonym of Rahim Redcar, who transitioned in 2021 – believes that attacks on trans people play into the larger project of far-right politics, with its reactionary insistence on strict gender roles. “Trans identity became stories of pain, mistakes, the punishment, the loneliness,” he says. “I myself suffered from that loneliness but then I realised that’s what they want – to divide us as a community. We question a whole system of repression. I would like to remind people of the dignity of the choices people make to live life in a system that is so harsh on everyone.”
St James hopes that Trans Mission will embolden ground-level progress in the form of “people having not-so-nice conversations with their uncle who’s made a horrible comment at the kitchen table, or overhearing something at the office”. For trans people themselves, she says, the concert will send the message “that 10,000 people got together and said, ‘We’re with you’”.
“I wish for a night of highly elevated energies,” says Redcar. “I would love some kind of collective revolt where we could stop feeling like shit about everything. We could stop feeling so powerless.”
• Trans Mission is at Wembley Arena, London, on 11 March