Trans Country Music Artists Keep Thriving

Despite the genre's conservative image—and the ongoing culture wars—some performers are defying stereotypes

- SHANNON POWER

A QUICK GLANCE AT 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 not only do transgender country artists exist, they are making music and building audiences 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 tells Newsweek people were "explicitly looking for" queer country music and that was better than "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." What does it matter if transgender people have a seat at the country music table? For one thing, it is one of the most profitable genres in the U.S. earning about $4 billion in revenue annually. For another, it 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 that their driver’s license and birth certificate match the gender they were assigned at birth.