Sydney scores new festival dedicated to trans and non-binary voices: Transgenre

You can’t be what you can’t see, and after years of reasonable pleas for Australia’s festival scene to catch up to 2023 and curate lineups that reflect audiences being ignored, Australia’s alt trans and non-binary music scene has done the heavy lifting themselves. Today, we behold Transgenre, an inaugeral live music event set to showcase many brilliant and important voices so often looked over.

Leading the charge for the festival line up is bubblegum punk’s Cry Club, who will be holding high above their heads album #2, Spite Will Save Me. Since the albums June release, the band have wasted getting to the top of the Zietgiest, powered by their unique ability to get the party started.

Having also spent much of the year dominating playlists, headphones and feeds, Perth’s For Those Who Dream will also be in pole position for Transgenre, fighting fit from their recent run with Short Stack.

The rest of the line up is a tapestry of favourites, from pop-rocker Blake Williams, Nonnie from Adelaide and the rough-and-tumble Final Girls, with plenty of input from hitherto unheard wonders such as NOCTICA, Two Knives and Wolfjay.

Transgenre isn’t just an important opportunity for artists to be heard through the noise, it’s also an opportunity for Australia embrace and enjoy a community that has been needlessly put through it this past 12 months (and beyond).

Orchestrated by dynamic duo, prolific music journalist Ellie Robinson and FVNERAL’s Tim Blunt, Transgenre was created in direct response to how the trans and non-binary community have been treated simply for wanting to be included. When their comments for more diversity on festival line ups are met with calls to ‘shup up and do your own festival’, they bloody well did.

“It’s been a pretty wild year to be trans (to say the very least) and especially now, it’s so important to champion our community as loudly and proudly as possible.” says Robinson. “We need to be visible, defiant and thriving – and at the core of that is positive representation in all corners of society. Our aim with TRANSGENRE is to offer a bit of that representation to the Australian live music scene, showing that trans and non-binary voices are among some of the strongest and most incisive in the country.

“Personally, we hope this festival encourages people (cis, trans and everyone in-between) to pay closer attention to the wealth of gender diversity that exists in the Australian music industry, and be louder in supporting it. The show is obviously open for everyone to enjoy, but we’re so bloody keen to see a bunch of our fellow trans and gender-diverse people having an incredible day at the first-ever TRANSGENRE, enjoying some of the best live music in Australia, and celebrating their identities as excitedly as they want…

without having to worry about being judged for it.”