On the air in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

Hello, my good fellows, and welcome to Trans Pirate Radio! I'm your friendly neighborhood deejay, and I'm here to talk about... well, all sorts of things. I could talk about travel; I could talk about exercise; I could talk about sports; I could talk about arts and crafts; I could talk about film and entertainment; I could talk about current events. One of the advantages of being somewhat neurodivergent is picking up all sort of interests over the years, and it is likely that many of these will show up at some point.

That said, this site has a focus: chronicling the trans experience in general, and (as a side bar) how music has shaped trans people and trans experiences. I want to go into both parts of these, and why I feel this is so important, especially now.

First, the trans part. To understand this, I may have to borrow a bit from Sean Connery, from "Highlander":

"From the dawn of time we came... moving silently down through the centuries. Living many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the gathering..."

From the Dawn of Time We Came. We were the ones who walked the paths in between, who saw and experienced what cisgender people did not, and could not; what most people took as given, we saw as construct, as farce, and this gave us insight as to what lay beyond ourselves. We were the shaman, the priestess, the wise one. We danced and worshiped and composed our hymns for Queen Inanna while Abraham's ancestors were still herding sheep in the Fertile Crescent. We were the ones who played our lyres to sing to Mother Cybele in Phrygia, in Greece, and in Rome. Even the Abrahamic religions have heard our voices in praise and worship; for centuries, we explored alongside you the spiritual aspects of Abraham's Y-hw-h, Jeshua ben Joseph's God, and Muhammed's Allah. Our notes to the song of history stretch back millennia, and echo to the present day.

And, ultimately, we were the witches you failed to burn. Those that cannot understand, refuse to understand, will constantly try to persecute what doesn't fit their narrow worldview. Whether that is prosecuting us as heretics and witches, or declaring us "mentally ill" and locking us in asylums, or simply burning our writings and murdering us in the streets, we have long endured persecution from people under the delusions and intoxications of power.

And, yet, despite that, our voices, our songs remain. We are still here.

We have always been here.

We will always be here.

So... why the music part, if the main point is to talk about what it means to be trans? One thing I learned very early on is that life has a soundtrack. Music is a part of our lives, and wherever it is absent, we will create it from ourselves, for ourselves. How often do we sing quietly to ourselves through our lives, or dance to a song on the radio, or whistle to ourselves to some invisible tune? We can't escape the music, because the music is a part of us, a part of our lives, our souls. This is true for trans people as much as any other. But... as shown before, our perception of the world is changed as a result of being trans. What is a given for others is contradiction for us; we see the lie buried in others' so-called truths. This provides a character to our experience with music; songs and melodies that seem incomprehensible or jarring to others are coherent and harmonious to us, and vice versa. Put simply, some music speaks to us in ways that it doesn't for cisgender folks.

Note that this does not mean that I will focus exclusively or even predominantly on trans artists. The trans experience isn't exclusively trans, any more than there is an exclusively cis experience. But there are some experiences that just tend to speak more to the gender-expansive crowd - and I will cover some of those here.

In the same way that the music I cover will be expansive, so will the genres. While most of the music will no doubt be modern popular music of some type, at least one of the songs I will cover will be going as far back as the 1680s, and I will almost certainly be going back far further. This of course means that all sorts of genres will make their way into this platform. To give an idea, the next post is going to delve into opera, because it is so relevant to an upcoming event.

Both of these together lead to the overall theme of this place: Trans Pirate Radio. Societies have long tried to dictate the message broadcast to the masses, fearing any message that could be considered transgressive. So "official" channels are censored, "official" media is throttled to keep any message from the masses. And yet, visionaries have always found media to send their message out to anyone willing to listen. From easily-destroyed pamphlets to underground blogs to the eponymous radio stations off of the coast, people have found ways to get their message across.

So... Trans Pirate Radio. The broadcast has begun.

I'm not planning on charging anything for this; these words are mine and mine alone. If you wish, if you find these words interesting, you can subscribe if you'd like.

Keep the channels open, my friends. Silence really does equal death.

-- Miss Dee Jay.