liminal spaces, free xones: 50 records that embody a notional feeling of transness

Excellent list - will check the few I haven't heard and have a think how to vote

Tender Buttons v. Night Time, My Time v. Throwing Muses s/t. Thinking on it...

Throwing Muses s/t leapt out at me.

dang I prob woulda voted for that, I missed it, went with Faith/Void

That Hope Sandoval is one of my fave records of all time and it doesn’t get enough love.

Good selection in general!

this is a really wide-ranging guide to this sort of feeling. i'm looking forward to listening to more of these. i had always meant to get into throwing muses - i guess now is the time.

Very interesting list. I’m not a trans person but Is This Desire and Monster press some interesting buttons. Is Frank Ocean’s blond a different kind of thing?
Also HTRK Psychic 9-5 Club but I guess “The Body You Deserve” tips me that way.
SOPHIE too obvious?

or similarly aya’s im hole

awesome list, whole lotta thumbs up. replica is my favorite OPO and just an album that means a lot to me in general. the kassem mosse is probably my favorite dance album of the 10s. rip is magnificent of course…

Victorialand, possibly a top 10 favourite album.

Was listening to a lot of Broadcast about a year into my transition so Tender Buttons absolutely tracks.

Close seconds for OPN, Muses and Victorialand.

For some reason retrofuturism/hauntology strikes me as very trans despite predominantly being made by cis folx, so my personal list would def have some Boards of Canada, Ghost Box etc. The Advisory Circle is obvs v trans on many levels.

Flowers of Romance is the ultimate "between" two things record to me, not exactly what they (PiL) were nor what they would become, sort of half-finished or sketches of songs, but something otherworldly and singular.

Faith/Void split is good too...except I've never listened to the Faith side

one of the things i find most beautiful about transition is that each transition is unique. the liminal spaces we pass through are completely different, mediated not just who we are, but by the beautiful creatures we are _becoming_, beyond the horizon of our imaginings until, well.. until well after it's already _happened_.

ghost in the shell is on my to-watch list. the anime soundtrack i'd put on my transition soundtrack is yoshihiro kanno's "angel's egg" soundtrack.

i'm listening to kenji kawai's soundtrack now. i've never seen the movie but i'm looking at the image on the upload. a pale woman wearing only blue boots with blue hair and pink eyes. wires and mechnical things and for some reason the head and shoulders of a man protrude out from her. are those diodes poking out of her left leg, or are they tubes of lipstick? she is floating in the center of everything, curled in the fetal position. she is holding a snub-nosed gun. she is looking right at the viewer. right at me. right at _you_.

i'm not voting, but right now, i don't know what speaks to the transfem transition experience more than this.

wait now i'm listening to the young thug, definitely this. see, this is why i'm not voting.

one thing that I feel is notable about this list is how many of these releases feel like the capture a moment of musical transition/transformation within the context of the artists/band's career. There's only a handful of debut albums here, and those there are seem like paradigmatic examples of albums where the debut feels almost out of focus (in a good way) compared to a more sharply/clearly delineated aesthetic articulation on a later release (e.g. the Garbage debut versus Version 2.0; Pretty Hate Machine versus The Downward Spiral; the Throwing Muses debut versus The Real Ramona or University).

But more commonly the choices feel like a the artist/band embarking on a conscious shift away from a previous (very clearly expressed) perfected-aesthetic in order to explore the hinterlands of their artistry (e.g. The Velvet Underground, Tori Amos, Seefeel, PJ Harvey, Broadcast, Nona Hendryx, Cocteau Twins, The Knife, Deee-Lite, PIL).

this will need some thought. for me the obvious pick is velvet underground s/t mainly because of candy says, which is so otm about transness i find it hard to believe it was written by a cis person. i can get tearful just thinking about that song tbh

also what goes on, which i find all inspirational in an i will survive kinda way. lyrics are also a bit trans

One minute born, one minute doomed
One minute up and one minute down
What goes on in your mind?
I think that I am falling down
Baby, be good, do what you should
You know it will work alright
Baby, be good, do what you should
You know it will be alright

the anime soundtrack i'd put on my transition soundtrack is yoshihiro kanno's "angel's egg" soundtrack.

haha very appropriate :)

great list - went with broadcast. Kinda feel deformed have a second one post White Pony but not sure which one I’d pick atm.

Magnetic Fields’ Charm of the Highway Strip is one of those albums on mine.

for better or worse i grew up with classic rock and i've barely heard any of the other records on this list besides the third velvet underground album - i'm listening to some of them now while writing this. right now it's "gowns" by red state. i love this too.

looking back on that album from the vantage point of what i guess i'll arbitrarily call "post-transition"... it's surprising how much of it doesn't seem to describe what i went through. maybe it did at the time. everything keeps changing.

i think a lot about "candy says"... well, it's a good reminder whenever i start believing that cis people can't understand the trans experience. lou reed was a cisgender man, but god, that song just speaks to the heart of the trans experience.

but.

but i've come to love my body. i'm a fat middle-aged hunchback trans woman with a barrel chest and i fucking love my body. not everybody has that experience, and i'm still not really sure how or why that happened. it wasn't something i _wanted_ or _expected_ but it's a good thing, isn't it? a good thing that i love my body? we all have different experiences.

still, the song, with this voice, this new, clear, beautiful voice, that sounds like lou and yet not like lou. there's something in that.

the songs that click with me now, that seem to describe my experience, are those first three on side two. i worked so hard for so long Before and i never got it right, and then... opposite action. the opposite of what i expected of myself, of what others expected of me, wine in the morning, breakfast at night, sure! it works. beginning to see the light, because it's softer now. i started seeing myself, the person i wasn't, the person i might be, the person i _wanted_ to be, in a dream, and it was alright. my life was saved by... different song.

how does it feel to be loved? that's what i learned. to love and be loved.

it's liberating. it feels like... being set free. for what? to where? something new. no ultimate truth, no correct answer, no Final Form. this is something i wanted from transition, and i got. to change without end. to find new illusions and reshape them, find the truth behind them and within them. to explore strange new world. to seek out new life. to boldly go where no man has gone.

that's the story of my life. wrong and right? both those words are dead. good, bad, i'm the one with the estrogen.

so yeah those are the songs that click with me. "after hours"... that was what i _wanted_ my transition to be, to be the girl with the lilting, singsong voice who shut the door to everything. i remember telling my girlfriend that, late last year, that the light struck terror, that didn't want to ever have to see the day again. it couldn't last, that feeling couldn't last. a lot of the stuff that i wanted... transition made those things impossible. i consider this to be a _good thing_. i've spent my whole life trying to close doors, trying to shut out the light, and it doesn't _work_ anymore. i feel so good. i feel so fucking good. i'm a woman, and i'm beautiful, and i love myself, and i love my body. that's now my fundamental _truth_, that's the thing i keep returning to, as much as the trauma, past and present, persists, as hard as it hits.

one doesn't often get the chance to vote for skindiver for... anything really, so i'm taking advantage of this rare opportunity. such a nice album.

that isn't to say that aren't other records on here i love just as much (or maybe more) —victorialand, throwing muses, janet, flowers of romance, etc.— it's just that the more folks pay attention to skindiver, the better off we'll all be.

Killer list. I went Tindersticks. Falling faintly and faintly falling on my beginning and my end.

I saw Flowers of Romance on this list, ivy, and knew exactly what you meant.

still, the song, with this voice, this new, clear, beautiful voice, that sounds like lou and yet not like lou. there's something in that.

It helps knowing that Doug Yule sang it, though maybe in later years Reed's louder declamatory tone would've given the opening lines a finality.

it's liberating. it feels like... being set free. for what? to where? something new. no ultimate truth, no correct answer, no Final Form. this is something i wanted from transition, and i got. to change without end. to find new illusions and reshape them, find the truth behind them and within them. to explore strange new world. to seek out new life. to boldly go where no man has gone.

this is really beautiful kate, thank you for this, and for the rest of your great post.

many of these releases feel like the capture a moment of musical transition/transformation within the context of the artists/band's career. There's only a handful of debut albums here, and those there are seem like paradigmatic examples of albums where the debut feels almost out of focus (in a good way) compared to a more sharply/clearly delineated aesthetic articulation on a later release

Enjoying ivy's thesis with this list and contemplating all these releases in the context of Tim F's observation above as well. I'm struck by how many of these albums were growers for me, murky and bewildering on first listen, but beguiling too, beckoning to keep exploring.

several xps personally i've come to hate my body but i also love it. i now have feelings about my body. pre transition i tried to avoid thinking about it whenever possible. it was just a thing that i happened to live in. these days i can appreciate how beautiful it is but it also causes me a lot of hurt, so much seems wrong.

i read a while ago that medical transition is the greatest subversion of expectations placed on your body at birth. it really is ya know. we physically become something new. it's absolutely wild

and i gave around the fur a listen for the first time in years, that album fucking slaps. transest nu metal record

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

thank you everyone for contributing excellent posts to this thread <3

jeez what am i gonna vote for

recently was on verge of tears for the entirety of american football lp3 so maybe that

but which Throwing Muses self-title

I made a playlist of songs from the 10 records on the list that are familiar to me, chosen based on my interpretation of the opening post. The most uncanny of these was Is This Desire, though Victorialand is probably "best".

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I don't know all of these albums. Of those listed, Pretty Hate Machine is probably my favorite, although I know that's pretty pedestrian.

Hoping to get closer to what Ivy is talking about in the OP, my vote is going to Dewdrops in the Garden. It wasn't my first Deee-lite album, but it was still a pretty pivotal record for me. I got clued in about Deee-lite a few years after the fact by my friends who had turned into ravers, and who I aspired to be more like. As a cis-het teenager, Lady Miss Kier was one of the first woman artists who I learned to embrace without shame. I got clued into them by friends who had turned into ravers over the years, while I had been steadfastly bigoted against electronic music. I was more quietly defensive about women in music; I liked the idea in theory, but if asked, I probably would have said something dumb like "Donna Jean Godchaux was a member of the Grateful Dead from '71 through '79" or "Morgan Fichter played violin on the best Camper Van Beethoven album."

Dewdrops definitely became my favorite Deee-Lite album when I heard it. Amazingly technicolor and openly, sweetly sexual. Not long after buying it, I did get clowned about it by some goth friends I was giving a ride in my car. "You're listening to CLUB MUSIC?" "Yeah, I like it."

Alas for Tender Buttons in second place, but I concede Victorialand is a worthy frontrunner.

voted vu

i detransitioned (not exactly, but something like that) about four years ago and announced it on facebook with a link to "farewell transmission" by songs:ohia, which was probably as on the nose as you could get.

didn't know broadcast at the time, but god if that album doesn't capture a lot of the things i felt when i was younger

idk where else to post this but this is a song i've been lowkey obsessed with for many years. this seems like the most appropriate space i've come across to ask what other people think it's about-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc1D0fqLp_8
solbakken - "women's own" (1999)

i've always thought it was about trans identity and kind of mocking traditional ideas about gender.

(i could be way off and it's nothing like that)

guitarist/vocalist empee holwerda went on to form kanipchen-fit with his wife and they did an album. half of the songs on it could be considered modern protest music and their politics are very left-leaning, anti-establishment. he's an amazing guitarist too, btw.

"find whatever essence that comes from within"

xp that’s such an OTM song I’d never thought of in that light until you mentioned it

Now we'll all be brothers of the fossil fire of the sun
Now we will all be sisters of the fossil blood of the moon

Think I went with Broadcast - great poll and insights from everyone!

xxp detransitoning (even if it wasn't exactly a detransition) must have been very difficult, depending on how long you'd been out as trans for I'd imagine it could be even harder than transitioning. I hope that things are going OK for you

solbakken - "women's own" (1999)

i've always thought it was about trans identity and kind of mocking traditional ideas about gender.

(i could be way off and it's nothing like that)

― "another slice of death, please." (Austin)

even if it's not... a lot of the songs that connect with me on a trans level, i don't think they're really "trans songs". and there's always... in transness, there's often this ambiguity. there are plenty of trans women who do rock the tradwife aesthetic, and it's not entirely ironic.

i get the sense sometimes cis women... you know, all the shit women go through, the misogyny, the constant negative reinforcement, the constant feelings of inferiority, not pretty enough, not young enough, too _emotional_, i didn't get any of that before. dressing up with lipstick and heels and pearls to vacuum the house, it's onerous, it's stupid, and some of us _want_ to do that. at least to, you know. at least to _try_ it, to see what it _feels_ like. i wanted to know completely what it feels like.

and i won't, of course, i won't ever know _completely_, because part of it is getting those messages from birth, being told that from birth, and i wasn't. people have only been telling me that for a couple of years now. people said other things, mind you, said things that made me feel awful, made me feel like shit, and they didn't, a lot of the time, know they were talking about me. i'm not making a comparison, but a lot of times it doesn't get recognized that we have that experience, that everyone acting like i was a man all the time sucked, because i wasn't, i didn't _want_ to be. elsewhere ava posted a song "do this or die", and of course for a long time i _didn't_ do this, and what that meant was that i was dying inside, always dying, never quite dead but not really _alive_.

anyway, that was the past, and i'm not making a comparison. i get misogyny and oppression when i pass and when i don't, and yeah in some sense i _wanted_ this, i signed up for it, because i was tired of dying, because for me, this is better than dying. it's not that way for all of us, and that's why a lot of us don't transition. i hate the misogyny and oppression, as much as anyone, maybe more because i see how stupid and arbitrary it is. this idea that i'm now categorically different because the subcutaneous fat deposits on my face are slightly different, that this somehow makes me inferior - i'm furious. i'm not just furious about how i get treated, i'm furious about how we all get treated, everyone who suffers from this stupid patriarchal bullshit, whoever we are, whatever gender means to us - women, men, both, neither, something else entirely.

but, of course, i'm a woman, so i've learned not to show it most of the time.