4 hours, 100 artists, and one 26-minute flute song: this epic new album is in support of trans rights

In 2024, the singer Sade released her first song in six years, Andre 3000 debuted a 26-minute flute song, and Sam Smith covered Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”—and it was all for the same project. They are three of the more than 100 artists who contributed original songs and covers to Transa, a nearly four-hour epic of a compilation album from longstanding advocacy-through-music organization Red Hot. 

Co-produced by Red Hot executive director Dust Reid and artist/activist Massima Bell, Transa is an effort to “center trans people and the gifts we bring to the world,” Bell says.

The album’s mix of music and spoken word tracks is separated into eight “chapters”—starting with “awakening” and “survival,” ultimately arriving at “liberation” and “reinvention.” Many of songs pair trans and cisgender artists—Ezra Furman and Sharon Van Etten cover Sinead O’Connor, trans singer Lauren Auder teams up with Wendy & Lisa of Prince’s Revolution to cover “I would Die 4 U.”

When Red Hot debuted in 1990 with its AIDS-benefit album Red Hot + Blue, the compilation of Cole Porter songs from the likes of U2, Neneh Cherry, and Sinead O’Connor “was this watershed moment of having musicians who weren’t necessarily gay stand up with gay people and really turn the tides against the cultural stigma of HIV/AIDS,” Bell says. Inspired in part by the 2021 death of artist/producer Sophie, Bell and Reid see Transa as having potential to play a similar role as Red Hot’s first release.

Like Red Hot + Blue, Transa arrives at a time when the trans community is under attack. The ACLU is currently tracking 574 anti-LGBTQ bills in the United States, and the Anti-Trans Bill Tracker has logged 48 anti-trans measures that have passed state legislatures. President-elect Donald Trump spent $19 million on a swing-state attack ad that cast gender-affirming care provided to California inmates under then-Attorney General Kamala Harris as a drain on taxpayer money. The ad and its zinger—“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”—helped shift the race 2.7 points to Trump in swing states.

Part of why these attack ads succeed is that—similar to only 15% of Americans personally knowing someone with AIDS in 1990—a majority of Americans don’t know a trans person. Polling firm Data for Progress in 2023 found that only 30% of likely voters said they personally knew a trans person, with only 21% saying they personally knew a nonbinary person. Singer/songwriter Teddy Geiger, who has a song on Transa with DJ and artist Yaeji, says albums like Transa can help combat that unfamiliarity. 

“When people have personal experiences with trans people and you really get to know someone that has been on that journey, it just clicks,” says Geiger, who came out as trans in 2017. “There are so many people who haven’t had that opportunity, and projects like this allow people [that experience].”

Transa is aimed at providing that example for a new generation at a critical time for the trans community, but doing so has required the organization to undergo its own transformation while confronting a music industry that’s worlds apart from the one that helped Red Hot make an impact in its early years.

Building a New Legacy

While Transa fits well into Red Hot’s longstanding ability to bring musicians together for a cause and change some minds in the process, it’s also the first effort of what Reid hopes will be a new legacy he is charting for the organization.

When Red Hot marked its 30th anniversary in 2020, Reid pushed the organization to adopt a new, formalized mission statement that encompassed its legacy of fighting AIDS while broadening its efforts to raise awareness of broader LGBT issues. “I believe Red Hot’s primary mission is in promoting diversity, and that’s through equal access to healthcare,” they say. 

Reid says the new focus opened the door to projects, like Transa, that are designed to showcase trans talent and solidarity from the broader industry rather than entirely focus on AIDS. “Obviously we still care about that cause, too,’ Reid says. “But this project is a way of suggesting that all of our issues are interconnected. We can’t solve HIV and AIDS if we can’t solve the issues within ourselves first.”

Island in the Stream

Red Hot is releasing Transa into a music industry that’s starkly different from the one Red Hot + Blue launched into. That compilation sold more than a million copies and sprouted a TV special, helping bankroll a nearly $1 million donation to AIDS advocacy group Act Up. 

Streaming’s dominance and physical media’s decline have completely changed how—and if—projects like Transa make money that can be donated. “When I started at Red Hot, Spotify didn’t even exist yet,” Reid says. “It’s radically shifted the way the org has operated—there were even some dormant years where we just didn’t know how to bring projects to fruition.”

With Transa, Reid says Red Hot has acted as its own label, rather than partnering with a label that would fund recording and marketing budgets, as it has for past compilations. While it means that all revenue comes back to Red Hot, it also means sales have to make up for the costs of creating the record—part of why Transa isn’t positioned as a benefit album.  

“In the ‘90s and 2000s, you could have a release that sold like, 500,000 [physical] units without any promotion, and then that would bankroll a huge gift to Act Up,” Bell says, adding that with Transa, “We haven’t wanted to promise something to the orgs we’d want to support. She notes that the organizations Transa could benefit, if possible, include the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, the New York Trans Oral History Project, and housing-focused organizations Dallas Hope Charities in Texas and GLITS in New York. As part of the release, Red Hot is taking pre-orders for a six-LP box set that will ship in Spring 2025.

“Our main mission is to raise awareness—we think this album is a historical document that will help lead people back to themselves,” Reid says. “Hopefully streaming, sync, and licensing will help raise funds.” He adds that Spotify has helped boost Transa’s profile, with Transa tracks populating personalized playlists for users, and the album getting some Times Square billboard time as the album of the month for Spotify’s Glow LGBT equity program. 

“It’s been a struggle to get on Spotify’s radar for Red Hot releases to date, but Transa is unlocking a lot of doors,” Reid says. “It was industry people at MTV back in the ‘90s that really helped platform those early Red Hot projects. We need places like Spotify and Apple to step up and do the same today.”