Trans Day of Revenge 7″ by G.L.O.S.S. (2016)
Kay Logan
“Living well is the best revenge” remains a difficult proposition for the trans community a decade after Olympia, Washington’s G.L.O.S.S. released their debut cassette and following 7″. The group – active from 2014 to 2016 – courted controversy and fallout during their all too brief lifespan. I first became aware of the group during one of several periods of homelessness in my life, arising from transphobic familial rejection as a teenager. I found at the time, a degree of solace in punk – finding community, housing, and employment where social services and otherwise normative means had failed.
While their music resolutely found itself within the realm of ‘d-beat’ (a subset of punk named after a distinctive drumbeat popularised by the eponymous Discharge), G.L.O.S.S. vacillated between advocating for community cohesion and an espousal of violent direct action, more often associated with traditionally ‘straight edge’ hardcore’ (or ‘crossover’ acts, drawing upon metal influences). Titles like “Give Violence a Chance” when espoused by their trans femme vocalist, Sadie Switchblade, found the group courting backlash, while cisheteronormative peers (working on similar lyrical ground) did not face such criticism.
The framing of the “trans debate” (taking place, for example, solely around single sex spaces) often serves as a cover for normalising the socially acceptable mistreatment of trans or otherwise gender nonconforming people. Drawing attention towards this, as G.L.O.S.S. did in many of their songs, often results in dismissal, circling back to accusations that the minority seeks only to harm the majority. The band found themselves targeted by transphobic rhetoric from musicians outside of their niche, disbanding after attaining a modicum of wider recognition. A community (as is often the case with marginalised groups) paradoxically maligned as both threatening and somehow weak; simultaneously displaying easily identifiable markers of difference, yet accused of ‘seamlessly’ blending into society, in a mass conspiracy of infiltration and subversion. Assertions that patriarchal violence also impacts trans people are disregarded, considered a self inflicted handicap that can be undone at any time.
Since then members of G.L.O.S.S. went on to form the group Physique, who thematically concern themselves with broader subject matter (more in line with d-beat tradition). Survival in the face of systemic oppression, exploitation of labour, and anti-war sentiment are some relevant themes here, connecting all those who are ideologically aligned. Associated gender neutral / nonconforming fashion tropes can also appeal to trans individuals, another distinctive reference within the subculture. The relative uniformity, also found in sardonically self-referential musical idioms, acts as a foundation through which many discover a sense of belonging. This notion is considered most fully in the penultimate track of the Trans Day of Revenge 7″, “We Live”.
A decade after G.L.O.S.S. disbanded, one needs only to consider recent legislation – in the UK and USA – intended to restrict the civil rights of the trans population, to understand their frustrations. G.L.O.S.S. affirms an existence which is routinely denied, or denigrated as dangerous, one viewed as a choice by those who are incapable of relating to a lived actuality, repeatedly, and on occasion, fatally impacted by democratic consensus.
Kay Logan is a musician, visual artist and writer, whose album Music for Counterflows (under the name Helena Celle) was released on False Walls in 2022. Kay is currently working on a number of different projects and collaborations, including Unmaking, Vow of Silence, and The Gall. More information here: patreon.com/free_entry
