‘We Created a Pitchfork Fest for Trans Rights’

Jael Holzman writes and speaks with locomotive urgency, as a political and climate reporter as well as a co-founder of the Washington, D.C., punk trio Ekko Astral. You sense the directness is an after-effect of time spent spelling out terrifying implications of processes people hadn’t deeply considered. Holzman, who left Axios in 2024 as the only out trans reporter covering Congress, pushes for a realignment with realism by poking holes in lofty narratives on social media and vanquishing bunk logic on the climate beat, while pondering the plight of the world’s least protected people in Ekko songs like “Pomegranate Tree” and “Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between L’Enfant and Eastern Market.”

But this is not a doomer’s numbing sense of hyperawareness. Holzman is an optimist. That’s why she helped launch Liberation Weekend, a two-day music and arts festival in D.C. planned for May, alongside her Ekko Astral bandmates and the Gender Liberation Movement, as a way to fight eroding rights and support for the trans community. The band and collective have tapped trans artists and allies — including emo and skate-punk revivalists Home Is Where and Pinkshift, indie rockers Speedy Ortiz and Ted Leo, and genre-smelters Bartees Strange and L’Rain — to share wares and kick proceeds to future rallies and actions. Liberation Weekend aims to build on the ambitions of 2020s showcases like New Haven’s T4T Fest while avoiding the docile pleasantries of larger organizations beholden to corporate and political donors. Explaining the origins of the idea over the phone, Holzman hammered on the importance of musicians making use of their power to move cultural needles.

Talk about how Liberation Weekend came together.
I had been reporting for Rolling Stone on why Democrats were exceedingly likely to fail to stand up for trans people in this moment. I kept hearing from people saying the only thing that’ll change is ordinary folks going out of their way to say, “We stand for this.” So I finished my story and got a buzz on my cell from someone asking if I wanted to cover a protest that Gender Liberation Movement was helping put together at bathrooms in the Capitol complex. One of the reasons I left reporting in Congress is, as the only out trans reporter on the scene at the time, I genuinely believed it was going to be an unsafe place for me to work. I knew it would be easy for them to ban me from using the restroom legally and that’s a working condition no employer could ever really negotiate with.

Seeing Gender Liberation’s willingness to protest while no longer on the Hill, I thought, That’s pretty cool. But I don’t want to cover it. I want to help. I thought a music festival was the best way we could leverage the energy we have in Ekko land, and the energy and exposure that GLM has. We wound up spending the next four months putting together what I believe to be the largest single music festival to raise money for trans rights. We have had trouble at times getting folks onboard, but a lot of people have really come through the floodgates to help.

Are there people saying no to you? 
There are companies that have said no to sponsoring, because they don’t want to be publicly associated with this event. We’ve had bigger companies, some that we as a band received support from in the past that said, “We’re willing to give you stuff, but can we not have our name on it?” It is not ridiculous to think that at a moment when federal dollars are being conditioned upon whether or not you rescind your support for the trans community, that money and public support would diminish. That’s what’s happening across the nonprofit space and private sector.

This festival feels like you’re trying to renegotiate what Pride can look like after the apparent death of the rainbow-capitalism wave that flooded parades with bank floats.
There’s a reason we’re not working with Human Rights Campaign or GLAAD on this, not to say those aren’t fantastic organizations. Right now there is no nonprofit that is currently trying to develop a comprehensive vision of the future of what trans inclusion in America looks like other than Gender Liberation Movement. I personally wanted to create an event that would be a signal to artists to partner with GLM and organizations like it instead of the larger, dare I say, more passive and cautious advocacy organizations that aren’t meeting this moment with a forceful defense of human rights that we need to see.

I often think of a quote — one of the few things Steve Bannon ever said that I fucking agree with: Culture is upstream of politics. If you are able to define the culture, you can define the politics. I have never seen my articles mean as much to the hearts and minds of kids in this country as much as one song I’ve written, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not lost on me that this is taking place at a time when even just traveling to this country for the event is going to be incredibly difficult. Multiple countries have warned against trans travelers coming to the U.S. I feel a bit complicated about being part of a global gathering of queer people in Washington, D.C., for that reason. However, there has never been a more important time for as many people as possible to show force. Not just force. Really, this is about solidarity support, empathy, and what we as humans value. Polling on trans rights is confusing and noisy. The issue of discrimination often polls in favor of supporting trans people. For American politicians to abandon us when there are people who support protecting us from discrimination feels like an issue of echo chambers and of folks not seeing a broad cultural movement that would change their behavior.

A big piece of the pie is widespread fear of making people uncomfortable in media and entertainment. I think about Beyoncé dedicating Renaissance to the queer community, getting creatives paid via features and samples, but also a doing photo op with Colin Allred, who wouldn’t defend trans youth in Texas against Ted Cruz’s smears.
You can go even further than that. Why are we holding SXSW in Austin? I hate to say it because we really want to perform at SXSW as a band. But at Politico, I had chronicled the stories of families who had to flee Texas when state leadership began declaring parents of trans youth to be child abusers. That was 2022. And the entertainment industry has been routinely holding this global gathering of art and of culture for people’s promotional cycles in a place where trans people are afraid to go to the bathroom. Jasmine.4.T spoke about this at a Rolling Stone Future of Music showcase. No one else playing there was speaking on anything and here comes a trans lady from the U.K. saying, “In order to play this thing, I couldn’t legally go to the bathroom in the airports and I had to hold in my pee for like 12, 14 hours.”

I don’t fully blame artists for being too guarded about important issues because I think fans like it this way and the press facilitates it. You’ve spoken out a lot about political media flattening and spinning big stories and I wonder if you see the same routines in a music landscape where no one ever asked Kendrick Lamar about dropping slurs and getting deadname-y with a family member on his 2022 track “Auntie Diaries.”
I think people are profoundly afraid and unsure of how to market art in an environment where identity is debatable. Whether or not you are who you say you are is, for many, debatable. The social democratization the internet was supposed to provide instead gave way to echo chambers. On the artist side, I still feel there are bigger musicians out there finding ways to persevere and be subversive. We take a lot of cues from the last ten years in British punk rock. The U.K. is often about ten years away culturally from wherever the U.S. is. We could easily argue that tariffs are our Brexit. We’re going to declare independence from the way the world works. After Brexit, you had Idles and Fontaines D.C. and a wave of garage. It feels like we’re going to have a resurgence, a cultural reaction to what’s happening right now. If we don’t, we’re fucked as a society. I never forget about how “Alright” was revived by protesters in 2020. It became a language people could use. It’s interesting that you bring up Kendrick’s other song. That’s also language people can use. Even though I responded harshly at first, I like the song now. I’m just happy anyone said something positive about the trans community in a rap song. Subversive, transgressive. Say something, right?

I don’t know if the audience truly craves transgression. The response to Ethel Cain and Chappell Roan speaking out was very imperialist.
But look at the streaming numbers on Macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall.” They’re ridiculous and it’s actually absurd that it required Macklemore to share the message. I think a big reason our first record was received so well is before we recorded it, we had a long conversation about the world that we wanted to create with our art. Oftentimes making music is a selfish exercise. You’re getting feelings on paper in a way that appeals to as many people as possible in the audience you seek. Too few artists today sit down and say, “What is the positive impact that I’m going to make with my art right now?” I think about how “Alright” measures against “Not Like Us” and how “Not Like Us” is both magical and also harmful. I think about Brat and how Brat differs from previous Charli work and how a lot of the pop that was the biggest last year was so selfish you could almost tell Trump was going to win.

I started to lose it last summer covering musical non-reactions to current events. The joy looked very “last party before things get dicey.”
When we dropped “Pomegranate Tree” last year, we were the only artists I could see with a song on the anniversary of October 7 talking about what happened. I didn’t see anything else on platforms. That song was the first that got playlisted as fuck from our band after our album came out. No one got upset. We live in an algorithmic society. People are not yet accustomed to the language of the moment being disruption. They think being background music is the way to succeed. AI is making that increasingly irrelevant. But the best way for artists to grow is to try to disrupt the way things are going. One of the fastest ways to do that is speech. The pure mechanics of getting music of that tier out mean that it’s very, very difficult to speak to the moment as it’s happening.

I’d argue that tonally confusing background music has been the vibe since maybe 2021.
I try to speak with optimism on this front because it happens to be the only place where I actually have seen people grow and change and where I see conversation happening. When we toured with Idles, we urged the gang to post about trans rights more. So they started speaking about Palestine and trans rights more. Those kinds of quiet conversations are ways our voices can actually impact the way people think. People revere musicians and songwriters more than they do politicians and other elite leaders at this point.

I see Red Hot’s TRAИƧA as a kindred spirit in the realm of modeling the world where the newsmaking hangups about gender and sexuality don’t matter, so it makes sense to see a presence at Liberation Weekend.
Speaking to why we picked what artists we picked, it ultimately came down to curating a representative example of what a truly inclusive trans-forward and trans-fronted music festival could really look like at that scale. Also I wanted it not to suck. I really wanted it to flow and have artists with something interesting to say. We’re showing, not telling. You can have two full nights and a day of stellar art across genres that’s inclusive of the trans experience. We also have Ted Leo performing and — I can’t announce one of the special guests, but he’s not the only white cis guy playing. These are artists who deeply and seriously think about how to include trans people in their own art. For us, having those perspectives there too was really important, if only to show through the sociology of elite signaling that if you’re a white, cis, straight guy, you can be very loudly for trans rights and be cool. Pitchfork Fest is not happening this summer. You can come to this instead. We created a Pitchfork Fest for trans rights.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the outlet and year Jael Holzman worked as a reporter.

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