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........

© Fast Company