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THE EMO TO TRANS PIPELINE:

How Rock Music Helped Me Embrace Myself Before I Even Knew Who I Was

StephAn Kyriacou

The Emo-To-Trans Pipeline: How Rock

Music Helped Me Embrace Myself Before I

Even Knew Who I Was

by Stephan Kyriacou

If you had told my younger self that he would be living openly and proudly as a transgender man by the time he reached young adulthood, he would have laughed you out of the building And that’s not to say that I thought trans identities were something to be mocked back then. Rather, I was so suppressed and so deeply in the closet – I might as well have been in Narnia at that point – that I simply could not imagine myself being anything other than the always-confused-and-unfathomably-angry-about-it ‘girl’ that I had been labelled the day I was born.

Thanks to a combination of ignorance, fear, and the tantalisingly suffocating grip of a Greek Orthodox upbringing, teenage Steph was leaps and bounds away from realising his true identity. Even when my university friends softly tried to initiate conversations about it after I began exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria and incongruence with my assigned gender, I did not allow myself to examine those feelings and instead lashed out and denied everything. (Thankfully, I did come to accept my truth and now this story is something my friends and I can laugh about, which I am grateful for)

However, while I was a kid who often felt misunderstood and unsure if I would ever find my place in the world, I still managed to unexpectedly find solace and comfort in a different kind of community. The kind that sported dyed hair, fake piercings, and skinny jeans; along with a concerning adoration for lead singers who had an alarming resemblance to sickly Victorian children.

This is my extremely long-winded way of saying that I, along with a surprising amount of other trans folk, traversed the ‘emo’ pipeline as angsty teens that somehow snaked its way to us being the beautiful transgender people that we are today. That isn’t me claiming that being ‘emo’ means you’re bound to be trans, or that all emo kids are just ‘eggs’ waiting to be cracked. Rather, having the space to explore different clothing, music tastes, and self-expression without fear of judgement or harassment from the people we shared a community with crafted a safe space that allowed us to experiment with gender and self-expression before we even knew we were doing it.

Personally, I have always been a ‘tomboy’ or ‘butch’ or ‘masc’ or whatever wonderful phrase you want to use to describe someone embracing their masculinity. But I was still perceived to be a girl because that’s what I was labelled from birth, and I had yet to correct anyone. (Namely because I had yet to correct myself, but it wasn’t time for that yet.)

And despite my family being somewhat accepting of my boyish ways, I still felt like an outsider when I was around my peers; especially because my family is 80% women and they all fit into your more stereotypical ideals of how womanhood can be ‘performed’, which made my differences all the more obvious. And if it wasn’t other kids at school making me feel bad for being different, then it was the adults in my life making disparaging comments about how I just “wasn’t like other girls” and it was just “such a shame that I wouldn’t wear my hair down because it was sooo long and pretty”.

But this isn’t too much of a tragic tale. If anything, being an outcast meant I had to either accept being alone or forge a found family of my own. Which led me to a charming little website called MySpace.

A site I often describe as ‘Tumblr for emo kids’, MySpace gave me the freedom to explore myself and meet other teens who were like me without the fear of being ‘found out’ and potentially punished for straying from the path of normalcy. At the time, I was a confused kid who was always being told they were wrong for not being like everybody else, and this understandably affected my mental health in a notso-positive way. So it won’t come as a shock that, when I discovered rock and metal music, I felt seen for the first time in my life. I found bands who loudly and unabashedly created art about being cast aside, ignored, made to feel small; and I felt like I had come home. I found men who wore eyeliner and had long hair, women who rode skateboards and sported buzz cuts and piercings; and while they were all different in their own unique ways, they were united by their refusal to conform to what society said they should be. Following this, being able to dress in a more masculine way without being ridiculed and instead, being celebrated for it by others who loved the same music and embraced the same fashion allowed me to see my masculinity for what it truly was: something beautiful. Something to be cherished. Something to be revered after years of suppression and shame

Finding this safe space was healing for my soul, and, without me even realising, it began to lead me towards discovering more about myself than I ever thought possible. While coming out to myself as a lesbian in my late teen years was wonderful and freeing and somewhat easy, my relationship with my gender was not something I was ready to even glance at, let alone dissect. So imagine my joy when I found myself in a community with a bunch of people – surprisingly, many of whom were cisgender straight men – who saw beauty in gender-bending and breaking stereotypes and upsetting the status quo I remember my heart swelling with joy when I saw frontmen wearing make-up, when I read lyrics dismantling capitalism and the patriarchy, when I heard powerful women proclaiming their strength from centre stage.

All of this gave me the confidence to take the plunge and commit to dressing how I liked – and for me, that was band t-shirts and Converses and finally cutting my hair into that shaggy spiky mullet-type style that I’d dreamt about for so many years. Allowing myself to BE myself, without apology or shame I truly believe that opened the door for me to finally start to examine who I was and where my identity lay, which was the first tentative step towards me coming out as bisexual and then trans many years later.

That’s not to say that accepting my transness or coming out was easy However, it was somewhat easier having that conversation with myself after years of unintentional gender nonconformity thanks to the emo boys and girls and people that I looked up to.

Paramore, Green Day, Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance; these were bands that weren’t afraid to stand out and sing about the messy stuff, whether that was mental health, addiction, broken hearts, family dysfunction, and everything in-between. Unlike mainstream artists of the time, who performed gender in the most rigid ways dictated by societal expectations and pressures, these bands wore their differences proudly; and their emotional lyrics combined with punky melodies and poppy choruses burrowed their way into my chest and planted the seeds for the future forest of self-confidence and pride that was yet to grow.

This all relates hugely to my journey with sexuality as well as gender. Contrary to what some people misguidedly believe, it is possible to be both trans and queer One does not negate the other, and the two can – and do – coexist harmoniously within many individuals including myself. I can count on one hand the amount of straight transgender people that I know. Which isn’t to say that most trans people are destined to be bi or pan or gay or queer in any way – I’m just stating this because gender and sexuality, while different, often intertwine in ways that mean we can’t accept one facet of ourselves without also accepting the other.

And while most big names in the music scene at the time were cisgender people playing around with ideas of cross-dressing and general nonconformity, even that small sliver of gentle representation allowed for many of us to examine our relationships with not just who we were, but who we were attracted to. As a young person assigned female at birth, realising that I liked girls was a little scary at first because it opposed the heterosexual ideals that had been (poorly) cemented into my mind as something I should aspire to. But I very quickly came to love my love for women, helped by movie and TV characters including Santana Lopez (Glee) and Emily Fitch (Skins), and for the first segment of my young adult life, I was an extremely out-and-proud butch lesbian. And this was helped massively by the boyish girls and girlish boys that I watched sing their hearts out on Kerrang every evening after school. While these punks may not have been specifically queer themselves – or had yet to come out, in the case of some who have since aligned themselves as fellow LGBT+ legends – there was still that general air of acceptance that emanated from their music All those songs about being an outcast, being different, being misunderstood; they could be applied to queerness as well as transness, and it afforded me a way to feel a little bit less alone in this world that didn’t seem ready to accept anyone who strayed from the cishet norm.

While this has been a pretty upbeat reminiscence so far, I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to speak to the lack of racial diversity in the music scene at the time. While I found comfort and community as a young white queer (not yet trans) person, my peers of colour weren’t quite so lucky when it came to seeing themselves physically reflected in the people topping the rock and punk music charts. While incredible bands like Skindred, Skunk Anansie, and Killswitch Engage existed, they weren’t given the same attention and media presence as the bands mentioned previously – adding to the seclusion felt by many LGBT+ POC who grew up in that era Thankfully the rock scene has diversified since then, but there is still much progress to be made. It's all well and good talking about how progressive many bands are nowadays – and I’m not intending to sound ungrateful here because there are many bands and artists who are using their platforms to literally stand up and show their support in the name of trans and queer allyship – but that progressiveness can quickly become questionable when it is not actually inclusive of other groups who suffer from marginalisation, abuse, and government-level discrimination.

If you’d like to find more rock/punk bands featuring members of colour, you can check out playlists like the Black Rockers, Asian Rock, POC in Alternative Music, Indian Punk, and POC in Alt/Metal/Rock. Also, please do research yourself as this is just a handful of amazing POC artists that are out there, and there are loads more to discover. The same goes for LGBT+ rock/punk artists – there is now a whole treasure trove of queercore shows and trans anarchy just waiting to be unearthed all around the globe, and you don’t want to miss it.

Overall, I think it’s fascinating that I’m not the only person that this kind of story applies to. Many of my trans and non-binary friends grew up alongside me in the emo trenches, and they also relate to the twinky punk men and butch punk women we grew up idolising. In a world where there are no rules about clothing, lyrics, melodies, or who can have the most smudged black eyeliner – why the hell would there be rules about gender?

Looking back on this, as a thirty-year-old transgender man, I’m eternally grateful for my younger emo self for getting me to where I am now; and I hope the same can happen for the trans youth of today. Whether it’s a badass trans woman singing about gender dysphoria, a delicate trans man strumming a ukelele, or someone in between – I hope you all find your comfort. And I hope you have better hairstyles than I did when I was a teenager, because, well... that certainly was a choice.

Stephan Kyriacou is a 30-year-old Greek bisexual transgender man with a Creative Writing degree from the University of Winchester. I use my social media platforms to share my work, find creative inspiration, and to spread trans joy and LGBT+ positivity. I am a huge lover of dogs, snakes, tattoos, and Jurassic Park.