There’s One Group Thrilling Dance Floors in a Way Few Expected. Here’s How They Did It.

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The floorboards on the roof deck creaked under the stomping of fashion sneakers and high heels. Under a gray May sky, a few dozen trans women, miscellaneous queers, and dancers of other persuasions shook their bodies to the beat as Chelle, a DJ in an oversize T-shirt and sunglasses printed with the chaotic design of the Maryland flag, put another record on the turntable. Swaying to the bass in the DJ booth with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, she worked the crowd up with ecstatic house and disco. When she kicked off a track with a particularly nasty groove, a few delighted dancers threw up their hands and cheered.

The event was the doing of Free Pussy, a nomadic Washington, D.C., party that presents all-vinyl sets from women and trans DJs at venues across the city. This one was on Mother’s Day, or as it was billed in its cheeky-sexy promo materials, “Mommy’s Day.” One of the hostesses, the spunky xXabiXx, played her own set in a bikini top and generous hoop earrings; later, Kiernan Laveaux, an in-demand DJ in town from Pittsburgh, spun some weirder and darker techno selections.

At another venue, or in an earlier moment in nightlife history, a DJ lineup of all trans women would have been a rare sight. But this party was held at Transmission, a D.C. space that opened last fall as one of the few—if not the only—nightclubs in the world with trans women at the helm. And it took place at a time when trans women are driving electronic music and nightlife culture to an unprecedented degree. Trans DJs, party promoters, lighting technicians, sound engineers, festival curators, and music producers are becoming a critical mass in a scene that has long thrived on queer creativity but seldom made space for queer ownership.

Eris Drew, a celebrated DJ on the dance music circuit, came out as trans a little over a decade ago, at age 39. When she first started touring a little while later, there were only a handful of trans women on the DJ lineups at queer events she played, and fewer who had crossover success playing big festivals and clubs with mixed crowds. For the most part, even where trans women were present in the industry, they weren’t in leadership positions. “We weren’t really that integrated into it,” Drew said. “We were really gatekept out of it.”

These days, it’s a different story. In the midst of a hostile political climate that grows more threatening to trans Americans by the day, trans nightlife is flourishing. “There was some kind of tipping point that happened, where enough of us were getting together and creating opportunities for each other,” Drew said. Now, trans women aren’t just more visible in dance music—they’re “taking the reins over the modes of production.”

Before she and her business partners opened Transmission in October, Ellie McDyre was frustrated by the precarious infrastructure of underground music in D.C. A veteran of the city’s DIY punk scene, McDyre had watched cherished spaces that hosted shows get raided by cops, shut down, or destroyed by months of hard use. As in the viral case of Last Ditch, the struggling COVID-conscious queer bar in Western Massachusetts, the constraints of capitalism can make it difficult to meet the needs of a values-driven community.

“It always sucks to see a space that you love and that is militantly accepting of you—that will throw down if somebody is rude to you or misgenders you or anything like that—exist in a spot where it’s not sustainable,” McDyre said.

Along with Kelli Kerrigan and Kabir Khanna, McDyre rented a tucked-away, no-frills space above a restaurant in Chinatown, where they spent a year throwing raves, underground parties, and queer events under the moniker 618 Productions. It provided proof of concept: Soon, their audience outgrew the venue. They began looking to expand into a more permanent home, an adaptable space they could mold into the club of their dreams.

At the time, there was nothing in D.C. nightlife that gave them everything they wanted. Some clubs brought in top-quality DJs, but the crowds were “douchey,” as Kerrigan put it. Some of the best events with DIY vibes were at semi-legal venues that couldn’t be counted on as lasting community spaces. There were killer pop-up parties that dissolved when the organizers broke up or moved away. One club was too small, another too mainstream, another lacked an outdoor area for smoking.

“Transmission came out of a desire to create something that wasn’t there,” Kerrigan said.

The group landed on a space in the H Street neighborhood, a corridor crammed with restaurants and bars. The building was the former home of the Rock & Roll Hotel, a popular music venue that hosted small-to-mid-sized music acts before shuttering in 2020. The Transmission crew signed a lease that made them responsible for all repairs and upkeep, in addition to rent. Though the building had sat empty for five years and wasn’t particularly glamorous, the team went into their initial inspection with confidence. “We were like, ‘I think we’re good, right?’ ” Kerrigan said. “And the inspector guy was like, ‘You guys are not good.’ He was like, ‘Are you messing with me?’ ”

Facing a daunting renovation with little wiggle room in the budget, the team gathered their friends. Anyone who’d ever made an offhand remark about wanting to help get the venue off the ground got a phone call or text. The Transmission crew was expecting just a handful to come through. “And suddenly, 50 trans women and musicians in D.C. appear, like, ‘What can we do to help?’ ” McDyre said.

Together, they ripped up floorboards, fixed holes in the walls, installed baseboards, and painted three stories’ worth of dancing space. At one point, just as some volunteers were fretting about their incompetence with power tools, someone sent a reassuring text: “The butches are coming!” When the butches arrived, they ripped out an entire bar and redid the drainage piping.

It was an emotional sight for McDyre; she was overwhelmed with gratitude and “cried a lot” as she watched everyone pull together to get the job done. For Kerrigan, those warm fuzzies came with a weight of responsibility. After accepting the generosity of so many community members, she said, there was “some sense of needing to perform—like, ‘Jesus Christ, I hope this thing doesn’t close in four fucking months.’ ”

People are drawn to dance music for a litany of reasons beyond the urge to party. They flock to the club to feel flashes of transcendence, to express their deepest selves, and to liberate their dancing bodies from the strictures of social conventions. “So when people see a trans DJ on a stage, for them, I think that’s a pretty tight fit,” Drew told me. “We end up symbolizing what people want dance music to represent: real love and freedom.”

Drew videochatted me from Amsterdam, on a swing through Europe on a summer tour. She was joined by her partner, Maya Bouldry-Morrison, an equally renowned DJ who performs and produces under the moniker Octo Octa. The New Hampshire–based power couple, whose first album together dropped earlier this month, often does gigs as a pair, exchanging smooches and sweet nothings as they trade off at the turntables. They also throw parties and release records from trans artists through their label, T4T LUV NRG, named for the sustenance they find in connections with other trans people.

As a raver in the ’90s, Drew didn’t have any language or cultural models to help her articulate who she was—a trans lesbian. “I felt so constrained and so careful in my normal life,” she said. But at raves, “my body would express something in that beat that was something more feminine, something freer.” Each party brought together misfits and marginalized people seeking community outside the mainstream. “It was like a little lifeline to other queer people … where we could share in this thing called house music.”

In those days, trans women were most visible in nightlife “as the muse, as the go-go dancer, as the girl at the door that tells people where they can come in,” said Juliana Huxtable, a DJ, artist, and writer from New York. Huxtable herself started out this way, as a hostess and dancer, years before she would headline bills as a DJ. It wasn’t until feminists began pushing for more women in electronic music—and certain parties began to court a queerer population, as opposed to just gay men—that Huxtable felt “invited to participate as a cultural producer,” as opposed to “the interesting, eccentric trans girl that people think is really cool and want at the party, but is not part of the mechanisms and technology of how the party functions.”

To Huxtable, dance music is a particularly inviting art form for trans people. On a dark, crowded dance floor, you’re apt to find less sexual shame and more gender experimentation than in the world outside. Also, between the lighting, sound systems, and electronic music production, the club is a tech-heavy space. “Historically, there’s been a strong affiliation between trans people and technology,” Huxtable said, nodding to the medical interventions of gender-affirming healthcare. “The metaphor of the cyborg and all of that is super relevant.”

When Drew and Bouldry-Morrison met about a decade ago, they were both DJing parties on the gay-men circuit, because there weren’t many underground dance music events aimed at a broader spectrum of LGBTQ+ people. But in the years that followed, many of those parties began making moves to be more inclusive. One popular annual festival, Honcho Campout, used to be held at a men-only resort, but now explicitly states a desire to “be more non-binary, trans, femme” and offers financial support through a “Queer Fam Fund” to help attendees with fewer resources cover the costs. Growing numbers of trans people have begun organizing their own events, too, like Body Hack in New York and Envelope Soundsystem in the Bay Area. This August, Drew and Bouldry-Morrison hosted their second annual weekend rave, System Activate, on a plot of undeveloped land in the woods of Vermont.

Trans women are by no means new to the decks—Honey Dijon, for one, has attracted ecstatic crowds for decades. But they were often the exception, doing their work in isolation among the cisgender men who dominated the field. Now, a virtuous cycle of inspiration and tutelage has taken hold, leading ever more aspiring trans DJs, producers, and promoters to jump into the field with the support of their forebears. In a thorough survey of the phenomenon published in Pitchfork a few years ago, Delilah Friedler wrote, “so swiftly and soundly have the tides turned that some call this era ‘the doll takeover.’ ”

Why are trans women ascendant here? “I think we represent, symbolically, the best dance music values,” Drew said, including “the strength of a marginalized community, the strong feminine,” and bodily autonomy. But, she added, there’s another, darker reason. “The music industry and the festival industry has always fetishized and commodified otherness.
There’s a lot of money to be made in presenting the exotic.”

With this in mind, Drew and Bouldry-Morrison are doing their best to help up-and-coming trans DJs succeed on their own terms. The duo offers free compendiums of DJing tips, small-group trainings on skills like turntable pitch-mixing, and mentorship for trans friends who perform with them, some of whom have gone on to lead their own workshops. “In our community, because we deal with strife in other ways, I feel there’s more desire to teach and connect with each other than to keep things gatekept from one another,” Bouldry-Morrison said.

At this point, there is enough of a critical mass in the trans underground dance scene to support some pretty esoteric projects. A week before we talked, Drew and Bouldry-Morrison spoke at an event in Amsterdam thrown by FRXCTOSE, a queer party crew that was hosting a series of talks about building and running “queer sound systems.” Given the specialized subject matter, the DJs didn’t expect more than a handful of people to show up. But it was a packed house, with dozens of audience members ready to learn.

Bouldry-Morrison frequently receives messages from people who’ve come to one of her shows or a T4T LUV NRG event and later realized that they’re trans. “Part of that is because they got to see another trans person doing something, when so much of life is trying to not let trans people do anything,” she said. Trans club nights don’t need to explicitly engage with today’s political landscape in order to present an appealing alternative. When trans people make something together—a techno track, a rave, a supportive creative network—they are “furthering a project of freedom for all of us,” Bouldry-Morrison said.

Transmission doesn’t primarily market itself as an LGBTQ+ venue. Though Huxtable played a set there in April, she told me she’d had no idea that there were trans women in leadership. The proprietors have broad and varied tastes in dance music; serving a diverse population, including lots of cisgender straight people looking for a killer party, is good for vibes and good for business.

But the ethos of the place is unmistakably queer. In addition to the trans DJ collectives and queer parties that pepper the club’s schedule, there is pro-trans graffiti covering the walls, leftist zines in the bathrooms, and shelves of free Narcan (a treatment that can save someone in the midst of an opioid overdose) and Plan B at the entrance. A monthly trans gathering has featured a tax preparation clinic, a vocal feminization workshop, and clothing swaps. The team won’t book DJs who aren’t cool with trans people, and every event is advertised with the acronym NOTAFLOF—no one turned away for lack of funds.

That means waiving ticket fees for anyone who says they can’t pay, which cuts into the profit margin. “There are certain promoters that don’t necessarily love that we do that, but they understand that if they want to work with us and have events here, that’s a nonnegotiable part of how we operate,” said Claire Wilensky, the club’s trans CFO, who joined in January to professionalize the back end of the business.

Programming director Khanna finds inspiration in parties like Digital Escape in Baltimore, which has spawned a community that extends far beyond the dance floor: In a Signal chat, members offer to help each other with rent and issue warnings about ICE raids in the city. Khanna has DJed and volunteered at the event, where he has witnessed a nightclub version of the curb cut effect: The space was created by trans people for the purposes of raving, but the care they put into making it safe and fun for trans ravers makes it a better party for everyone. He sees the same thing at events run by DJ Sophsick in Richmond and Bored Lord in Oakland. “Every city you go to, it’s trans people who are behind the best shit,” he said.

For a group of people from DIY backgrounds, taking Transmission from a dream to a sustainable club has been a challenge. “Trying to balance your ethical prescriptions, your programming direction, and then also the actual business of it all is no small task,” Khanna said. Unlike other venues with investors who can buy their way into big DJ bookings and slick marketing, Transmission is getting by on the street cred of the nightlife veterans at the helm: Some artists have offered to take lower-than-normal rates because they’re friends of the owners or believe in the club’s principles, with the understanding that they might get a fatter paycheck once the venue is more established.

But for now, even though the Transmission crew ended up doubling its expected expenses just to get the doors open, the club is financially stable. On a video call shortly before its one-year anniversary, members of the leadership team kvelled at what their baby had made possible: couples meeting and falling in love; trans guests coming to the venue on their first forays out in public as women; DJs leaving on a high because, unlike the aloof crowds at some other nightclubs, every single person on the floor stayed off their phones and danced.

In 2026, places that offer respite from our anti-trans political trajectory are getting harder to find. The problem is particularly pronounced in D.C., where the streets are teeming with uniformed troops and Donald Trump’s UFC fight forced the rescheduling of Pride, but it’s a nationwide theme. Liberal politicians running in the midterm elections are turning their backs on trans athletes; some states run by Democrats, once thought to be havens for trans Americans, are allowing trans youth to be forcibly detransitioned through Medicaid cuts. No one party can reverse this trend, but at a space like Transmission or a trans-run rave, an opposing milieu emerges—one lovingly built to cater to the needs and creative expressions of people too often dismissed by the world outside.

“There are certain nights that you look around, and you can just see the joy in everyone’s faces, and know that you’re providing that escape for people,” Wilensky said. She smiled as she recalled a party called Doll Factory that the club had hosted a few weeks before we spoke. Attendance was close to capacity—around 500 people—and the vast majority of partygoers were trans. “There’s not many spaces that you can go to anywhere in the world that are like that,” she said. At Transmission, it was just another Saturday.