'We need to protect our trans siblings and be a community more than ever'
Lucy Spraggan rose to fame as a contestant on The X Factor in 2012, she has since become a successful musician in her own right.
She joins Yahoo's Queer Voices to discuss her experience as a queer singer in the music industry, why Pride should be a protest again, and her affinity with the transgender community.
Her new album Other Sides of the Moon is out now.
I think it's important for us to be a community now more than ever. We all practise authenticity and love and being ourselves, and I genuinely think being there for our trans brothers and sisters now — like they have always been there for us — it's about allyship and it's about protecting each other. And I don't think that fight is finished yet. I think it's very important to still be fighting that fight.
I do believe Pride should always be a protest that I feel like there's so much — as a community, we have so much to do for trans rights across the board. Pride should always be in protest.
I have had real issues locally recently trying to drive the message through to people that trans people are all individuals. They're all different, we're all different, we're all authentic, so maybe we should just let people be themselves.
But it's really hard, it's hard to push a message through to somebody who's ignorant and I just feel all I can do is support my trans friends and trans people I've never met as much as I can. Sometimes that feels like it's about literally, physically standing in front of them at protests.
When I was on X Factor, I'd already been out for years. I came out and I was really young, so I remember one of the producers or press teams saying: 'Are you gonna like, come out?' And I was like, 'everybody already knows I'm gay'.
And one week on The X Factor, we did the covers, I did a Gold Digger cover and everybody had backing dancers and I said 'Can mine be female backing dancers?' And they were all twerking up against me and it was absolutely amazing, and I remember feeling quite confident in being my queer self then.
Things are so much more different about being queer now than when I was on X Factor. There's so many more people to see, there's so many more platforms to see queer people on. I love that about social media, it's one of the few things I love about social media — that you can see so many of your people.
All of my music is inspired by my real life experiences. My new album is called Other Sides of the Moon, which is a song about my wife and how we fell in love with each other. So I guess there's intrinsic queerness throughout my entire album, but it's all about things I've felt or observed.
I can't wait for it to come out, there's a collection of older songs on there that have been reborn in some ways and it's kind of a message to people: Think about the past or something they can change. And I looked at a lot of songs from the past and actually thought I'd like to give them new life.
My favourite thing about being a musician is the culture and the community that there is at my shows. There's just so much diversity and my favourite thing is that music has brought all those people together and just being a part of it, I don't feel like a leader of it or anything like that, I just feel immersed in this community, and I love it.
Whenever I think of Pride I think of being a 15-year-old living just outside of Manchester and going to Manchester Pride and just looking around and seeing so many people that just felt like family. And I remember that so vividly, walking around with my mouth open the whole weekend just thinking this is life. And I still feel that at Pride events now.
My advice to young queer people is do your thing. Live your best life and protect each other and the whole phrase of 'blood is thicker than water' is actually the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, and that means that the the bond between nuns is actually thicker than the bond of those in in family situations. So if you need to create a new family, if you need to look for other people, go for it because that bond is thicker than it.
I always go back to the storyline that I loved most on television, which was Coronation Street with Hayley Cropper, the trans character. It was so long ago, and it was so left field for that that time, and I went into school and they were asking what we wanted to be when we were older and loads of people were saying, 'firefighter', 'I wanna be a policeman' or actor and I said I wanna be a transsexual.
I just thought it was such an amazing story, they used transsexual then on television because it was so dated, I think it was 2008. But I spent from age well late toddler to about 10 being called Max, I was a boy until puberty and so I didn't realise that [transitioning] was really possible until I saw it on television and I was like, 'Oh my God'.
And now you get to see transgender people so much more, and I wonder if I'd have had access to the world in the same way that we do now if my choices would be different growing up.
There's so many shows I wish I had. I remember watching Queer as Folk growing up, my mum was obsessed with Queer as Folk, and there's so much more now on offer. Before being gay was kind of like it was about how being gay meant you had to be part of this scene, and now there's so many things that represent being gay or being queer. You can just be a normal person and be that, and I like any shows that has that in it.
In terms of my queer role models, growing up my mum's best friend Kathy is a trans woman and I remember just always feeling so empowered by her. Not just Kathy, but actually my mum was such a pioneer, she always surrounded us with artists and creatives and queer people — she's a real pioneer.
I feel like there's room to improve when it comes to the platforms for queer people, I think there's always more to be done. I think within our community the amount of creativity and just fabulousness, it's always pouring out of the community, and I always feel like there could be more places for that art to be distributed.
Not even necessarily in terms of more celebrating, but more more areas of industries that hone in on queer people and whatever that means for that. There's more avenues and more funding for people, especially young queer people, to express themselves.
I think the future of queer storytelling is gonna be how it always has been. From Oscar Wilde right up until now, everyone's always gonna tell their story and it's going to be remembered because there's been so much adversity in this community for thousands of years.
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