Trans Women DJs Are Taking Over the Club

Artists including Jasmine Infiniti, Honey Dijon, Juliana Huxtable, and Eris Drew are lighting up dancefloors and seeing their collective influence reflected back
From left: Nita Aviance, Honey Dijon, Ariel Zetina, and Jasmine Infiniti are just a few of the trans DJs thriving right now. Graphic by Callum Abbott; photos by Ricardo Gomes, Elvin, and Andreas Asher Brimmer 

A stall door clangs open in the bathroom of beloved New York City club Nowadays, and out pour four lanky girls with tiny purses under their arms, each over six feet tall in heels. Along with raver bois draped in black and fashion queens sashed by the colorful straps of Telfar bags, the trans girls are here to support a fundraiser for Rash, a nearby club known for hosting trans DJs that was forced to closed for renovations in April after it was set on fire by an arsonist; two Rash employees were hospitalized as a result. The 24-year-old man arrested and charged for the crime now faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted. In a statement condemning the attack, a U.S. attorney said, “The victims, and all LGBTQ+ New Yorkers, should be able to enjoy their nights out in peace and without fear.”

The Rash fire was just one of several recent reminders that queer and trans people are still fighting for our safety, and the fundraiser was one of many corresponding acts of defiance. Trans people are hardly a rare sight at Nowadays, but on this Wednesday night in June we basically run the place—staffing the bar and filling the dancefloor, as DJ Swisha’s agile breakbeats dissolve into Jersey club. The air is humid when a footwork beat reveals itself to be a remix of “Faceshopping,” a track by the late trans music icon SOPHIE. Grinning, two trans femmes move in to bounce and twirl at the front of the crowd. Next up is Sausha, a trans woman and rising star in the city’s techno underground, who reigns over the decks with a kind of haunting grace. Later, at 2 a.m., DJ Fuck has the crowd exploding to warp-speed gabber. This electronic eclecticism is typical for the emerging trans dance scene, which skews young, hosts a rare degree of gender and ethnic diversity, and often features bold genre-mashing at breakneck speeds. (“I don’t care if you’re transgender,” reads one recent tongue-in-cheek meme, “turn down the damn BPM.”)

Queer and trans people invented the dance scene as we know it, but never before have trans women—known in the community as “the dolls”—been free to take up so much space, including headlining gigs at major venues in New York, Chicago, Berlin, and beyond. Trans artists Eris Drew and Ariel Zetina were up for DJ Mag awards this year, while electronic music bible Resident Advisor named club wunderkind Juliana Huxtable “one of the most dynamic, creative, and innovative jockeys going.” Long sidelined even within queer nightlife, trans-run parties stacked with trans talent are now being recognized by nightlife mavens as some of the best parties out there, drawing hordes of queer and straight ravers alike. So swiftly and soundly have the tides turned that some call this era “the doll takeover.”

It’s not just that trans girls are succeeding—they are innovating sounds and spaces that cut to the heart of what dance music can be. Femmes like Honey Dijon, Nita Aviance, Lina Bradford, and Jordana have carried this often thankless work for decades, and today, their heirs are leading queer community to new heights.

Growing up in the Bronx, Jasmine Infiniti excelled in musicals. But when a talent scout came knocking, he told her parents that their supposed “son” should act “more masculine” to have a shot at a career. Embarrassed, her mother shut the door on her child’s ambition.

Years later, Jasmine found New York City’s ballroom scene and eventually joined the House of Infiniti, where a new chosen family supported her desire to begin medically transitioning at age 23. While initially drawn to voguing, she quickly became more interested in the music behind the artform. “Where is this coming from?” she recalls thinking. “Is it disco? Is it house? The scene incorporated so many types of genres and turned them into ballroom tracks.”

She attended GHE20G0TH1K and other early-2010s parties thrown by Venus X, where artists like Total Freedom, MikeQ, and Juliana Huxtable braided ballroom music into a menagerie of beats—techno, juke, dembow, and more. Infiniti interned for Venus, learning to scour the deep recesses of the internet for unique tracks. After moving to San Francisco in 2012, she began DJing and throwing parties with a local collective of mostly cisgender people. But their events didn’t cultivate the queer community she craved, and Infiniti realized she and her trans friends deserved better.

“We were sort of being used,” Infiniti says. “I use the term ‘doll’ but I also hate it, because it often seems like that’s what [trans girls] are to people—something they play with, or put on a shelf to gawk at.”

Infiniti and trans friends like Cali Rose and Erica Mar decided to create their own scene. They founded New World Dysorder, throwing underground parties that aimed to elevate the kinds of people often steamrolled in nightlife. “We decided if people were going to come see us, we should be the ones getting paid,” says Infiniti. “It wasn’t a gay or straight party, it was our party, and we were highlighting trans people and Black and brown people—period.”

New World Dysorder evolved into a label home to many trans artists. Paying homage to GHE20G0TH1K, they incorporated vogue balls into their parties, laying the groundwork for recent fundraising events by Arm the Girls, a mutual aid effort that purchases self-defense kits and training for trans people nationwide. Trans femmes of color in particular continue to be harassed, assaulted, and killed at rates far beyond the norm. The issue of safety is personal to Infiniti, who was attacked in 2017.

Back in New York, her career came full circle: She began playing parties inspired by the scene New World Dysorder helped create. Post-pandemic, Brooklyn lit up with new events thrown by and for trans people, including Club Carry and XCakes. These parties tend toward the visceral and chaotic. At an East Williamsburg underground event this spring, Latin-infused techno sputtered from a side room while Infiniti played to dancers bouncing on a boxing ring, the clangs of its floor syncopated to her aggressive beats. No single identity dominated the crowd, though some aesthetics were pervasive: chains, bandanas, sunglasses, and dramatically flared low-rise jeans; The Matrix meets late-’90s streetwear.

A similar vibe flourishes at parties like the monthly Body Hack, which raises money for trans people and abolitionist causes at Nowadays, and trans socialite Angel Money’s Platinum. In May, Platinum touched down at Bed-Stuy’s Sugar Hill Supper Club, where Ariel Zetina played as part of a mostly trans line-up, mixing techno, house, Caribbean soca, Belizean punta, and… pretty much everything else.

Zetina is a Belizean-American trans woman who has created spaces for trans artists to thrive in her hometown of Chicago. Like Infiniti, she credits her genre-mashing style to the influence of GHE20G0TH1K and Huxtable. “Juliana was the one to be like, ‘You can do anything, let’s go,’” Zetina says. Jake Sillen, co-founder of the Rash nightclub, agrees that Huxtable is a major touchstone for the new generation of trans DJs, calling her party Shock Value “an amazing institution.” Zetina and Sillen also say the Fade to Mind label, and particularly its artist Total Freedom, helped shape the sound of today’s trans clubscape in the early 2010s.

The current scene’s techno-futuristic iconoclasm goes back even further, seeded by prior generations of trans women who got freaky on the decks. Wendy Carlos—who helped create the Moog synthesizer and used it to score movies like A Clockwork Orange and Tron—was pivotal in developing modern electronic music. Later, Jordana (formerly known as 1.8.7) and Terre Thaemlitz (aka DJ Sprinkles) became important producers of drum ’n’ bass and deep house, respectively, but both artists’ identities and contributions were often overlooked. This is not uncommon with trans artists, of course; there are many whose names we’ll never get to know.

The longest-serving trans dancefloor DJ is Honey Dijon, who this year played both Coachella and Glastonbury—as well as worked on the new Beyoncé album—more than two decades after she started spinning. Born in Chicago and raised on house, Dijon began her arduous climb through New York City nightlife in the ’90s, initially as a drag performer. She says she started DJing “out of necessity” because the music scene in New York was “musically segregated” compared to the melting pot of Chicago, and she wanted to see that change.

Her mission faced resistance. Over the years, she lost gigs at gay clubs over her reticence to play pop music. And in the early 2000s, being a Black trans woman associated with the gay scene essentially barred her from playing straight clubs where wider tastes were welcome.

“At that time, there weren’t any trans DJs,” she says. “There were very few women DJs. It was a very misogynistic boys club in the straight world, so literally the only place I could get work was in gay clubs, where they wanted to hear the latest Madonna remix. That’s no disrespect. It was just different from what I wanted to do.”

In what she calls “a classic Josephine Baker or James Baldwin story,” it wasn’t until she began spending time in Europe, expressing herself fully in the clubs of Berlin (where she has split her time since 2010), that Dijon found the success and recognition she enjoys in the U.S. today.

Also coming up in the early 2000s was Nita Aviance, who now enchants dancefloors worldwide as half of queer DJ duo the Carry Nation. Arriving in New York at 17, she immediately fell in with the House of Aviance, a ballroom family that exploded her concept of gender. She exclusively went out in drag, at the very least what she and her peers called the “boy cunt” look: make-up, spandex, platform shoes.

Aviance played at gay bars in Manhattan’s East Village, known for its punk rock vibe. During a Friday night residency at Opaline, she practiced on the freshly invented Pioneer CDJs, bringing a turntablist style to songs by the Neptunes and Kelis. Later in the night, she’d weave these beats into house music, as dancers who once graced the floors at the legendary Paradise Garage club poured in. Aviance sees a direct lineage from artists like herself to the genre-mashing styles of today. “It’s multicultural,” she says. “This, that, hip-hop, freestyle—everything. It can all go together, and it all makes sense.”

Unlike today’s youth, Aviance did not have a slew of trans DJ role models. “There was no Eris and Maya,” she says, referencing Eris Drew and Octo Octa, the powerhouse team behind T4T LUV NRG, a label and traveling party that has blown the door open for new trans talent. Besides Honey Dijon, there were DJs like Lady Bunny, better known for her drag, and Lina Bradford, whose residency on gay beach destination Fire Island ran for 10 years.

Aviance felt pressure to blend in with the masc-presenting men who lorded over gay clubs and parties. “There was a time when all I had was five black T-shirts and a pair of black jeans,” she says. “I could not give any ounce of bandwidth to the look. I had to focus on the music. It felt critical for me to be taken seriously.” Such strategic veiling is far from unique, or even outdated. “I’ve known artists behind some of my favorite tracks, and no one even knew they were trans,” says Infiniti. “They had to hide who they were in order to make sales. Now, all of that is changing.”

Aviance recalls a moment from the Carry Nation’s last New Year’s party, when, on stage before a crowd of muscly gays, she and her friend Xander danced what she calls “full-femme, all-out faggotry queendom to the highest degree” at the climax of the night. “I was like, ‘This feels different now. It was not like this before.’”

Though the pandemic devastated the global club scene at large, many trans DJs actually credit it with helping to catalyze the doll takeover. The shuttering of bars and clubs “gave us space to party on rooftops and in woods, fields, even my backyard,” says Infiniti. “We didn’t have the privilege of just ‘staying home.’ Many of us needed to survive and make money by whatever means we had. It was an opportunity to make our talents known without anyone in our way.”

Dijon underscores how far things have come since she got her start. “As trans people, we basically lived in the dark,” she says, but now “it’s a whole new generation that have definitions, spaces, and medical care that allow them to flourish.” She names Infiniti, Dangerous Rose, and Memphy as young trans artists “who are making space, unapologetically and fiercely.”

The proliferation of trans-centric parties and collectives has now gone worldwide, including San Antonio’s House of Kenzo, Berlin’s No Shade, and emerging spaces in Brazil and Colombia. “I’m glad I could have been a part of changing the way things were,” says Infiniti, though she adds, “I wish I could get more money about it, because it’s still struggle life out here.”

It’s important to follow the money: Besides Rash, which plans to reopen this fall, and Seattle’s Kremwerk, which is also trans-owned, practically all venues are owned by cis people, usually white men, who profit off showcasing queer talent. Says Dijon, “Until we have more trans people behind the scenes, making decisions of what’s actually happening and being in creative positions of power, it’s just a lot of optics.”

While there’s still more progress to be made, every time a trans woman gets behind the decks, she is claiming power. She can orchestrate a crowd’s experience, get paid for sharing her art, and inspire other gender non-conformers who watch her preside in her own way. “DJing is inherently trans,” says Aviance. “It’s putting things together that aren’t supposed to be together. It’s tearing things apart, and seeing the world in a different way.”

And who gets to direct the arc of a party is not just about representation—it’s fundamental to determining what kind of community emerges on the dancefloor. “You now have dolls doing parties for the dolls, it’s not for anyone else,” says Infiniti. “Sure, you can come, but this is celebrating us.”