This write-up is a bit of an outlier.
For the sake of full disclosure, this was not submitted directly to us. This is a request from a girl I consider to be my sister, a girl I used to work with who needed help getting the treatment she needed. She’s a trans woman, you see, and I am a trans man; at the time that I met her, I had brought over all the toil, the blood and sweat and tears on printer paper that was my medical documentation from my hometown in which “Planned Parenthood” was nothing but a bogeyman or something spoken of in hushed tones, over to a place where such clinics were more readily accessible. I had admittedly been blindsided by how little of that inch-thick case file was necessary for the clinic to continue my treatment, and when I realized that all the clinic required was my informed consent. I saw it as a blessing, as good luck. I saw my informing my coworker of that easy option to pursue the life-saving treatment she needed as nothing more than passing that luck along.
I see her as something of a sister by now. I’m proud of how far she’s come. She recently earned her certification in phlebotomy. And she sent me the music video for Cheap Dirty Horse’s single, “P.R.O.T.E.C.T. T.R.A.N.S. K.I.D.S.”, asking me to review it. This piece is therefore dedicated to Gwyn. With that context established, let us get on to the requested song itself.
According to the group’s Bandcamp page, Cheap Dirty Horse is a group based in Nottingham, UK, self-described on their Patreon as “your favourite (sic) queer trash folk-punk dad-kissing band”. I will admit that this pitch alone kept an iron grip on my personal intrigue. The instrumentation for “P.R.O.T.E.C.T. T.R.A.N.S. K.I.D.S.” is peppy yet fiery; electric and acoustic guitars blend together well in the high energy of this piece, and the sparse drumset adds a rugged characteristic that matches the settings of graffiti-lined alleyways and underpasses chosen in the song’s music video. Something that only jumps out at me when I search for it is the presence of a banjo, not just in the music video, but in the song itself. This is an unusual choice in punk instrumentation, at least in the Gregorian year 2026, but a welcome return to the banjo’s original form as the “poor man’s guitar”.
Another odd choice that somehow still manages to work is the use of an accordion about halfway through the track, and it strikes me suddenly that either the composers of Cheap Dirty Horse are total nerds for music history as it pertains to music-as-resistance, or perhaps that the punk of the 2020s is rebuilding the sound of the proletariat reverie from which it had descended by way of either first principles or pure, serendipitous coincidence. Either way, this solidified my intrigue without my even realizing it.
But that is enough to be said of the music itself. While the video depicts the band (credited as “The Horses”) learning how to skate in Tram Line Spot before giving their performance behind Flo Skatepark, the lyrics on this track cut right to the heart of the matter:
When your rights are being debated
And you’re not invited
And your institutions won’t protect you
So you stay inside.
A scared trans kid
Doesn’t know what they did
For so many people
To care where they been
In both the United Kingdom and the United States, trans people of all ages (but trans kids especially) are under more intense legislative attack than ever before, all thanks to a reign of stochastic terrorism in both countries that we now know to be the work of a tightly-connected network of journalists in the pockets of some of the richest in the world—especially a particular disgraced financier, specifically disgraced by his child sex trafficking empire built by his own myriad connections within the global bourgeoisie. The less-informed yet astute in our audience may notice that this all seems to be spearheaded not by trans voices in the media and courts, but by cisgender malefactors. This would be correct. Insofar as it pertains to trans women, what with their common invocation in public or media discourses (or hypervisibility) despite frequent and repeated denial of participation in these discourses (about them!), radical transfeminist Talia Bhatt has termed this very phenomenon “epistemicide”. Just the same, trans kids are spoken over in order to be argued about by institutions that refuse to recognize their rights to relief through self-actualization.
For so long, this went on, and for so long, a majority of us thought this was for no reason. We are given a more solid reasoning and thorough understanding now, that this is the design of the elite in order to keep trans women and girls in a state of social and financial precarity for as long as this elite desired to exploit them for sexual abuse while ensuring trans men and boys, “damaged goods” that we are, are disposed of and hidden away as quickly and quietly as possible; we understand this now, but does it make this persecution sting any less for our most effected? Certainly not.
Certainly not.
All we queer adults can do is support our youth, just as Cheap Dirty Horse does with
Written by Alexei Lee
