Joanna Cuddle

Róisín, I saw you at Dangast, Secret Garden Party, Bluedot, Milan, Bern, Lisbon, Bruges, Rotterdam, Bilbao, Dublin, Royal Albert Hall, Manchester, Printworks, Brixton, and on and on and on. You may begin to suspect who I am. I was one of your most devoted fans. I believed profoundly in your artistry. It kept me awake at night, influenced waves of my own work, and gave me the confidence to succeed as an artist myself. Because you, woman, inspired me to believe I could. I told you, immediately after your first anti-trans comments in August 2023, how deeply disappointed I was. But three years later, you have gone from expressing concern about puberty blockers to describing transgender identities in terms of social contagion, characterising trans rights as a threat to gay people, and explicitly declaring that trans activists are unwelcome at your concerts. And now you tell us we have misunderstood Gone Fishing. Nobody is questioning whether you loved the people in Paris Is Burning when you wrote that song. We're questioning how you reconcile that love with the contempt you now express towards the movement for transgender rights. You celebrate a culture built by marginalised queer and trans people, then suggest that many of its pioneers would have been robbed of their brilliance had they been allowed access to gender-affirming medical care today. You cannot possibly know that. You are rewriting their imagined lives to validate your present politics. You speak of chosen families, misfits, acceptance and tenderness, yet describe fans who challenge you as coercive, entitled, and incapable of returning love. And perhaps most painfully, you claim to speak for your fans when you declare trans activists unwelcome. I gave you years of my life, my money, my attention, and above all my genuine admiration. I wasn't demanding that you fake your beliefs to keep my custom. I was asking you to recognise the humanity of the people whose culture helped shape the art I loved. I am still asking you, imploring you, to be the one person in this movement who stops and thinks, “Wait, no. I've got this wrong.” And just apologises. People don't hate you. We're scared. You haven't lost fans because we don't understand your artistry. You've lost us because we really, really do. Right now, your entire body of work feels at odds with the person you are presenting to the world. While you are entitled to your beliefs, you cannot demand that we reconcile those contradictions for you, nor mistake our heartbreak for an attempt to control you. You taught me that art could be fearless, tender, defiant and transformative. I still believe that. I just wish you could recognise those same qualities in the people you're now pushing away. And no amount of insisting that your intentions were tender can resolve the contradiction between what you celebrated then and what you advocate now. Do better. You still have a genuine chance. Don't be proud.