A Love Song that Honors the Gifts of Transness
Reflections on Always by Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, & Time Wharp
I am launching a weekly series on my substack, in which each Friday I share a song with you, some information about its content/context, and what it means to me. I will be starting with selections from TRANSA, a compilation which I’ve now written much about because it has been so impactful to me in this era of hostile misunderstanding and attempts at erasure of transness and gender diversity.
TRANSA (stylized as TRAИƧA) is a project presented by activist and musical non-profit Red Hot Organization and produced by Massima Bell and Dust Reid. In short, this is a musical celebration of transness and what trans people offer the world. In the words of the TRANSA team, this album is "a spiritual journey across 8 chapters and 46 songs, spotlighting the gifts of many of the most daring, imaginative trans and nonbinary artists working today. It softens the edges of the world we know, and invokes powerful dreams of the futures that might one day thunder from its cracks." For Massima and Dust, the word transa means "to love without limits" and "you are more than you know."
The album features collaborations from 100 artists across genres and the spectrums of gender and transness/cisness, from icons and well-known musicians like Sade, Sam Smith, Laura Jane Grace, Moses Sumney, Allison Russell, Perfume Genius, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland to more obscure but equally visionary creators. It also includes multiple spoken word poems (by poets such as Eileen Myles, Marsha P. Johnson, and Nsámbu Za Suékama) set to music.
The chapters of TRANSA follow the journey trans people make as individuals and as a collective: Womb of the Soul, Survival, Dark Night, Awakening, Grief, Acceptance, Liberation, and Reinvention. You can read more about how TRANSA has been a source of radical hope for me here. And check out the full tracklist and order details here.
The track I’m sharing today is from the Reinvention chapter - “Always”. It is both a love song and a celebration of transness. The song was written and performed by long-time romantic and creative partners Elizabeth and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, the latter of whom often goes by Glenn, and electronic musician/composer Time Wharp. As you will hear, it opens with Elizabeth and Glenn saying to each other (and to us, I believe) “blessed am I to be loved by you.” It is with intention that I am sharing this today, February 14th, a day we may be particularly called to reflect on (and I hope celebrate) love.
Glenn is a musical and trans icon/idol of mine. He is a vibrant musician and seemingly true creative spirit in his 80s who has been releasing recorded music since the 1970s. After a long career, Glenn has experienced a surge of critical recognition in recent years. Younger artists, including queer DJ and musician Romy, have sampled and re-imagined his classic songs, and in 2023 he released The Ones Ahead - an album which I return to again and again when I want or need connection to ancestral trans power and our future legacies. Having come out as a transgender man in the 1990s, Glenn has welcomed the role of “trans elder” and he was both an inspiration for TRANSA and a key collaborator.
Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland is also an accomplished and innovative musician and writer, with much of her work being in the realm of theater. She (along with Glenn as I understand it) has been very active in theater and arts education in their communities in Canada.
Glenn and Elizabeth announced last year that Glenn is living with dementia. In their discussion of this, they have spoken of his (and their) ongoing generativity and the importance of holding the duality of life and loss in this diagnosis and chapter of their existences. They have also been frank about how this development in particular will require intentional community support. I have been so moved by what I have witnessed of their love and dedication to each other and to the communities that they are a part of it. They are a model for all of us in our personal and collective journeys.
This song, “Always”, is on one level a lovers’ duet, with two long-time partners sharing their deep appreciation for each other and for how each of them benefits from the qualities of and a life spent with the other. The refrain is a call and response: “Will you catch me when I fall?” “Always.”
What makes this song even more meaningful to me is that the lyrics repeatedly anchor their love in Glenn’s transness and what that means about who he is as a person and a partner. Through this, the song also becomes a love song to all of us trans folks and to transness as a concept. This is particularly evident in Elizabeth’s verse:
Two-spirited are you: a prophet, pregnant with proof of human possibility.
Two spirited are you: your life a crucible, alchemically creating human gold.
In awe I witness as you breathe freedom into rigid definitions of Yin and Yang.
You hold two worlds like the sky holds the stars: surely and with reverence.
In your arms, I feel heaven.
In your presence, I know grace.
Blessed am I to be loved by you.
We also hear the celebration of duality and other-worldliness and sacredness of Glenn’s transness in his own verse:
I am a tall tree growing:
Leaves erupting,
Roots burrowing deep,
Feasting in fragrant Earth.
I am a constellation:
Pegasus flying, gods crying
Sacred wonder.
With you beside me, I hear the heavens.
With you behind me, I dance in joy.
Blessed am I to be loved by you.
I had never before known a song - or actually any creative expression - that so deeply acknowledges that transness is a part of what makes one’s lover so amazing.
The instrumental composition of the song is performed by Time Wharp, the musical project of Kaye Loggins, a prolific electronic producer and openly trans woman. This component of the eight and a half minute track is incredible - layered, dynamic, itself other-wordly, and apparently it was improvised in response to and in collaboration with Elizabeth and Glenn and their writing. So there is an experiential component to this celebration of all that transness makes possible: this improvised trans creation musically lifting up and expanding the spoken words.
The song has an additional set of layers, to me at least: love for us all, love for our future descendants, and love for the planet. Toward the end of the track, Elizabeth recites an incantation that captures this:
O great dreamer who art our eternal mother
Hallowed be thy flame
Thy rapture come, thy songs be sung
In joy at thy simple wonder
Give us this day our daily breath
And forgive us our hubris
As we forgive that which makes us complicit
And lead us not into extinction
But deliver us from further benumbment
For thine is the history and the mystery and the moral
Forever and ever and ever
May we remember your beauty
May we imagine a glorious and just future
Blessed are we to be loved by you
Who every day makes it all brand new
I grew up really celebrating Valentine’s Day. My mother loved and loves celebrating love. And really, so did and does my father. And I’ve carried that forward. My whole life, February 14th has been a day to honor all the forms of love that humans or other beings create and practice and experience. So I really appreciate that this song centers love between and for so many - all the different levels, not just romantic love between two. This is an intimate love song between Elizabeth and Glenn. This is a love song to trans people. This is a love song to all of us, and those who came before us, and those will come after us. Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you.
