{"id":845066,"date":"2025-05-01T17:11:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/01\/trans-musicians-are-canceling-us-tour-dates-due-to-trumps-gender-id-rules\/"},"modified":"2025-05-01T17:11:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:11:55","slug":"trans-musicians-are-canceling-us-tour-dates-due-to-trumps-gender-id-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/01\/trans-musicians-are-canceling-us-tour-dates-due-to-trumps-gender-id-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Trans Musicians Are Canceling US Tour Dates Due to Trump\u2019s Gender ID Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"
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T. Thomason\u2019s US<\/span> touring visa doesn\u2019t expire until June\u2014but the Canadian pop artist is pulling out of a festival appearance in Belfast, Maine, next month because he doesn\u2019t want to be targeted at the border as a nonbinary trans man.<\/p>\n

Last week, Thomason, 30, who splits his time between Toronto and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, announced he had dropped out of the All Roads Festival, which takes place May 16-17. He tells WIRED he made the decision after seeing President Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s executive orders targeting the<\/a> trans community<\/a>, including one proclaiming that the US government will recognize only two sexes, male and female. He\u2019s also been increasingly fearful after hearing stories<\/a> of visitors<\/a>, US visa-holders<\/a>, and applicants being held at the border, including a Vancouver woman who told The Guardian<\/a> she was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for two weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just thought if that\u2019s happening to cis people, I really feel worried about what could happen to me,\u201d Thomason says.<\/p>\n

Toronto- and Montreal-based singer Bells Larsen, a trans man, also announced Friday that he is canceling his spring tour because the gender on his passport, male, does not match his assigned sex at birth, potentially disqualifying him from being eligible for a US visa under the Trump administration’s new rules.<\/a> Aya Sinclair, a London-based musician and trans woman, told Pitchfork<\/a> she\u2019ll be avoiding American shows \u201cuntil anything changes.\u201d Even Neil Young, a dual Canadian-American citizen, has said he\u2019s worried<\/a> about being \u201cjailed\u201d upon returning to the States, due to his criticisms of Trump.<\/p>\n

But the decision not to play in America means foregoing touring income and the opportunity to build one\u2019s fanbase in the largest music market in the world. And simply rerouting to Europe or elsewhere abroad, particularly for Canadian artists, is a costly endeavor.<\/p>\n

The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, a union that can petition the federal government to grant touring visas, told Canadian members in late March<\/a> that the updated immigration rule \u201cruns afoul of our shared values. At this time, it is unlikely the US government will pivot from this objectionable position.\u201d<\/p>\n

Los Angeles\u2013based entertainment attorney Dani Oliva, a trans man, tells WIRED \u201cthere\u2019s been a general panic\u201d among his clients in the past few weeks. Oliva, who is Thomason\u2019s lawyer, notes that Canadian musicians who want to play in the US have two options for visas, one of which costs up to $8,000 and is \u201cextremely onerous.\u201d He says processing times for his clients have jumped from three or four months to eight to 10 months without paying for expedited processing.<\/p>\n

He says he does a risk-versus-benefit analysis for each client looking to come to the US. But he\u2019s worried that trans clients\u2019 visa requests could be denied on the grounds of \u201cmisrepresentation or fraud\u201d if the gender on the identifying documents they submit doesn\u2019t match up with their assigned sex at birth. That finding could result in a person being banned from the US for life<\/a> unless they successfully apply for a waiver\u2014a cumbersome process.<\/p>\n

Despite the headaches of getting a US visa, there\u2019s a reason people do it: money and cultural cachet.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s be real. I mean, so many artists only find their breakthrough if they tour in America,\u201d says Kurt Dahl, a Vancouver-based entertainment lawyer. \u201cThere\u2019s 10 times the population; it\u2019s just more likely to get press and get attention.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While he says almost every Canadian he knows, artist or not, is reevaluating taking trips across the border, some of his clients\u2019 fanbases are 80 percent American.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just see them sort of scrubbing their social media, scrubbing their cell phone of anything that might be considered controversial, and then sort of rolling the dice.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the geography. In Canada, he says, sometimes a band is driving 10 hours to the next city, whereas in the US they might be able to hit 30 cities in a much shorter span.<\/p>\n

Thomason says Trump\u2019s border crackdown has forced artists like him to rethink goals they\u2019ve been working toward for \u201cyears and years and years.\u201d He says he won\u2019t be entering the US as long as Trump is president. Even if he wanted to tour here, he believes any of his new visa applications would be denied because he\u2019s changed the gender marker on his passport to male.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe end goal for a lot of artists is to end up in places like New York or LA and build their careers out from there. It\u2019s kind of taking your dreams and completely changing them.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says he\u2019s \u201creally, really sad\u201d that his connection to his US fans is being \u201csevered\u201d at a time when he was just starting to build it. His friend and fellow artist Larsen, meanwhile, noted on Instagram<\/a> on Friday that he was hoping to play his album Blurring Time<\/em> \u201cfor queer and trans people in the US who saw their stories reflected in my own.\u201d The album blends Larsen\u2019s vocals both pre- and post-transition.<\/p>\n

To help make up for the income loss, Thomason is advocating for Canadian arts groups to develop new funding streams for trans artists. But he also says this is an issue that will go far beyond trans artists in Canada, or trans people around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a country undermining the validity of a government-issued document by another country,\u201d he says. \u201cIf people think that starts and stops with trans people, they\u2019re wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Manisha Krishnan
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

T. Thomason\u2019s US touring visa doesn\u2019t expire until June\u2014but the Canadian pop artist is pulling out of a festival appearance in Belfast, Maine, next month because he doesn\u2019t want to be targeted at the border as a nonbinary trans man. Last week, Thomason, 30, who splits his time between Toronto and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, announced<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":845067,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4444,3192],"tags":[21773,11536],"class_list":{"0":"post-845066","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-musicians","8":"category-trans","9":"tag-musicians","10":"tag-trans"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/845067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}