There is something in the air as people start arriving at the campsite, surrounding a small greystone farm in the Welsh hills. Anticipation, anxiety; for some, a coming home; for others, a step into the unknown. With each step onto the site you can sense a collective exhale as people catch up to the realisation that they have permission to let go.
Through a thicket of woodland, half-naked dolls and tboys are swimming in ponds and lounging on the grass, getting settled to watch this afternoon’s sports day competitions. The low murmur of animated voices is occasionally punctuated by howls of laughter in the copper afternoon. At the bottom of the field, a line of contestants stand poised, waiting for a signal. Someone informs me that they are doing shot put with Liquid Death. Sure enough, at the starter’s signal, a barrage of metal cans fly through the air, one of them landing at our feet.
Like the role gay beaches from Lake Michigan to Sitges played in gay communities during the 20th century, spaces such as Camp Trans provide rare respite from the ceaseless self-censorship, masking and violence of our lives. As Olivia, one of the welfare officers on duty this weekend, reflects: “Camp Trans means not having to think about being trans for the whole weekend while getting to think about being trans for the whole weekend.”
Safe spaces are ideologically flawed and logistically impossible, but the promise of a separatist event like Camp Trans is that you can leave your hypervigilance at the door and let it all hang out. The festival, now in its third year, is organised in honour and reference to the original Camp Trans in the US, a protest camp which started in 1991 after Nancy Burkholder was ejected from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for being trans. Since its inception in 1975, MWMF sought to build a separatist haven for women, and exercised a strict “womyn-born-womyn” policy.
One of the organisers of the OG Camp Trans in the early 2000s, who for the purposes of this article will be referred to as Andi, emphasises that while MWMF “was an important and powerful experience for thousands of women, it was a site of harmful ideology about trans women. These women then go back into their communities and bring that ideology into other things they do.” Both MWMF and Camp Trans UK, in radically different ways, underscore the idea that separatist spaces are not isolated realities: they are porous sites of world-building. We bring stuff with us and take stuff with us when we leave.
After transphobic harassment from locals during last year’s Camp Trans in Bedfordshire, the organisers were forced to find a new, more secluded, home for the festival. That was no small feat: the organization’s Arts Council funding had run dry, and further funding opportunities fell through. But they were undeterred. Jeng, one of the organisers, says that “we have to make trans spaces no matter what. Obviously it’s nice to have funding, but we don’t need funding. We need each other.”
As people emerge from their tents on the second day, the campsite is a buzz of conversation. The chatter seems to flow seamlessly from dumb transgender humour to vulnerable soul-baring, whether you’ve known someone for years or just met them yesterday. A group of dolls are reading Larry Mitchell’s ‘70s queer manifesto The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions to each other between cathartic sobs. According to one camper, Victoria, “being at Camp Trans makes it easier to be tuned in, tapped in, to the transgender condition. It’s like coming up for air.”
Someone set up a Camp Trans personals Google Doc on the coach, and it’s already being enthusiastically populated. One entry reads:
Fluffy Mouthfuls
Me: 1.5m telescopic rotating marshmallow fork.
You: literally any marshmallow. Get on my prongs and take a hot ride to mouth town.
Another entry echoes what is the hottest topic of conversation at camp, this year and every year, in its demand for orgy transparency: “When and where are we all fucking? Horny information is horny power.” An unofficial orgy committee coalesces round the campfire to meet people’s needs.
As the afternoon sun dips behind the trees, people gradually return from fungi foraging walks, forest school (where campers learn basic bushcraft and set up tarps) and TRANScendent breathwork sessions. But the real magic of Camp Trans lies in the unplanned moments: in just seeing what happens when you drop 200 transgender people in a field and leave them for three days. Someone makes an announcement in the camp WhatsApp chat: “dolls vs dudes cigarette race 5pm small fire bowl please bring straights (fags) (cigarettes) xx.” Apparently there’s a shortage of dolls who smoke.
In a dimly lit and hazy stone-walled room at the back of the site, some of us gather around folk and protest singer Burn The Ladder, whose cries of “I’m so tired of living on TERF island” reverberate through the still air, echoed by a dozen mouths. Shortly after, synth siren The Silver Field performs at a low table, unleashing stirring distortions from a modular synthesiser, her unearthly voice that seems to pierce flesh and stone.Lavender Rodriguez, whose Afrofuturistic tunes move us into Saturday evening, says that “spaces like Camp Trans are so necessary because you get to unapologetically take up space without feeling guilty.” This sentiment is echoed by Neo (who performs this weekend under the alias May Swoon). They underline the importance of the camp’s connection to nature, especially for BIPOC trans people who may feel “quite isolated in [their] day-to-day life. Being able to wake up, get dressed and sit with other trans people and just chat and exist has partially healed that person inside me who has been crying out for interactions like this.”
You can leave your hypervigilance at the door and let it all hang out
There is something deeply transformative about spending three days in nature surrounded by trans people in various states of undress, all our similar differences and different similarities – bulges, scars, lumps, stubble – suddenly the new standard. The first year I went broke my brain, but in a good way. Something that strikes me is how our voices – some raised, some deepened, some fried – meet in the middle. Part of me wonders if cis culture would fall apart if one day we all left and lived in one big separatist transexual community in the woods and they had no one left to define themselves in opposition to.
Late on Saturday night, in a mist of poppers and dry ice, SHANDY and her human vessel Eula, through which she channels her music, pulls our bodies into the frequencies of Transexual Dance Music. (SHANDY and Eula are both dolls, but only one is plastic.) Projections of rippling water cut my new friends’ half-naked bodies into silhouettes. Some people remove their shoes to dance on the cool tiled floor as we lock in. Others pass around bumps of K. After the night comes to a close in the early hours, with an impromptu cèilidh to Cosmic Caz’s mystical trance, we all huddle around the campfire on a collection of old and beaten-up armchairs and sofas, some people adding boiling water to instant noodles while we swap stories and scream with laughter. There is something magical about raving with people you’ve been camped out with in the cold and the muck for two days, stumbling out at the end of the night and realising that you don’t need to go home, because you’re already there.
In our climate of deeply systemic transphobia in the UK, Andi reassures me that “in times when there are no effective strategies to win in the public sphere, maybe the best thing we can do is wait. Not wait and do nothing, but wait and build community. Because we have to help each other survive this wave of shit, and build power through mutual aid that we can then mobilise when there is an opportunity.” Elliot, another organiser of Camp Trans UK, tells me: “Transitioning made me feel a lot less lonely. Having a community means having resources we wouldn’t otherwise have.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning two local cis boys try crashing the party, and are immediately kicked off-site by Elliot, the landowner and de facto camp security. While this situation was harmless enough, beyond one of the cis boys claiming to be non-binary, a slight tension lingers in the air. The location is kept secret, only revealed to staff and ticket holders. Even so, word always gets out. While the gay beach has become commodified within mainstream culture, the trans beach must remain hidden. It is a jarring reminder that beyond the limits of the campsite the world is as we left it. It also reaffirms that, in all its chaos and messy vitality, Camp Trans will always be ours.
Text: Ailo Ribas
Videography: Jesse Glazzard