Trans women, techno, and the underground scene that saved them

For many members of the LGBTQIA+ community, music is a form of escape, especially when it’s in the form of celebratory songs by Madonna and Lady Gaga, personal queer love tracks by Troye Sivan, and more. Aside from pop music, techno — fast-paced electronic dance music characterized by minimalist, driving rhythms and a futuristic vibe — has paved the way for many trans musicians like the late SOPHIE, Arca, Octo Octa, and more.

Currently, in the international music scene, many techno DJs identify as trans women, which poses the question: Why has the genre attracted people who identify as such?

Casual listeners may find techno too loud and sparse in lyrics. The musical arrangement may even throw people off. But for some members of the trans community, techno transcends the properties of sound — it is a part of their identity, something that can’t be taken away, engraved in their soul.

A trans woman was instrumental in the development of techno music

Wendy Carlos, born in 1939, was the first openly trans woman to win a Grammy Award. She is also instrumental in the development of electronic music.

Techno music is built on synthesizers, and Wendy is responsible for making the synthesizer a viable musical instrument. She was a composer, engineer, and inventor who aimed to make synthesizers more accessible to the public.

During her time at Columbia University, she significantly contributed to the development of the Moog synthesizer, one of the earliest electronic instruments. The electronic music we have today, as well as the machines used to produce tracks, wouldn’t have existed without her efforts.

At a time when electronic music wasn’t taken seriously, she defied the odds and mixed classical sounds with electronic beats, ultimately leading to her winning three awards at the 1970 Grammy Awards for her genre-defying 1968 album Switched-On Bach.

Wendy opened doors not only to musicians but also to trans women as electronic music evolved and techno was born. From its roots in Detroit in the mid-1980s to the clubs in Poblacion, techno music has constantly evolved and influenced musicians and DJs.

adobo Magazine spoke to four trans DJs in the Metro Manila underground music scene who explained why trans identity and techno are so deeply intertwined, based on their personal experiences.

Taking the power back

When she was 21 years old, Xtina Superstar suddenly found herself in an ice plant. It was the first time she experienced a rave, but she wasn’t there to perform; she was just a girl surrounded by good people and music she had never heard before. Little did she know that experience had planted something.

Today, Xtina is a part of CHURCHLOVESU, one of the most popular queer collectives in Manila’s underground scene. It’s also a party scene she simply describes as home. Getting there, however, wasn’t easy.

^{Xtina Superstar of CHURCHLOVESU}

“I almost quit DJing before doing CHURCHLOVESU,” she said, “Because there was a time when I would only get booked during Pride month or Women’s month — then the rest of the year I wouldn’t get booked. It felt tokenizing on my part as a trans DJ.”

That tokenization became the blueprint for everything CHURCHLOVESU would stand against. When Xtina and her co-founders, Jer Dee and Paulo Castro, built the party, she made a deliberate decision: the lineup would only feature trans, queer, and cisgender women DJs. Not as a gimmick, but as a correction.

“The nightlife scene is catered more to straight cis male DJs — kulang pa din talaga sa trans and queer visibility (there is a lack of trans and queer visibility),” she added.

Xtina credits much of her confidence to the late Shola Luna, a trans icon of the 1990s Manila underground rave scene and an HIV advocate, whom she was lucky enough to meet in person.

“She made me believe that you can be unapologetic by just being your true self,” Xtina said.

That meeting — one trans woman passing something unspoken to another — quietly explains why visibility keeps coming up in how Xtina talks about her work.

“I grew up not having enough trans visibility in the media,” she said. “My entire teen years, hindi ko alam na may term pala na ‘trans woman’ (I didn’t know that there was a term for ‘trans woman’) — akala ko bakla ako (I thought I was gay).” 

That personal history is exactly why she refuses to treat her presence behind the decks as incidental. “It means taking my power back. It definitely sends a message that it is possible for trans women to lead and be the one in charge. That to me is a power move,” she said.

For Xtina, commanding a room full of people with music isn’t just a job; it is, in its own way, a statement –– one she spent years being denied the right to make.

Witnessed, not watched

EDGY remembers vividly the exact moment when techno found her. It was in January 2023 at the Clown Convention, a party organized by the Elephant Party.

“It was the first night that all of my inhibitions were stripped off and all I had to do was surrender and be present,” she said. Before that night, she had been a club-goer searching for something she couldn’t quite name. In that party, held in a parking lot, stripped of a proper venue and all the trappings that come with one, she found it.

^{EDGY is a DJ at Club Euphoria MNL}

Today, EDGY is part of Club Euphoria MNL, a queer party collective that started with Zoom parties during the pandemic, which eventually transitioned into drag and music shows. For her, that collective is rooted in art, friendship, and belongingness. It has since taken over the streets of Poblacion and Cubao with DJ-centric club nights and drag events.

What she describes when she talks about the dance floor is less about music and more about a fundamental shift in how a body gets to exist in a room. 

“Outside the club, trans women are often hyper-visible. People are constantly reading us, questioning us, defining us,” she said. “On the dance floor, that relationship changes. I’m not performing womanhood for anyone’s approval — I’m just moving. The floor doesn’t erase being seen, but it transforms it. Instead of scrutiny, it becomes recognition. Instead of being watched, you’re witnessed.”

She draws a similar line around techno’s absence of lyrics. “Pop often tells you what to feel. Techno gives you space to discover it yourself,” she said. “As a trans woman, that’s powerful — because so much of life is spent being explained, categorized, or interpreted by society. Techno is one of the few realms where I can exist without needing to translate myself.”

What stands out most in her story isn’t the music –– it’s the people. When asked who became family to her in the scene, she answered with a list: Earvin Corona, the founder of Club Euphoria MNL, who has been a “true believer to my engine since day one.” She discovered and honed her talents during the pandemic with her best friend, rapper and songwriter Kumare Harvey. They honed their musical talents together.

She also named Ari and Kyle, also known as DJs arigoggles and KADILIMAN, who taught her that being unserious was actually okay. And Jorge, known as obesedogma.777, who invited her to play an experimental set at Apotheka and in doing so, showed her a reflection of herself she hadn’t seen before. 

“What he saw in me, I also started to see,” she said. “He’s taught me how to be more graceful with myself — not just as an artist but most importantly as a human being.”

EDGY doesn’t hide the cost of all this. Getting to where she is right now required losing parts of herself, she said — willingly cutting branches so something new could grow. And when asked whether she had ever considered walking away, she brought up the 27 Club –– the tragic roll call of artists such as Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, whose lives ended at 27, overwhelmed by pressures that proved too much to bear in a world that watched their every move.

“It’s kind of bizarre to now finally get the horrors of the ’27 Club,'” she said. “I just want everyone to know that I try my very best. Every day.”

A place that was always yours

Kenia‘s entry into techno was quieter than the others, but not less decisive. It was 2024, her first time at Bliss Club, and progressive house and techno music blasted through the speakers. “You don’t just listen to the rhythm, you start feeling it deep inside. It felt like home.”

Already a resident photographer and DJ at Club Euphoria MNL, Kenia also performs at Apotheka, Electric Sala, and The Groove Cubao — spaces she had to earn her way into. It wasn’t as simple as walking on a red carpet. Claiming space as a trans woman in the underground, she said, required constant energy. It was a journey that involved always having to prove herself, navigating moments of feeling unsafe, and moving through a scene long dominated by masculinity. 

^{Kenia performs at Apotheka, Electric Sala, and The Groove Cubao, aside from being a resident DJ and photographer at Club Euphoria MNL}

“There were times I almost walked away,” she admitted. 

Spaces like Bliss Club, Planet Amor, and Von Dyke — FLINTA (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-Binary, Transgender, Agender) venues — became the lifeline that made staying possible.

What changed everything, she says, was community. Club Euphoria MNL gave her a first family in nightlife, a place where she started as a photographer and grew into a DJ without ever having to do it alone. 

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“Music became less about proving myself and more about sharing energy with people I trust,” she said. “It made me braver behind the decks because I wasn’t doing it alone anymore — I had people who saw me grow and grew with me.”

When asked if there was a specific trans artist whose existence exemplified the possibility of thriving inside —and not merely visiting — the scene, Kenia’s answer was unlike anyone else’s.

“Actually, none. I’ve met all the local trans women DJs I admire.” She didn’t need to borrow inspiration from afar. Proof, standing right in front of her, in the same rooms she already occupied, was more than enough.

Your movement is the lyric

Simoan started DJing only recently. At the time the interview was conducted, she had played twice, so far — but she speaks about the dance floor like someone who has lived on it for years. In her own way, she has. Long before she stood behind the decks, she was in the crowd, learning every variable in the room: the energy, the hesitation, the moment a body finally lets go.

She found techno through Club Euphoria. Before that, she went to straight clubs, and while she doesn’t knock those nights, she’s clear about what they didn’t give her. 

^{After years of hitting the dance floor, Simoan eventually spun hits behind the decks}

“If I stayed in straight clubs’ playlists, I wouldn’t be this chic and confident,” she said. Techno didn’t just give her sound. It gave her a stronger sense of self.

What draws her to the genre goes beyond taste — it goes back to origin. “It was made by queer people for queer people,” she said. “It inspires me to play for them.” 

View this post on Instagram

And in the absence of lyrics, she finds something more honest than a written line could offer: “Techno does not interrupt. It does not require you to be controlled by composed lyrics or the said feeling from the writers. Techno lets you be vulnerable through your own being. In techno, your movement — and your breathing — is the unrequired lyric.”

She sees the DJ booth as an extension of the floor, not a separate entity. “I started as someone who loves to be on the dance floor, and it is my safe space — so being behind the decks does not change how I feel or how safe I feel,” she said.

“It feels like I am a student and a professor at once: one who studies the dance floor to gain empathy and connection, and a leader tasked to let these people feel safe, loved, and seen.”

The person who showed her that a trans woman could truly live in this scene — not just pass through it — was a name some might already recognize from this piece: EDGY. Not a global icon, not a legend from another era, but someone in the same rooms, on the same floors, doing it in real time.

The floor doesn’t lie

Spoiler alert: there is no single reason why trans women find themselves drawn to techno. 

Xtina will tell you it’s about reclaiming the room she was once barred from entering; EDGY will tell you it’s about being witnessed instead of being watched, about finally existing in a space that doesn’t ask you to translate yourself; Kenia will tell you it’s the people or a found family that made her brave enough to stand behind the decks unapologetically; and Simoan will tell you it’s in the DNA of the techno genre itself. 

What all four DJs are really saying, beneath the different languages they use, is the same thing: for a trans woman navigating a country with no national law protecting her right to simply exist, the underground is not just entertainment; it’s infrastructure, it is the architecture of a life built in the dark, with other people who know exactly how the dark feels.

Wendy, who cracked open the instrument in 1968, didn’t get to live publicly as herself for years, and would even disguise herself as a man to perform on stage. SOPHIE made music that sounded like aliens and the future while her present was still being contested because of her anonymity during the early years of her career.

In a parking lot somewhere in Metro Manila, in a queer venue in Poblacion, in a booth at Apotheka an hour past midnight, four trans women are continuing that lineage –– not as a tribute, but as inheritance.

The floor has always known what the law has not: that trans women were never visitors here; they built the room, they set the frequency, they are the music.

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