Hozier wants you to know that respecting trans people really isn’t complicated -TGN

Hozier, singer and intrepid trans ally. (Getty/Twitter)

“Cherry Wine” hitmaker Hozier has a simple but essential message: It’s very easy to show trans people basic respect.

The Irish singer-songwriter has become something of a sapphic favorite since crash landing on the music scene a decade ago. So much so that there is a whole subsection of TikTok dedicated to figuring out why his music is so appealing to queer women.

In return, Hozier makes no bones about speaking out for the LGBTQ+ community. He’s been doing it since the beginning of his career.

The music video for his monster debut hit “Take Me To Church” features a gay couple being assaulted, drawing attention to the physical violence so often faced by queers.

Earlier this year, he headlined the “Love Rising” benefit concert in Tennessee along with Paramore’s Hayley Williams, raising money for the state’s LGBTQ+ organizations. Weeks earlier, the Volunteer State became the first in the US to ban public cross-dressing performances, though the legislation has since been rejected by a federal judge.

On stage, he praised “revolutionary” queer culture and denounced politicians for inciting “artificially generated fear mongering” against the wider community.

Hozier is strengthening his alliance and has now specifically expressed support for the trans community, which bears the vast majority of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment from right-wing politicians and media outlets.

In the US, many of the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed so far this year have targeted trans youth, while UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was recently caught on video mocking trans women.

For Hozier, the anti-trans narrative is “starkly predictable” and distracts from the cost of living and housing crises.

“There are media companies that like to pick soft targets,” he said Subway. “Instead of having conversations about the actual, serious, difficult questions of our time and our collective predicament, (they) will take just less than one percent of the population and decide that the most urgent thing is to talk about it in an existential way.”

While the right-wing parties commit to using the trans community as a “scapegoat”, Hozier is urging everyone else to show an ounce of “human decency” by using the names chosen by trans people and correct pronouns.

“If you believe in a free and open society, part of that is respecting and supporting your fellow citizens’ rights to be who they are,” he said.

“For me it’s a matter of decency and showing up. It’s a very simple matter of human decency if you treat someone with respect, you treat them with respect, whether that’s their pronoun, their name.

“It’s that simple… it really is. Those things aren’t that complicated.”

Hozier joins a growing number of cisgender music stars expressing their support for the trans community.

Earlier this month, Grammy award-winning band Imagine Dragons declared their shows to be a “safe space” for the LGBTQ+ community.

“We care a lot about human rights, basic human rights, about the ability to love whoever you want,” lead singer Dan Reynolds told me. Insider. Meanwhile, the band’s bassist Ben McKee, who can often be seen on stage rocking a guitar in the colors of the trans flag, said that “everyone deserves the right to feel involved”.