Music

Lead singer of metal band Liturgy just came out as trans while making a powerful statement about femininity

May 12 2020
Written by Josh Milton

Hunter Hunt Hendrix of Liturgy has come out as trans in a moving statement. (Roger Kisby/Getty Images)

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the lead singer of American black metal group Liturgy, has come out as trans.

In a statement posted on the band’s social media profiles Tuesday morning, the musician explained how she realised she was trans before forming the band, but, out of fear, kept it quiet.

“I am a woman,” she emphatically stated, “I’ve always been one.

“The love I have to give is a woman’s love, if only because it is mine.”

pic.twitter.com/xpaKA5lPy3

— Litvrgy (@LITVRGY) May 12, 2020

‘I’ve finally broken free from some kind of compromise I felt I needed to accept.’

She continued: “I knew I was female and not male, emotionally and in my experience of my body. But I was afraid – of social rejection, romantic rejection, career rejection, rejection by my family, failure.”

Founded in 2005, the Brooklyn, New York, band built a sprawling following for their genre-blending music, often bending the limits hip-hop and prog-rock into, what the band dubbed, “transcendental black metal”.

Hunt-Hendrix went onto say that her womanhood has played a crucial role in her music-making over the decades.

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and Tyler Dusenbury of Liturgy perform onstage during the 2012 Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park. (Roger Kisby/Getty Images)

“The music and ideas I compose come from a female heart,” she explained, “whatever that means, and I don’t want to partially distort the transmission through an ‘effeminate male’ mask any longer.”

She added: “This statement is essentially making itself.

“I have no choice, there is no way for me to stop it from coming out, I am simply surrendering to it.

“I say this as an artist in a way, but ultimately it’s about my own relationship to my emotions and my body.

“Through a long-developing process, I’ve finally broken free from some kind of compromise I felt I needed to accept, without being fully conscious of what I was doing or able to seriously imagine an alternative for myself.

“It has been very emotional, and it’s over now, so I am punctuating it.”