Witch Fever have joined these voicing their opposition to Obtain Competition’s obvious coverage concerning rest room entry for trans followers.
Earlier as we speak (Could 27), artists NOAHFINNCE and Pinkshift hit out on the rock and steel pageant for upholding a coverage that prohibits trans girls from utilizing girls’s loos and trans males from utilizing males’s amenities.
Pop-punk singer-songwriter NOAHFINNCE shared a screenshot that appeared to come back from an e mail question to Obtain, exhibiting the pageant saying: “We’re happy with the fame the Obtain group has when it comes to variety, and can all the time look to advertise the security and luxury of all pageant attendees together with transgender and non-binary clients.
“We will likely be following the interim steerage issued by the Equalities and Human Rights Fee (EHRC) on 25 April 2025 right here. Their steerage states that ‘trans girls (organic males) shouldn’t be permitted to make use of the ladies’s amenities and trans males (organic girls) shouldn’t be permitted to make use of the boys’s amenities’”.
Hey @DownloadFest what the fuck are you doing. How have you ever received the gall to ask trans individuals like me to play your pageant after which ban them from utilizing the bathroom? If the one approach we will piss is by outing ourselves then you definately’ve created an unsafe surroundings… pic.twitter.com/W0oLIa5P4U
— NOAHFINNCE👹 (@noahfinnadams) Could 27, 2025
NOAHFINNCE responded: “Hey @downloadfest what the fuck are you doing inviting trans individuals to play your pageant however not permitting them the straightforward proper of utilizing the right rest room?”
“I had a good time taking part in final yr however won’t be attending once more if I’ve to queue up for the women’ rest room and my trans sisters must threat outing themselves within the males’s rest room. All this does is put trans individuals in peril,” he added. “In the event you’re taking part in @downloadfest, attending it and even simply conscious of it, say one thing about it.”
Now, Manchester band Witch Fever have additionally criticised Obtain. On their Instagram Tales on Tuesday, the band responded to the query: “Have you ever learn the Obtain Festivals coverage concerning trans followers rest room entry?”
They replied: “The risk to trans individuals’s security by forcing them to enter bathrooms which might be assigned to a gender that they don’t affiliate with is an entire fuckin tragedy. We hope this determination will get modified.”
The band have been constantly outspoken on behalf of the rights of transgender and non-binary teams, they usually performed at Obtain Competition in 2023.
In 2022, bassist Alex Thompson informed NME: “Empowerment is all the time going to be on the core of something we do, as a result of that’s why we do that. We wanna present individuals – particularly girls and gender non-conforming individuals – you could categorical your self in the best way you’ve been informed your entire life you shouldn’t – and there’s an influence and positivity to doing that.”
NME has reached out to Obtain’s organisers for remark concerning the coverage.
The coverage outlined by Obtain organisers seems to narrate to the UK Supreme Court docket ruling on April 16, during which judges unanimously dominated that the authorized definition of a girl relies on organic intercourse below the Equality Act.
As outlined by the Equality Human Rights Fee, the April ruling from the Supreme Court docket implies that, in locations open to the general public, trans girls shouldn’t use girls’s amenities akin to bathrooms.
BBC later reported that over 1,000 cultural figures then signed an open letter which claimed that the ruling “overlooks the necessity to defend trans, non-binary and intersex individuals from discrimination”. It additionally added that many leaders throughout the UK’s cultural sector have been “unwilling” to police which bathrooms individuals select to make use of.
Charli XCX, Self Esteem and Wolf Alice are among the many many artists to have additionally signed an open letter of solidarity to the trans group from the UK music trade. On high of that, quite a few figures within the leisure world expressed their help for these affected. Those that have spoken out in help of the trans group embrace Scissor Sisters, Fragrance Genius, Rubbish, Rachel Chinouriri, JADE, Lambrini Ladies and Billy Bragg.
This yr’s Obtain Competition takes place at Donington Park, Leicestershire from June 13-15. Inexperienced Day, Sleep Token and KoRn will all be first-time headliners, and different names on the invoice embrace Weezer, Intercourse Pistols that includes Frank Carter, Jimmy Eat World and Poppy.
