Dear Margo Wildman,
June 8, 2026 | #queer #rave
A funny thing happened to me recently.
It happened like this: I dropped off my kids at school, and then I biked up the street to our local bakery to buy a loaf of bread where, waiting in line, I heard a song come on the radio.
Damn, I thought, this song is a bop. This is a real jam. What is this?
I pulled out my phone, and it told me that I was listening to Midnight Sun by Zara Larsson. I put my phone back in my pocket, paid for my bread, and biked home, where I put on my good headphones and listened to the song three times in a row.
It’s catchy. It’s like… a hyperpop-inflected drum and bass track, pretty vocals, nice beat drop. It’s a cute song about going to your cabin in the woods for midsommar and feeling happy. It’s good, I thought.
I also thought that it sounded gay as hell.
I couldn’t put my finger on it, but this song… to my ears, this song clearly sounds like doing mdma at a Pride rave. It sounds like getting dolled up and going dancing in a sweaty basement. It sounded like getting wet in the misting rain, chatting in the smoke pit, the steam rising off our bodies.
Who’s Zara Larsson? I had never heard of her before.1 Is she gay?
I looked up the music video, and immediately I knew in my heart: no. This music video was made for the straight gaze. This woman is not gay. I read her Wikipedia page and confirmed my suspicion: she’s an ally, but no friend of Dorothy’s.
I felt confused. What is happening right now? Am I losing it? How could I feel this so clearly, and yet be so wrong?
I clicked on the Wikipedia page for the song itself and… there you were, Margo, credited as a producer. Oh shit, I thought, this song was made by a trans woman. THAT EXPLAINS THAT!
It gets better. I looked you up, and immediately found this interview in Dazed from January, 2026 where you explicitly position your art within a transgender sonic lineage.
How would you define that trans sonic identity in a few words? What does it sound like?
Margo XS: Malleable, synthetic, oftentimes confrontational, and oftentimes glossy. There’s also another side of it, [the idea that] it can be it can be anything, but there is a really beautiful lineage of trans women and the synthesizer, starting with Wendy Carlos and going up to SOPHIE.
The kind of equipment that was available at [Wendy Carlos’] time in the 70s was very analog sounding synthesizer, which had a lot of variables that could change to the weather in the room. It was very new. It was very unknown, and was very unstable. And, you know, think of that in relationship to being a trans woman in that period, it’s like it’s something you are. So you your body is still changeable and under your own control, but you are restricted by kind of the new of some of the technology surrounding these ideas at the time, and how that can change based on environment.
Whereas if you look at electronic musically by trans women in the 21st Century, there is a kind of refined plasticity that is able to be created or able to be synthesized due to less changing variables and more of a chance to have a platform. And so that’s just one, one way I think about kind of continuing a transgender lineage sonically and how sound mirrors the body and mirror our ideologies.
This floored me. This is SO COOL. This blew my mind.
I mean, on the one hand, of course I liked your song: you DJ at the same kind of underground queer parties I attend as often as humanly possible. Of course your music appeals to me. On the other hand, though, it was a disorienting experience to realize that I had somehow heard that connection in your music.
It blew me away that you managed to actually put all of that… sonic lineage in one of your songs, that there was something floating in the air that I could pick up, and immediately relate to, myself, as a fellow transgender woman. That’s pretty amazing.
I thought I would write you a letter and fangirl a little bit: I wanted to thank you for making your music.
If you ever come to Toronto, I’m sure we’d throw a cool party.
Warmest regards,
Filipa
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I now know that she is very famous, but I’m old, I’m a mom, I don’t know these things, okay?!? ↩