Bells Larsen knew that releasing a low-fi, folksy album about his transition as the Trump administration relentlessly attacked LGBTQ+ people would give it an inherently political edge. But the Canadian singer-songwriter did not expect to be caught in a bureaucratic nightmare while attempting to tour the US – and ultimately have to cancel that tour due to the gender marker in his passport.
On 12 April, Larsen announced on Instagram that he was pulling out of concerts to promote the album in eight cities this spring: “To put it super plainly, because I’m trans (and have an M on my passport), I can’t tour in the States,” he wrote.
Earlier this month, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) updated its manual to “only recognize two biological sexes, male and female”, reversing a Biden-era policy that allowed for a third gender option on visa and immigration forms. This means that trans or non-binary travelers could face issues with their documents when applying for visas or attempting to enter the US. The update comes amid the turmoil caused by the president’s border crackdown and targeting of LGBTQ+ individuals.
“I feel overwhelmed by the degree to which my community is being completely dehumanized,” Larsen said on a Zoom call from his Montreal apartment, where colorful figure drawings by his partner, Noah, covered the wall. “My livelihood has been robbed of me, but this is also so much bigger than me.”
Larsen, 27, now finds himself in a delicate situation. He wishes to transcend the touring visa drama and “focus on the music”, while also speaking out against efforts to legislate trans identities out of public life in America, where he has friends and fans.
Larsen wrote Blurring Time, out 25 April, while beginning to identify as trans in 2021. The first line sung on the album – “Friday night, drinking boxed wine, alone in my apartment blurring time” – describes the messiness of coming out during the pandemic.
“Being alone in my room and looking at myself in the mirror, seeing the way my body curves or doesn’t curve, and realizing that I’d been avoiding doing so for so long – the world paused, and I was invited to look inward in a way that I wouldn’t normally,” he said.
That isolation sparked Larsen’s decision to start taking gender-affirming hormones, though he now understands that he was always trans. “Growing up, my birthday present was always getting to go to the hair salon with my older brother Charlie and choosing his hairdo,” he said. “Why would someone want to give their brother a makeover for their birthday? There are all these little things I think back on and say, I’ve always been me.”
Larsen comes from an artistic family in Toronto; his father wrote children’s books and his mother went to acting school. Their support, along with seeing gay and trans characters in shows like Glee andDegrassi and watching coming out videos on YouTube, helped Larsen begin to put the pieces of his sexuality together early on. He remembers seeing a friend in a lesbian role in a middle school play and empathizing with the character.
“I just had this huge aha moment,” he said. Attending an arts high school had an effect too. “I met people in grade nine who were proudly and openly self-identifying as bi or queer or gay, and I felt this huge exhale,” he said.
When he was 15, Larsen wrote his first song to commemorate a breakup with his high-school girlfriend, Cara. “The very, very first lyric of any song I ever wrote started with ‘she’. Thinking back on it, I’m like, damn, that’s pretty rad that at the time I was a girl thinking about another girl and letting my freak flag fly.”
He wrote his first album, Good Grief, as a way to process Cara taking her own life in 2017. It addressed different types of mourning – the death of a friend, the end of a relationship, the loss of innocence that comes with growing up. At the time, Larsen identified as non-binary.
“My queerness before that album was always focused outward: who do I love, who am I attracted to?” he said. “Slowly, I started thinking about who I am, who is compelled by me, who am I as a lover? Once I started asking those questions, the gender of it all started to unfurl.”
Larsen wanted to start taking gender-affirming hormones as soon as he came out as trans, but he was worried about how the testosterone would impact his singing voice. “When we think of the way transition looks for transmasc people who want to pursue a physical transition, one of the first things we think about is that their voice gets deeper,” he said. “The thought of that was very euphoric for me, but also scary, because I didn’t know how it would impact my main instrument.”
So Larsen recorded all of the songs for Blurring Time first with his higher voice, with the intent of revisiting everything once he started hormones. When his voice deepened, he worked with a vocal coach to relearn how to sing in the new register. Justin Bieber was an unlikely muse, since the teen popstar experienced the hormonal changes of adolescence between albums. (Larsen, a “big Belieber”, met Bieber pre-fame when he was a child busking on the Toronto streets. Larsen told him he was a musician; Bieber told him to “keep on keeping on”.) Then Larsen re-recorded each song and layered his voices together, so present-day Larsen duets with a past version of himself. He got the idea in part through the dueting feature on TikTok. “I shaped my transition around this project,” he said.
Larsen’s confessional songwriting takes cues from Elliott Smith, who used multi-tracking vocals to create layers of harmony. He counts Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and Sufjan Stevens as major influences, and calls Adrianne Lenker, who fronts the folk-rock band Big Thief, “one of the best songwriters since forever”. Larsen’s lyrics directly grapple with gender identity while also refusing to be defined by it. “It’s not as simple as either or, I’m both and I’m more, most of all I’m unsure,” he sings on the title track.
In March, Canada and some European countries issued travel advisories for trans citizens, cautioning them about the US’s stricter visa rules if their documents do not reflect their sex assigned at birth. Larsen had planned safeguards, such as performing exclusively in blue states and traveling with a cis man as a sort of buffer. But the “biological sex” listed on his US visa application form, as required by USCIS, did not match the M (for male) on his Canadian passport. After receiving an email informing him of USCIS’s rule from the American Federation of Musicians, a labor union for both US and Canadian musicians, and speaking with two immigration lawyers, Larsen cancelled the tour. He made it clear that he felt forced into doing so because of the policy.
“I received an email with underlined wording stating that my application would not be able to be processed,” Larsen said. “So I know for sure that I am not able to apply for a visa and come to the States in a touring capacity, at least for the next four years.”
Larsen is not alone. The Nova Scotia-based singer-songwriter T Thomason, a non-binary trans man, told Wired that even though his visa does not expire until June, he cancelled a gig in Maine. Horror stories of travelers detained at the border were enough to deter him. “I just thought if that’s happening to cis people, I really feel worried about what could happen to me,” he said.
Antoinette Follert, communication director for the American Federation of Musicians, wrote in a statement: “USCIS will not accept petitions with no gender identity, and furthermore, the gender identity must be the same as what was designated at birth. We shared the information with our Canadian members, and upon receiving that information, Bells made the decision to cancel the tour. The American Federation of Musicians … supports all members equally and continues to lobby on behalf of all members in support of our mission and values.”
When foreign musicians tour the US, they usually apply for an O1 visa for “extraordinary ability”, said Sarah Pitney, an immigration attorney in Washington DC who does not counsel Larsen. That visa goes into a musician’s passport and is examined at the border by US border agents. If the gender markers on the visa and the passport do not match, a musician could face invasive questioning from a border agent. Pitney said it was unclear whether they also could be denied entry.
So far, there are no confirmed cases of trans or non-binary travelers of any nationality being detained or barred entry at the US border. But the fear remains.
“If you were to ask me, could this musician tour in the US, the answer is likely yes, if he’s willing to put up with the disrespect of having a visa that says female,” Pitney said. “And he absolutely should not have to do that. I agree with [Larsen]. If I were a trans person coming into this country, I would not come into this country. His decision makes sense to me, and I do not question it for a second.”
Pitney added that immigration lawyers were worried that US authorities could claim that a trans or non-binary traveler committed fraud if their gender markers did not match: “This isn’t something we’ve seen yet, but we’re theorizing it could and we have concerns.”
Massima Bell and Dust Reid are the producers of Transa, a sprawling music project out of the US released last year in support of trans rights, featuring songs from more 100 artists including Sade, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Sam Smith.
“Even prior to this administration, trans people faced more hurdles with traveling, because you’re always at the behest of basically whatever border agent you get,” Bell said. “That creates an opportunity to be targeted, singled out and harassed. Now there’s a top-down, concerted effort to create barriers for travel for trans people. I think it’s part of the creation of a blueprint where trans people are test subjects of these policies that are ultimately used to establish a more authoritarian federal government in the United States.”
Bell and Reid wanted to plan international events to promote Transa, but they’re holding off for now. “We’re reluctant to send artists overseas for fear of invasive questioning,” Reid said.
For now, Larsen is focused on shows in Canada and Europe. He was recently asked to tour with the Canadian musician Dan Mangan, who he counts as one of his heroes, and whose songs he used to sing while busking with Cara on Toronto subways as a teen. He wishes he could perform for his US fans, but says he has no interest in crossing the border “in the same way that you probably don’t want to date someone who doesn’t want to date you”.
Larsen does not feel like he needs a travel document to validate his identity. “There is no policy that can undo your existence,” he said. “There is no politician who gets to decide that you exist or don’t exist. You are who you say you are, and that’s enough.”