Talking to the London Founders of ‘Trans Fest’ Ahead of their Second Annual Event

Words: Emma Cieslik | Photography: Miguel Fresneda Carrasco

This upcoming November 20-23, Chats Palace in Homerton will host Trans Fest, a four-day celebration of trans and nonbinary joy, art, and resistance. The festival will include the Trans Rage Exhibition, a special screening of My Genderation with talks and a panel discussion with founders, drag performances, Sapphic Speed Dating for genderfluid folx, and the London queer art market featuring trans and non binary creatives. 

Trans Rage Art is a creative platform founded by Sunny Hayward and Lee Leaff Pond to uplift radical and authentic art from trans and queer communities. It was developed as part of R.A.G.E. (Real Art Generates Emotion), a company and collective that creates and hosts spaces for communities to share art and enact change. During a time of intense anti-trans legislation and violence, R.A.G.E. and the Trans Fest became spaces where gender expansive folx embrace the generative and political power of anger.

Ahead of the second annual Trans Fest, Sunny and Lee shared why the wildly successful festival first started, their viral poster reading “Do you want to punch a TERF? Create art instead” and the need to meet community needs.

Long-simmering rage among trans and nonbinary communities in the UK reached a fever pitch last year after the UK Supreme Court ruled on April 16, 2025 that the terms “woman” and “sex” within the Equality Act 2010 strictly refer to biological sex assigned at birth. The decision, supported by TERF actors like JK Rowling, was deeply felt by trans, nonbinary, and intersex individuals in the UK, including queer and nonbinary art curator Lee and artist Sunny. 

Lee had been going on their own journey exploring constructive outlets for their rage, after reading trans scholar Susan Stryker's chapter “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Champounix.” In it, Stryker argued that “rage is living in a world that fights against your very existence,” Lee explained. “It’s the idea that inherent in you is that kind of anger that the world doesn’t love you or respect you back.” 

“It is so validating for communities that are systematically told that they’re not allowed to be angry, to the female community, the trans community, the Black queer community, the fat community,” Lee explained. “Instead of rejecting anger as an unattractive quality, kind of embracing that, and being like, ‘no, I am angry, but I don’t need to express it in this typical white male I’m-going-to-punch-someone-in-the-street way but do it in a way where you funnel it into something productive.’” 

Nonbinary queer artist Sunny was doing just that already. Sunny was deeply upset when the mayor of London released thousands of leaflets reading that ‘you are loved and wanted in London.’ “How dare they say that! We’ve got people trying to push immigrants out. We’ve got people trying to stop trans people from living authentic lives. These posters are meaningless,” Sunny responded. In defiance, they ripped up each variation of the leaflets and created a collage with the wreckage, writing sarcastically over the original words “except for trans people?”

The resulting artwork sparked the R.A.G.E. collective dedicated to trans and nonbinary artists embracing rage during a time of unprecedented violence. Hosted by Chats Palace, whose director Mark Francis-Vasey offered Sunny and Lee a space for a weekend of trans rage, a resulting exhibition on Trans Rage (held in July 2025) featured Sunny’s work as the first one visitors saw when they entered a space that years earlier had housed gender liberation meetings. A long-forgotten site of queer history with posters from the AIDS epidemic still housed in the attic welcomed in a new generation of queer and trans activists and artists.

While both were worried about turnout, the flyers they passed out at last year’s London queer art market generated intense interest, and both were taken aback by the power of opening a dialogue about trans rage as both politically vital and valid. 

“There was the moment we saw the smiles and emotional experiences people were having,” Sunny explained. “People were holding each other and crying, and we were like, ‘There’s no way we can stop now. This has filled us with so much joy through the rage that we felt initially. Our rage has been turned into joy because we know we are becoming a hub for people where they can essentially let their rage go and heal together.”

“There’s a great history of marginalized communities using their anger as a political tool.”

Alongside a market supporting local trans and nonbinary artists trying to earn a living, “we’re really passionate about having an element of the Trans Fest that A, was free, that people could essentially come and essentially be together and B, be creative, just like we’re creative and allow people space to be creative, to artistically educate people,” Sunny shared. Art can be an outlet to express rage and amplify change. At this year’s festival, artists will teach people how to channel anger constructively through art with an open workshop where attendees can create zines, beads, and protest zines. 

“My aim is to continue building on the conversations and the sense of community and making sure that people leave and maybe go and create their own art,” Lee shared. This is critical for the trans community, but it’s also vital for allies. While this year’s Trans Fest is explicitly intended for trans and queer communities, Lee and Sunny hope that it will invite cisgender allies to step up in the fight for trans rights. 

“It’s a bit confrontational but intentionally so,” Lee explained. “It’s like these [trans people] are human beings with deep complex feelings. I want you to learn about them, and I want you to hear about them so that you can grow in your empathy and activism.”

Sunny and Lee hope people take the art they create home with them, but as they remember from last year when people discarded protest signs in the streets, much material culture behind the gender liberation movement is lost to history. As a result, Lee, themselves an art curator trained by Museum of Transology curator E-J Scott, is committed to collecting what people leave behind after this year’s Trans Fest to add to their own archive. 

History is at the heart of not only where Trans Fest is located but also its open embrace of anger as opposition. “I think there’s a great history of marginalized communities using their anger as a political tool,” Lee noted. “If it wasn’t for queer activism in the 1980s, if it wasn’t for feminist action in the 70s, if it wasn’t for the suffragettes, white men would still rule the world and what a boring, horrible world that was for everyone.” Rage has historically been demonised but that’s largely because it’s been the power of the people. 

Trans Fest reflects Sunny and Lee’s own self-described political and cultural movement of generating rage into love and political action. As a result, “we’re not doing this for ourselves,” Sunny chuckled. “We’re doing this for the people, through the people, because of the people.” 

“Watch this space,” Lee laughed, “We’re gonna get some shit done.”