Photo Credit: Ashley King
The Milkshake Festival was slated to go forward with Azealia Banks as a headliner. But after protests from the trans community, she’s been dropped. Here’s the statement from festival organizers.
The LGBTQ+ community protested Azealia Banks’ involvement in the festival due to her past statements. In 2021, she referred to trans women as “just hot gay boys with beat faces and plastic surgery.” She also stated, “I live for the trans girls but the trans shit is really a non-issue. Just gay boys on hormones using male aggression to force their ways into women’s spaces.”
Comments she made in 2023 included saying that healthcare funds should be prioritized for underprivileged elderly people over trans people seeking gender-affirming surgery. She called the surgery a ‘cosmetic surgery’ that should not take priority over elderly healthcare. Despite the comments focused on trans women, Azealia took to X/Twitter this week to shame J.K. Rowling for her public anti-trans stances.
She told the Harry Potter author that “trans women are not a threat to your femininity” and that Rowling is “too rich and legendary to keep spewing the same stuff over and over.” The latter comment is in regards to Rowling’s very public stance against trans women. “One would assume that you of all people who have written books about magic and esoteric things would be able to comprehend and understand how states of consciousness vary in a human being.”
Despite seemingly defending trans people from J. K. Rowling’s ongoing criticism, her past comments led to the trans community asking Amsterdam festival organizers to reconsider. The organizers of the Milkshake Festival took to Instagram to announce they would find someone else to headline.
“We take responsibility for not fully considering the potential impact of this booking,” the organizers told their fans on Instagram. “When booking artists, we focus on the contribution their music has made to spaces that matter to us. But their public persona should not go completely unnoticed. We try to create a platform for artists who haven’t always had equal access to popular spaces. We strive to pay homage to the roots of club culture, a community that has always been at the forefront in fighting for equality.”
An update posted today reads, “This is an update to inform you that Azealia Banks will not be performing at Milkshake Festival 2025. It is clear to us that we made a mistake and that we have overlooked essential information. We sincerely apologize for this. In correction of our previous update: this statement reflects only our standpoints as an organization, not that of Azealia Bank’s management.”