Black leather boots, pulled high on a toned bronze leg, wrapped in loose mesh tights. Tranie Tronic is defined, stark, and polished. Their black bra and briefs fit them snugly. And sitting on a slender neck above their shoulders, is their face — sharp, angular and poised. Their make-up is done, just to the point where they look effortlessly glammed-up. But you can see that their cheekbones are no feat of contour alone.
“Tranie Tronic, in the beginning…was very potty mouth,” Atif says, sitting in a chair by the window of their living room: the birthplace of their performative art piece and alter ego.
“Full self-expression, not polite… Nothing that I had been before in my previous projects,” they explain. “So I gave myself, you know, like, carte blanche to just say whatever I want. Whatever I wanted! So, it was, like, sexual, it was explicit, it was implicit, it was not pornographic but close… Obscene! Not something my parents approved of.”
Past all the artistic angles and transcendent photos, Atif Siddiqi doesn’t look too different from the brat doll-esque Tranie Tronic.
Their skin is polished and flawless. Those cheekbones are in fact real. But there’s also a warmth and comfort to Atif’s smile and beaming eyes as they recall vivid details of their past that led them to Montréal. It’s the feeling you get when your desi parents let you go hang out with your cooler and artsier cousin who is usually too busy to show up for family gatherings.
“Are you a girl? Are you a boy?”
“I always reveled in my femininity,” Atif says, remembering how they expressed themselves as a child growing up in Karachi, Pakistan. “I never hid it, I never tried to conform to any masculine social norms or anything like that.”
Dressing up in more feminine clothes, and just adorning themself, was always a part of Atif’s childhood. It drew attention — mainly questions of bewilderment. “Are you a girl? Are you a boy?”
There was never a huge shift or intentional awakening. Atif was non-binary before the word ever entered their personal vocabulary.
“What shifted was just where you were, and how you were deciding to present yourself.”
They continued to learn about themself as their life moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Their father was a defense attaché and work had prompted the family to relocate. There in Dhaka, for the first time, Atif put paint to canvas. And, as if they knew how to paint before ever trying, their interest in art led them to win a local award coveted by their teacher and peers alike. Right before they returned to Pakistan and eagerly waited to leave for the United States.
By the age of around 12, Atif was set on wanting to study fashion. As soon as they could, they headed off to Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) alongside their brother, where they spent more than two years studying at the same college — though things weren’t easy.
Aside from facing a few learning curves at the beginning of their studies, Atif said things weren’t the safest back then in Los Angeles. Violence and even death was at times just around the corner.
“LA is a very rough city,” they say, remembering incidents of physical violence they and their brother would face. “My brother was mugged three times when we were there. I was mugged with him once… We used to have these drive-by shootings and one of our school colleagues was killed, and then we had a murder suicide in the condo complex where we were living. So, it was nasty.”
From there, Atif returned to Pakistan. Having had their fill of the United States, they looked northward after hearing about Canada from their dad’s old colleague who was living on the South Shore. They waited a year until their visa was approved and then left for Canada’s Sin City.
Amethyst, herald of the Saathis
Atif’s dream was no longer to pursue fashion — but instead to perform, record, and produce content. No doubt, they’d gotten the fashion bit of that business mastered. They went back to school in Fine Arts at Concordia University.
Within a year, Atif felt well established in Montréal’s art scene. And the transition from fashion to performance art wasn’t too hard for them.
“I’d already started kathak dance lessons when I was in Karachi,” they say, in addition to beginning Indian classical singing. “I wanted to create this work which was called Amethyst’s Universe,” Atif says. “I started finding musicians to work with and got that project off the ground, [and] applied for arts council funding here… I wanted to do this kind of fusion of Indian classical inspiration with Western-style music.”
A collection of 12 poems, Amethyst’s Universe, in Atif’s own words, is the story of Amethyst, “an alter ego who is the fullest expression of [their] femininity.” It was one of Atif’s first projects to explicitly talk about their gender identity, self-discovery and acceptance. At the time, they identified as androgynous, as the term “non-binary” wasn’t yet known to them.
“The 90s were a great time to be an artist in Montréal. It was not expensive whatsoever,” Atif recounts. “There were so many different scenes and so many things happening and it was very vibrant.”
That vibrance attracted many immigrants from South Asia throughout the 90s. In 1991, 22% of Canada’s non-permanent residents lived in Montréal — with South Asians from India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan accounting for a good chunk of them.
Among their number were a group of Montrealers that got together with Atif and formed the “Saathis”: the Hindi and Urdu word for “companion” or “friend.”
The group’s inception came on the heels of a 1995 interview that Atif did for Fugues. After seeing a South Asian performer exploring queer femininity through art and poetry, many in the community came out to see Atif perform live. Connections were formed after the performance and soon Saathis came into being as Atif realized the need for a space by and for queer South Asians in Montréal.
“We just all, you know, got together as friends,” they say. “In the beginning, it was a social group. So it was just to meet, we always met at people’s places, brought food, had potlucks.”
After a few informal gatherings, the group grew as more people sought the space Saathis was giving queer South Asians in and around the island. Soon Saathis was hosting South Asian artists of all kinds. And to do something grand together was only natural.
“That’s how we created the Darbar,” Atif says with a glint of pride in their eyes. “Yeah, the following year in the summer, as part of Divers/Cité. That was in ‘96… And then that became an annual thing for a few years ‘til ‘99, ‘til most of these people left because they were all here for university.”
Enter Tranie Tronic: “the other woman”
Atif continued on in Montréal, landing a full-time job while performing and working on artistic projects on the side. But things took a turn when they met someone in 2003. And soon Atif was embroiled in what they called “a casual but very intense relationship” with this man whom they did not name.
“He had a girlfriend. I was the other woman,” Atif says, nodding. “There’s lots of discontent with being in that role. So there was a lot of drama.”
During that time eventually came the birth of the leather-and-fishnet-clad “potty-mouthed” brat herself: Tranie Tronic. Atif describes this alter ego as an incarnation of all the drama they lived in that relationship. They weren’t bothered if those words reached the man who prompted this artistic reaction in the first place.
“I was comfortable with the fact that I was writing all these songs about our experience together. But there was nothing [he] could do about it,” Atif says. “We’re still friends. We just decided to not continue our sexual relationship, but transform it into a good friendship. So, we’ve been friends for the last 20 years.”
But while personally processing their identity as “the other woman,” Atif wanted to open up a conversation on the realities of dating as a trans person at the time. And Atif says unfortunately the mandate of Tranie Tronic remains relevant to this day.
“I needed to express all that raw emotion and everything I was living,” Atif says. “And the way that trans people, non-binary people were just being treated as sexual objects and objectified, which is still the case to a large extent.”
Atif does notice how much gender expression has evolved since the past they experienced. Dressing the way they used to has become much more frequent, and trendy. Whereas at the time, for them it was raw self-expression.
“I did that for myself,” Atif says. “It used to turn heads, you know, I used to get honked at, and whistled at, and so on… At that time, you know, I felt most people wanted to pass for the gender that they were presenting as, and if you weren’t passing there was a problem. There was no space for the in-between, for the ambiguous.”
And occupying that in-between didn’t necessarily mean you would be desirable, whether inside or outside the LGBTQ+ community.
“Desire played a lot into it as well. The more you conformed to the binary, the ends of the spectrum of the binary, the more desirable you were. So the hyper masculine, the hyper feminine, because people could identify that and still feel a certain way.”
The second incarnation of Tranie Tronic: Transgression
Atif continued to flourish in that grey zone. Tranie Tronic slowly took a break. And at times they found themselves wanting to leave Montréal for a new city. But with their parents moving to the area, and the roots they had established, they stayed put.
Years later, though, they decided to take up the mantle of Tranie Tronic once more.
“And that came out of this experience I had in 2018 when I was drugged and robbed by this online date.”
Atif says it was a planned crime. The perpetrator drugged Atif with GHB, assaulted and robbed them. They say the entire situation was tangled in such a web of lies and deceit that it felt orchestrated, and they suspected this wasn’t the perpetrator’s first time doing something like this.
“I tried to do whatever I could, but the police were just not very cooperative with trying to help me,” Atif says, adding that officers had laughed at their situation.
They were told this individual was known to police, but ultimately there wasn’t enough evidence to put him away. Recently, Atif checked in with the authorities to see if there were any updates on their case, only to be told that no progress has been made since.
“It was a huge trauma for me and caused immense amounts of PTSD. Took me a long time to recover from it.”
A large part of that recovery was donning some leather and kajal, transforming back into Tranie Tronic and releasing their latest album, Transgression, in May of 2024.
I woke up crazed and betrayed
Lost and abused
End his thievery
Defeat his cunning
Kill his schemes of stealing from the innocent
Punish his heinous crime!
Transgression, Tranie Tronic, 2024
Almost like a badua, the lyrics to the title track from Tranie Tronic’s latest album are saturated with power.
“Part of the mission of this album was to kind of spread the word about these kinds of incidents. Encourage people to come forward who have gone through similar experiences or warn them,” Atif says, explaining the intent behind releasing Transgression.
It was the same Tranie Tronic, the same raw emotion, the hint of rage, dressed in a layer of elegance. But somehow different, more righteous and brave. Standing up once more and giving voice to an issue people are too afraid to speak up about, giving those who need it the courage to come forward about their trauma, which Tranie Tronic now shares.
They now possessed a grim but clear understanding of how heavy it can be to carry trauma of that nature in solitude. And now, that connection with others is what fuels Atif.
“It’s quite fulfilling to know that it touched somebody and made a difference for them and they connected with it.”
It all leads back to the calm and poised Atif, sitting neatly on a woven chair in their apartment, recounting various parts of their journey to Montréal in sharp detail. Surrounded by shots of Tranie Tronic and Atif, framed on a wall. As if a slideshow that retold their life was ready long before we spoke.
