Show Me The Receipts: Examining Róisín Murphy’s history of LGBTQ-related statements 

Has anyone in the history of public life ever gone from achingly cool to embarrassingly cringe quite so precipitously? Róisín Murphy, Moloko frontwoman and veteran solo artist known for eternal bop ‘Sing It Back’, was once an east London dancefloor mainstay and the jewel in the crown of many an LGBTQ+-coded music festival. Then 2023 happened. Here, we retrace the timeline of that glittering career, the explosive story and its dark aftermath.

1995 ✓

Moloko release debut album, Do You Like My Tight Sweater, and become instant favourites with the gays. They go on to reach their peak with top-three album Things to Make and Do, released in 2000.

January 2019 ✓

Murphy poses for a photoshoot for Loverboy magazine with Drag Race legend Detox. In an accompanying video, Murphy calls Detox “the best drag queen in the world”. 

She adds: “I was quite happy when I realised I had a big gay following. I think that happened when I was in Paris one night on the Ruby Blue tour. I walked out on stage and it was just wall-to-wall men, with their tops off, hanging off the ceiling, sweat everywhere, screaming! I just thought, ‘I’ve come home.’”

November 2019 ✓

In an interview with PinkNews, Murphy calls herself “pretty cis”(?) and adds: “Gender… I’ve got a lot of tremendous creative relationships with men. I do think there’s a gender thing going on there.” 

August 2023 ✓

Attitude interviews Murphy. Asked who her favourite drag queen is, she holds firm and answers: “Detox is my girl.” Detox would come out publicly as trans in 2024.

August 2023 ×

Days after we publish our interview, news breaks of gender-critical comments made by Murphy on Facebook. “Puberty blockers are fucked, absolutely desolate, big pharma laughing all the way to the bank. Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true,” she writes. She then adds: “Please don’t call me a terf [trans-exclusionary radical feminist], please don’t keep using that word against women.”

August 2023 ?

After a backlash, Murphy issues an extremely long apology on X for “being the reason for this eruption of damaging and potentially dangerous social-media fire and brimstone”. She continues: “I’ve spent my whole life celebrating diversity and different views.” She then goes on to say: “I really hope people can understand my concern was out of love for all of us. I will now completely bow out of this conversation within the public domain.” Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen.

September 2025 ×

Responding to a Guardian review of 2023 LP Hit Parade (“a masterful album with an ugly stain”) two years after its publication, Murphy writes on X of the record coming out “in the middle of a controversy. Having been told previously by music journalists that it was already ‘album of the year’ when the controversy broke, I was instructed by the same people to admit ‘ignorance’ and apologise or face a drop in scores. These messages were passed on to me by my then-record label, Ninja Tune. I have the receipts. This is not journalism or criticism, it’s authoritarianism. The record did indeed suffer revised scores across the board and was left off the end-of-year lists. It wasn’t just upsetting for me but also very frightening to see how the whole of the music media, in tandem, were able and willing to punish a work of art for the sake of activism. To say I’ll never be the same again is an understatement. Props to the Guardian for not changing the 5-star score. But the piece itself is rotten to the core. And the record was never again mentioned by them. I really hope one day that changes.”

October 2025 ×

Murphy shares a graph on X indicating that people aged 18-22 identifying as trans had dramatically fallen. “It was never real. Terribly sad though. Absolute havoc wreaked on children, families and society,” she writes. As the study’s lead author and professor of psychology at San Diego State University Jean Twenge says in a Fox News interview, one of the reasons for the fall could be that “when acceptance declined, identifying as transgender (or at least identifying as transgender on a survey) declined”.

October 2025 ×

After Murphy is dropped as headliner of Istanbul music festival Back in Town over these new comments, she writes on X: “The mob is out in force. The more I see of this cruel ‘activism’, the more convinced I am that I do not want them anywhere near me or my music, however that may affect my career. I won’t be held to ransom – no more blackmail. What I see more than anything is a spoiled and entitled childishness. I am not interested in being their ‘mother’ or ‘queen’; these babies need to grow up and allow artists like myself the dignity of opinion and the space and freedom to create.”

November 2025 ×

Murphy marches in the 199 Days Later march in London. Organised by Grassroots Women, it marked 199 days since the UK Supreme Court ruled on 16 April 2025 that the legal definitions of “woman” and “sex” under the Equality Act 2010 refer strictly to biological sex at birth rather than acquired gender identity.

April 2026 ×

Speaking at the House of Lords (!) to launch a new report on boycotts in the arts published by campaign group Freedom in the Arts and co-authored by academic Jo Phoenix, Murphy says: “When artists speak plainly these days, especially on radioactive issues, they don’t get debate. They get condemnation and professional exile. I’ve lived it when I spoke my mind about puberty blockers and current social trends around gender.” She continues: “The message was clear – conform or risk your livelihood … Being cancelled is hard. The world goes very dark very quickly.  Everyone and anyone who is ever going to disappoint you does so all at once.”

August 2026 ×

Murphy criticises Madonna for being a trans ally, saying she has “no excuse” for “supporting the TQ+ bandwagon or for not calling out its inherent homophobia. Perhaps she just doesn’t care that children who would’ve grown up to be gay are being medicalised and harmed before they have the maturity to know who they are.”

VERDICT 

Will we ever be able to enjoy the sublime ‘The Time Is Now’ again? Sometimes we can separate art from artist, and sometimes we can’t. In Murphy’s case, she’s doubled and tripled down on her recklessly ignorant words so many times, we’re not sure that we can. But Attitude is always optimistic that a person can change their mind.  

---

This feature appears in Attitude’s November/December 2026 issue.