I Was All Alone...

... I used to feel like I was the only one who felt the way I did. Then, this song came on the radio one Saturday morning while I was washing my car for a date.

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls

It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola

La-la-la-la Lola

At the time, whenever I encountered the word "transsexual," I researched it, but what I found never seemed to apply to me. No way could I be trans—the definitions back then only used words like "pervert" and "sexual deviant."

Then I heard about Lola, and my world changed.

Recently, however, the lens has shifted. The Guardian reported this week (March 23, 2026) that,

Kinks guitarist Dave Davies hits back at Moby for calling 1970 single Lola ‘gross and transphobic’

The band’s co-founder responded to the US musician’s comments, defending the song and saying they are ‘not transphobic’

by Laura Snapes

Mon 23 Mar 2026

The Kinks co-founder and guitarist Dave Davies hit back at Moby after the US electronic musician said that he could no longer listen to the band’s 1970 hit Lola on the grounds that he found it “gross and transphobic”.

Moby told the Guardian Saturday magazine’s Honest Playlist feature that he was repulsed by the song after it came up on a Spotify playlist. “I like their early music, but I was really taken aback at how unevolved the lyrics are,” he said.

The song details a young man in a nightclub falling for a figure who “walked like a woman but talked like a man”. It concludes: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”

Davies responded on X: “I am highly insulted that Moby would accuse my brother” – Kinks songwriter Ray Davies – “of being ‘unevolved’ or transphobic in any way.” In another post, he continued: “I don’t wanna show the guy up, but Moby should be careful what he says.”

It’s a strange conflict of eras. As Bob Dylan wrote, "The Times They Are A-Changin'." They were changing in the seventies, and they are still changing today—and so is our vocabulary. Back then, the community was amazed that a song like "Lola" would even be played on the radio. It was avant-garde; it broke the ice. As punk icon Jayne County once wrote,

In the letter, County described herself as “thrilled and amazed” that the Kinks would write such a song, and wondered if other listeners had clocked its subject. “Lola will always be one of those songs that for me ‘broke the ice’ so to speak! A song that breaks down barriers and brings a used to be, hush, hush subject to the forefront and makes it sound perfectly natural to be singing a song about a ‘girl’ named Lola!”

She said that the song had propelled the Kinks into “the modern world. The REAL world! A world full of all kinds of people! Bisexual, gay, trans, not just a world full of straight heterosexuals!”

The LGBTQ+ subject matter of Lola was not without precedent for the Kinks. In 1965, their song See My Friends centred on a man unsure of his sexual orientation. Dave Davies also wrote in his 1996 autobiography Kink about having had affairs with musician Long John Baldry and producer Michael Aldred.

And sometime our lens change color!