Contemporary Authors

• Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout Hachette Books (New York, NY), 2016

1. Tranny : confessions of punk rock's most infamous anarchist sellout LCCN 2016028515 Type of material Book Personal name Grace, Laura Jane, 1980- author. Main title Tranny : confessions of punk rock's most infamous anarchist sellout / Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Hachette Books, 2016. ©2016 Description 306 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm ISBN 9780316387958 hardcover electronic book audio cd audio download CALL NUMBER ML420.G7835 A3 2016 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113)

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/04/04/522581237/for-laura-jane-grace-punk-was-a-form-of-armor

  For Laura Jane Grace, Punk Was A Form Of Armor

  Listen· 43:24
  43:24

  Queue
  Download
  Embed
  Transcript
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Google+
  Email
  April 4, 20173:43 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
  Fresh Air

  Laura Jane Grace burned her birth certificate at a concert in North Carolina in 2016 in protest of the state's "bathroom bill" requiring transgender people in government facilities to use bathrooms that match the sex on their birth certificate.
  Ryan Russell/Total Treble Music
  Growing up, punk rocker Laura Jane Grace always felt conflicted about gender. She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that she felt like two "twin souls" were warring inside of her, fighting for control. "I thought that I was quite possibly schizophrenic," she says.

  It wasn't until Grace was 19 that she heard the term "transgender" and had a context for what she was feeling. In 2012, at the age of 31, she transitioned from male to female.

  Grace, who is the founder of the band Against Me!, writes about the transition and how it affected her wife and daughter, as well as her stage persona, in the new memoir Tranny.

  Overall, she says, the transition put her "more in touch" with herself: "It just, like, overall, all-around, made me a more real, more there, present and comfortable-with-myself person. It broke down a wall."

  Interview Highlights
  Tranny
  Tranny
  Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
  by Laura Jane Grace and Dan Ozzi

  Hardcover, 306 pages purchase

  On transitioning to female and wanting to avoid buying into stereotypes of women

  You decide you're going to transition and then all of a sudden you're like — and now I'm still a public figure and now I face the fear of, Do I look fat in this dress? I have to do a photo shoot and I'm worried about the way I look, and I feel like all those pressures sometimes, from a transition standpoint, are so unrealistic to navigate in a public eye. It's tough.

  On the appeal of punk clothes and style

  It was a form of expression, in a way, that I couldn't express myself how I wanted to otherwise. And it also served as a form of armor, because when you're wearing a big leather jacket with spikes on it and you're charging out your hair with Knox gelatin, I mean, you're like, arming yourself. I got beat up a lot, so that was something to kind of hold onto.

  At first, especially living where I was living, like, the nihilism of it all attracted me — the idea of live fast, die young — because I didn't think I was going to make it out of South Florida, especially [because] I got arrested and was already a felon by the time I was like 14, 15 years old, so I really thought I was going to get stuck there. So the idea of dying was appealing.

  On how the gender dysphoria she felt led to destructive behaviors

  Being stuck in that ... binge-and-purge cycle, where engaging in any kind of behavior that gave in to your dysphoria was then immediately met afterwards with intense feelings of shame and self-hate — I was a cutter. I actively sought out self-destructive things like deciding, like, I am going to smoke cigarettes. This tastes terrible, it just made me throw up, but I'm going to keep going until I like these cigarettes. Thinking in my head, How can I get a hold of drugs? How can I find cocaine? ...

  And that's like [at] 13 years old, because I didn't know ... I had no resources. I had no one to turn to, to talk about it. I used to go to a church group — the church paid for me to go to therapy. The church kicked me out of church eventually, because they thought I was a lost cause and there were just no words for it. Again, I didn't hear the term "transgender" until I was probably, like, 19 years old. Who wants to grow up to be something that you feel like is going to cost you a normal life?

  All Songs +1: Laura Jane Grace And Lauren Denitzio On Surviving In Punk
  ALL SONGS CONSIDERED
  All Songs +1: Laura Jane Grace And Lauren Denitzio On Surviving In Punk
  'That's Me': A Transgender Punk On Life In Transition
  MUSIC ARTICLES
  Laura Jane Grace, Transgender Punk, On Life In Transition
  On her then-3-year-old daughter saying she wanted Grace to "be daddy again"

  That overall feeling and that existential crisis crushed me. I want to be her dad, I am her dad, that's my kid, no one else, especially separating from her mother, [I had] the feeling of I'll be damned if someone else is coming in here and all of the sudden going to be "dad" to my kid.

  Maybe that's a dumb, aggressive attitude to have about things, but as a parent I refuse to apologize for any way I feel over the protection of my kid. It was something that I wrestled with and eventually came to the conclusion that I am her dad, no matter what. And she says female pronouns, "she" and "her," and she understands that I'm transgender and I am still her dad and she says "dad." People will often, in front of the two of us, refer to me as her mommy, and we've never said that. People have a hard time accepting that sometimes things are different.

• NME - http://www.nme.com/news/music/against-me-21-1195390

  Laura Jane Grace’s ex slams Rolling Stone for ‘misgendering’ & not censoring topless photo
  image: http://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/55/2016/05/2015AGAINST-ME_11_WO_300815-1-920x613.jpg

  Credit: NME / Wunmi Onibudo

  image: http://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/55/2016/10/Trendell-150x150.jpg

  Andrew Trendell
  By Andrew Trendell Sep 27, 2016

  Heather Gabel attacks magazine for their handling of transgender issues

  The former wife of Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace has hit out at Rolling Stone Magazine for mishandling and ‘misgendering’ her in an article, as well as publishing an uncensored photo of the singer topless.

  Artist Heather Hannoura split from Grace in 2013, but not for reasons relating to the singer identifying as transgender and becoming known as a woman.

  Hannoura has now taken to Facebook to criticise Rolling Stone for a recent interview about their relationship, and publishing a topless photo of the star in a bath.

  Hannoura claims that Rolling Stone ‘botched’ the interview, and that her ‘biggest problem with this piece is the gross misrepresentation of LJ’s gender identity’.

  “Rolling Stone has never published a photograph of a non trans women’s nipples uncensored before, which, to me, reads as them making arbitrary distinctions between trans and non trans women, which is fucked up,” she wrote. “Everyone’s tits should be legal. In my opinion, this is not a subversive decision aimed at giving censorship the middle finger, it’s a blatant example of misgendering, of gender inequality, and a general slap in the face to anyone who expects to have their gender identity respected.”

  MPU 1 (Desktop / Tablet)

  She continued: “ANYWAYS, I wrote to Rolling Stone after the piece came out but (surprise) they haven’t replied so I’m posting the letter I sent them here in the hopes that it opens a couple of eyes to the tired, biased, conservative, one sided “journalism” they are perpetuating. Oh, and I fixed the photo too. Believe me, I want everyone’s tits out, I am in no way supporting the idea that censorship of women’s nipples is ok at all, but since Rolling Stone censors women’s nipples the photo should have looked a little more like this.”

  See Hannoura’s censored version of the photo below:

  Laura Jane Grace publicly came out as a transgender woman in 2012, after dealing with gender dysphoria her entire life.

  She is yet to respond to the Rolling Stone article.

  MORE STORIES

  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/991e9d873a977f09f2f10d89dc133fba7bc3b84765f62b0faf08d535c7d908b9/145/90/1.0

  'Charmed' stars end long running feud
  'Charmed' stars end long running feud
  NME
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/9edc35b348998f80b69e88767391f74d84cda8cfd665d35643e3e50b461bd69a/145/90/1.0

  Trent Reznor says he doesn't know what the final part of Nine Inch Nails' EP trilogy will sound like
  Trent Reznor says he doesn't know what the final part of Nine Inch…
  NME
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/cdd8dbf27390b4fa90385d38a3bf2800cc002ac9493abe04f4565caf35297f23/145/90/1.0

  Father John Misty – ‘Pure Comedy’ Review
  Father John Misty – ‘Pure Comedy’ Review
  NME
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/310c1fd70e2b838fdb188299fa5273bcd75b3de781a8d90efa10389d59819fc8/145/90/1.0

  Album Review: Hunx and His Punx – Too Young To Be In Love (Hardly Art)
  Album Review: Hunx and His Punx – Too Young To Be In Love…
  NME
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/b8200eb84df9341815abaa857495692e58d37fd9b435c8b7028b35fd57d5671e/145/90/1.0

  Celebs With Fun Sized Wives
  Celebs With Fun Sized Wives
  Sports Jamm - Making Sports Stimulating
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/77171320c7a6eb9693c71623e042b38b01ce0e2643a0bdc36c159d1668737dfc/145/90/1.0

  Barbara Weldens Dies on Stage Mid-Concert: French Singer Was 35
  Barbara Weldens Dies on Stage Mid-Concert: French Singer Was 35
  E! Online
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/8734f4e39983ed48fb9d399c5a86c8f59783be8b42b5755ac81198124eb160ba/145/90/1.0

  How To Fix Aging Skin (Do This Every Day)
  How To Fix Aging Skin (Do This Every Day)
  Health Headlines
  image: http://images.outbrain.com/Imaginarium/api/uuid/88baad4ed681b187c2fead1846071b5103f0ec7d7a0d5dd8a847d72790a25a56/145/90/1.0

  Thinking About Installing Solar Panels? Read This First
  Thinking About Installing Solar Panels? Read This First
  Energy Bill Cruncher
  by
  Grace made headlines earlier this year for slamming North Carolina’s LGBT laws as ‘total, bigoted discrimination’. She also burned her birth certificate while playing a gig there yelling “goodbye gender.”

  Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/music/against-me-21-1195390#qDVRCZyGgVr43TWw.99

• Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/laura-jane-grace-on-trumps-transgender-action-fuck-off-w468560

  Laura Jane Grace on Donald Trump's Transgender Action: 'F--k Off'
  "It's creating that much more dangerous of an environment for transgender students," Against Me! singer says

  Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace sounds off on the Trump administration's action to rescind transgender students' rights in school. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty, Tim Mosenfelder/Getty
  By Kory Grow
  February 23, 2017
  More News
  Watch Laura Jane Grace Talk Hating the Word 'Tranny' on 'Seth Meyers'
  Laura Jane Grace: A Trans Punk Rocker's Fight to Rebuild Her Life
  Laura Jane Grace on New Memoir, Orlando 'Disgust'
  All Stories
  In the years since Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace came out as transgender, she has become one of music's most outspoken voices for trans rights. On Wednesday night, the Trump administration sent a letter to public schools asking them to annul special protections for transgender students. The action was the result of a struggle between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the latter of whom opposed it and only reluctantly signed off on it.

  RELATED

  Laura Jane Grace's Brutally Honest 'Tranny' Memoir: 10 Things We Learned
  When Against Me! singer's gender dysphoria first struck, how Bruce Springsteen helped her tune out haters and more from candid new autobiography
  To Grace, the action symbolizes a bleak future for the way the administration works with transgender people. As the dust settled, the singer – whose band will be touring with Green Day beginning March 1st – spoke with Rolling Stone to share her views on how she thinks it will affect the transgender community.

  What was your first reaction to Trump's action?
  The knee-jerk thought is "fucking figures." It's fucking stupid. It's unfortunately not surprising to me at all, and it's kind of predictable and seems so transparent that this is an administration that doesn't fucking care about transgender people.

  The previous administration was the first to even acknowledge transgender people and that was really an amazing feeling, like, "Whoa. The government has your back as a transgender person or is even acknowledging your existence." There's something that's somehow more evil about an administration actively going out and trying to take away rights as opposed to the previous administrations before the Obama administration that just didn't do anything. There's just something that much more fucked up about going out of your way to be like, "We're taking that protection away from you."

  ADVERTISING

  inRead invented by Teads
  "This is an administration that doesn't fucking care about transgender people."
  Last June, Trump tweeted his support of the LGBT community and when he was campaigning, he said Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower. He's flip-flopping on his personal views for his cabinet.
  Right, but again, it's not surprising to me. It echoes most of the transgender community's criticism of Caitlyn Jenner's naïveté for thinking that Trump or the Republican administration will give a shit or do anything to protect LGBT people, never mind going out of their way to take back protections.

  Conversely, The New York Times reported that Betsy DeVos – whose family has given money to anti-gay organizations – opposed the action, citing the suicide rate among trans students.
  My understanding is that she was voicing opposition to this and that it was Sessions and ultimately Trump who were like, "Nope. Go ahead and let's go along with this." But it just goes to show that she's kind of a pushover and that he's surrounding himself with people who will ultimately do his bidding; people he can steamroll who aren't going to oppose his ultimate agenda.

  And it's not just this action by the administration toward transgender people that's scary. It's the overall agenda of making certain groups of people seem less than other groups of people and how that contributes to discrimination and allows people to treat other people as subhuman. You are stating, "These people are not equal to these other people. They don't deserve protection." And it's just fucked up.

  Interestingly, DeVos included a provision saying that the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights should investigate attacks "against those who are most vulnerable in our schools."
  I don't think it's enough. And I know that enforcing protections, for the most part, is being left up to the states now. But I don't think it's enough. I don't think suicide hotlines are enough. I don't think that waiting until it's that much of a problem is enough. I just think it's ridiculous in this day and age.

  RELATED

  5 Best and Worst Trans Moments of 2016
  From bathroom laws to ascendance of Mike Pence in Trump's White House, this year was not great for the trans community
  Can states handle these decisions?
  Saying it's a states' rights thing essentially means OK-ing what's happening in like North Carolina with bills similar to HB2. You're giving the state the right to discriminate them.

  What would you like to see happen next, legally, with regard to this action?
  I just think it's a continual battle for education. So many people are ignorant when it comes to gender identity and what it means to be trans. So many people are ignorant around the bathroom issue in particular.

  It's insane that it's something that's so heated or so misunderstood. It's insane that it's a reality for transgender people, that it's my reality. Most of the time, I will just wait to use the fucking bathroom, and not do it in public. I feel so strongly about it being an issue for students because I remember there always being traumatic issues around restrooms in elementary school when I was growing up, and this is not even being out as a transgender person but just the experience of being a student and using a locker room or a bathroom and already feeling unprotected. You're creating that much more dangerous of an environment for transgender students.

  What organizations do you work with regarding trans rights?
  Most of the charity work I've been doing has been funneled through Gender Is Over. The focus of where the funds go to is always different, but it's always a trans-centered legal organization, or they send books to prisoners or something.

  My attitude has always been that as an activist who's a musician, the best thing that I can do is to contribute financially and have those funds directed to places that I know are going to be out there fighting for change on a legal level, like the Transgender Legal Defense Fund, because I'm just not personally in the position where I can be pursuing change on a legal level. I'm a person in a band, you know? I'm going on fucking tour with Green Day. So the best thing I can do is talk about it and try to educate people and then whatever funds I can raise, to direct that towards the people who are doing work on a legal level to create change in that way. You have to come at it from as many angles as you can.

  Since you have the great platform of touring with Green Day, will be you be distributing information or educational materials via your merch table?
  Well, we're going back to North Carolina. Whenever we're there, I invite any local groups that want to come out and flyer to do so. A part of the punk-show history or culture is having organizations out there and having them present. So I'm still encouraging anyone who wants to hand out information on what you can do on a local community level to do so. Other than that, I'll be speaking directly to it onstage.

  Do you have a personal message to Donald Trump?
  "Fuck off." [Laughs]. No, a personal message to Trump ... I don't even know where to begin. He seems so unrelatable. The simplistic idea of saying, "Oh, everyone deserves equal rights and equal protections" ... I don't even know. I just wish this wasn't a reality.

• Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/laura-jane-grace-a-trans-punk-rockers-fight-w438533

  Laura Jane Grace: A Trans Punk Rocker's Fight to Rebuild Her Life
  Four years ago, Against Me! singer announced she would begin living as a woman. Turns out, that was the easy part
  By Alex Morris
  September 8, 2016
  More News
  Laura Jane Grace on New Memoir, Orlando 'Disgust'
  Against Me! Present 'Trans Perspective on Sex, Love' With New LP
  Hear Against Me!'s New Stomper 'Haunting, Haunted, Haunts'
  Laura Jane Grace Talks Orlando Shooting, Gun Control
  Against Me!'s Laura Jane Grace: 'Goodbye Gender!'
  All Stories

  Against Me! leader Laura Jane Grace discusses how her career and personal life fell apart after she announced that she was transitioning. James Minchin III for Rolling Stone

  ADVERTISING

  inRead invented by Teads
  Laura Jane Grace is lying on a plastic-covered bed in the back room of Mohan's tattoo parlor in Queens. Outside, the No. 7 train rumbles overhead and tipsy drag queens in perilous heels totter past all-night taco stands. Inside, an artist named Kenji bends over Grace's calf with the focus of a surgeon, inking an intricate geometric pattern around both legs. It's well past one in the morning. They've been at this for more than 13 hours.

  Grace keeps dozing off despite the pain. She was up at 6 a.m. with a panic attack, which has not been uncommon since she came out as a trans woman – first drunkenly to a friend, then to her wife, Heather, then publicly in an article in this magazine four years ago – and began the process of physically transforming herself from a guy named Tom Gabel into the woman she knows herself to be. Today, her panic has something to do with the stress of being in New York to plug two projects – a new album from her punk band, Against Me!, and a memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout – and all the talking and explaining and answering she'll have to do over the next few days. But it's mainly that now, all of a sudden, Grace thinks she might, just might, be able to rekindle her relationship with Heather, someone she thought transitioning had cost her.

  And it's cost her plenty. The day the Rolling Stone article came out, Grace hid, terrified, in Against Me!'s studio outside St. Augustine, Florida. When she e-mailed the story to her father, a West Point graduate, he tersely wrote back to say that her "presentation left much to be desired." They haven't spoken since. Her mom and her brother have been supportive, but other family members haven't. "As far as friends," Grace says, "it shed people from my life."

  RELATED

  Watch Against Me!'s Glammy, Sci-Fi-Themed 'Crash' Video
  Face paint, lightsaber guitar necks highlight infectious clip for 'Shape Shift With Me' single
  Then things got worse. Against Me! had long been one of the most exciting and politically outspoken punk bands around – Florida kids who tore up stages with lefty anthems like "Baby I'm an Anarchist" and had enough punk cred to get shit for signing with a major label (they did anyway) and enough charisma to count Bruce Springsteen a fan. But within a year or so after Grace came out, they were hanging on by a thread. They'd been dropped by their label. Their ex-manager was suing them. Half the band had quit. These problems weren't all related to transitioning, Grace says, but it seemed inevitable that everything would end up in flux: "Coming out started a lot of change in my life in general."

  Then, in a hotel room in Georgia, near where Against Me! were trying to record the album that would become 2014's Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace had a bad reaction to hormones she was taking, waking up with her body half-frozen, dripping in sweat. She quit the hormones cold turkey, which, she says, "is not something you want to do. It fucks you up. It's like my brain was not even functioning. The only way I got through was Valium. I would take handfuls and fucking drink vodka every night just hoping I wouldn't wake up."

  But nothing – not the hormone withdrawal, the rejection from her dad, or even the tree that fell and destroyed Against Me!'s studio in 2013 – was as bad as what happened with Heather. "I've never had anything fuck me up more than the dissolution of my marriage," Grace says. "I'm not over it. I'll never be over it at this point." Grace had kept her feeling that she was born in the wrong body a secret when the two married in 2007. But when she announced her transition, the couple – who have a daughter, Evelyn, now six – thought they'd be able to work through it. At the beginning, Heather was in many ways Grace's cheerleader, championing her honesty and gently correcting people who called her "him." "I had her back so hard – it was like us against the world in a way," says Heather when I talk to her a few weeks later. "But it also sort of highlighted problems. With band stuff, all the press, everything, she was even less present. It was overwhelming for both of us." It didn't help that the hormones Grace was taking dampened her sex drive and caused physical changes. Or that Heather was attracted to men, not women. "That discussion," she says, "didn't go well."

  Laura Grace Against me 2001
  As a young punk rocker with Against Me! in 2001. Courtesy of Against Me!
  Grace eventually found a stash of letters under the bed in their house in St. Augustine, addressed to Heather in her maiden name. She wasn't sure her wife was having an affair – "It wasn't what she thinks it was," says Heather – but when Heather insisted they move to Chicago, where the guy who'd sent the letters lived, Grace agreed. She couldn't entirely blame Heather for wanting to move on. Nor was she willing to let go.

  Once in Chicago, the situation devolved. "We would be at dinner, just crying," says Heather. "Our therapist was like, 'You can't live together anymore. It's bad for your daughter.'" Grace moved out. She was terrified that Evelyn would stop calling her "Dad," even though the term was painful. And she was afraid of losing Heather for good. "I was socialized male," she points out. "The idea of your wife starting a relationship with another man is hard enough," she says, but it was made worse by the fact that she thought her jealousy, her anger, only underscored her male socialization. "Of course, you can't own somebody, and the idea of owning somebody in that way seemed like a very male thing. Where's the line between anger and misogyny?"

  Such were the questions Grace was asking herself when Transgender Dysphoria Blues hit the Billboard charts at Number 23 in early 2014, the highest debut an Against Me! album had ever had. Suddenly, she found herself a transgender role model with a fan base that included an overwhelmingly supportive queer community and a revamped career to go along with her decimated personal life. "I had gone from being married with a kid, two cars, garage, nice house in a nice neighborhood to all of it gone," she says. "But from an artistic standpoint, it broke down this fucking wall where there's no filter. I'm feeling stuff emotionally and just processing it." Her Web series, True Trans, earned her an Emmy nomination in 2015. She says the new Against Me! album, Shape Shift With Me, was the easiest to write of her career.

  It was hard to know how to process it all: the success versus the destruction, the media celebration of trans-ness versus the day-to-day reality of living as a trans person out in the world. "I was touring, and people would come up to me afterward and be like, 'I just started hormones!' and I'm just thinking, 'You're going to ruin your fucking life. Don't do it.'" She sighs. "I felt like I ruined my life totally."

  RELATED

  Watch Against Me!'s Sixties-Inspired '333' Video Starring Natasha Lyonne
  'Orange Is the New Black' star plays repressed Sixties housewife in video for 'Shape Shift With Me' single
  Grace doesn't feel that way any longer. It's the morning of her day at Mohan's, and we've met up for brunch at a coffee shop a block away from the tattoo parlor ("Eating's really important before getting tattooed. You need energy"). Our interview was supposed to have ended two days ago, after a round of gin-and-tonics at the hotel where Grace was staying with Evelyn and her nanny. But a six-year-old – even a cool, precocious one with partially blue hair – isn't keen to sit and ponder life's intricacies in a bar, and somehow one drink had turned into two, and two into three ("Least amount of calories in any alcohol but hardest on the liver = gin," Grace later informed me by text. "Don't fact-check that, just go along"), and suddenly Grace was the one asking the questions. "Are you married?" "What does dating mean now?" Is someone she dates now attracted to "the fading masculinity? Or the emerging femininity? Will she continue to be attracted to me as I continue to change?"

  Grace, all six feet two inches of her, with her neck tattoos and her punk-rock clothes, now hovers like a vampiress over a cluster of strollers by the door. Despite the morning's panic attacks, she's fresh-faced and talkative. No, transitioning has not been easy. Yes, it's cost her a lot. But she recognizes now that transitioning was never going to fix all her problems – "Taking hormones isn't going to solve whatever emotional issues you have; they're two separate things" – and that the problems it created may have been a necessary part of blowing up her life so she could create a new one. "Trying to cause chaos – I think that's the way I create change," she says. "Do you realize how crazy I sounded going into a psychotherapist and being like, 'I'm coming out in Rolling Stone magazine'?" she'd asked before. "At first they just thought I was out of my mind."

  Sometimes – today, for example – she wonders the same thing. For the past six months, she's been in a satisfying relationship with a Quebecoise singer named Béatrice Martin, better known as Coeur de Pirate. But since sending an early copy of her memoir to Heather two weeks ago, the lines of communication have been open in a way they haven't been for years. "She called me a narcissist, but it's cool," says Grace. "Writing your memoir is inherently narcissistic." Now, Grace wonders if she should end things with Martin and try to piece things back together with Heather, however improbable that may be. She wonders if she should break up the band as a way of forcing some sort of change. And she wonders if she should leave Chicago, though she's not sure where she'd go. The only thing fixed in her life seems to be her relationship with Evelyn, who once, heartbreakingly, asked her not to become a girl, but has come around to the idea (and does still call her Dad). "You realize that kids just want to know you love them," Grace says. "After that, they're just like, 'I want to watch cartoons.'"

  Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! performs onstage during 2016 Governors Ball Music Festival at Randall's Island on June 4, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images for Governors Ball)
  "Life has to be different going forward, and I have to figure it out," Grace says. Taylor Hill/Getty
  The new Against Me! album is ostensibly about love, but it's often really about longing, about experiences not had and memories not made. "I keep feeling like, 'OK, finished a book, finished a record,'" she says. "That's a monumental closing of a chapter. Something has to change. Life has to be different going forward, and I have to figure it out. What am I going to do for the fucking rest of my life? You know?"

  Punk had always been a refuge for Grace, first as a military brat – secretly trying on her mom's pantyhose and aching to be Madonna – and then, after her parents' divorce, when she finally settled in Naples, Florida, the poor kid in a rich town. "The majority of kids' first cars were, like, Mercedes," she tells me scornfully. Her ride was sometimes the back of a police car. She got beaten up constantly. "That was what was attractive about punk rock – you're wearing a leather jacket with huge metal spikes on it that's fucking literally armor, you know? Like, studded bracelets that you could easily slip over your knuckles." She still thinks of punk that way. "The way I carry myself through the world is, 'I'm going to look like the type of person you shouldn't fuck with.'"

  Not that the pressure to pass as feminine hasn't been "over-fucking-whelming." She stopped wearing makeup after someone referred to her as a young Alice Cooper. She's never sure whether to open a door or have it opened for her. She titled one of her new songs "Delicate, Petite & Other Things I'll Never Be." "I've had those moments in Starbucks where I place my order and they're like, 'OK, sir, I mean ma'am, I mean sir, I mean ma'am,' and you're like, 'Just give me the fucking coffee. I don't fucking care.'"

  Grace isn't sure where she'll end up. She used to have a step-by-step plan for her transition, but now that seems naive and too focused on physical aspects as opposed to emotional ones. Still, she's back on hormones – "the most powerful drug" – and has found that the injections she sticks in her thigh every week or so work much better than the pills she was taking before. She'll continue electrolysis to remove remaining traces of her beard. She's pleased the hormones have given her softer skin and a noticeable bust ("They say you end up X number of sizes smaller than your mother," she says with a laugh. "My mom's got the goods"). She wouldn't mind a brow reduction or a tracheal shave. She's definitely finishing her suit of tattoos, covering her body in images she finds beautiful. She still feels like she's in process, and imagines that she always will. "This idea of what you're going to transition into or who you're going to be," she had said, "that's not how you're going to end up. You don't know who that person you're going to transition into is. You just have to see." For today, she'll settle for getting inked and texting with Heather, trying to see where that leads.

  Around 2 a.m., Kenji puts down the gun and calls it quits for the night, or rather, the morning. The tattoo is slowly taking shape, painfully becoming what it's meant to be. Like Grace, it's not quite there yet. Tomorrow is another day.

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/dec/03/against-me-laura-jane-grace-transgender-punk

  QUOTED: "A lot of the book deals heavily with shame, internalised transphobia and self-loathing, and I don’t identify with the title. ... I don’t like that word [Tranny], so there’s a certain element of reclamation. And it goes along with ‘sellout’, like: go ahead, say the worst thing you can say about me, because I’m already saying that about myself."

  Laura Jane Grace on being transgender in the age of Trump: 'Panic isn't the answer'
  As she publishes an intimate new memoir, the Against Me! founder shares her thoughts on the presidential election, parenting and the healing power of punk
  Against Me! singer, Laura Jane
  Saving Grace: Against Me! singer, Laura Jane Grace
  View more sharing options
  Shares
  1,147
  Laura Snapes
  Saturday 3 December 2016 04.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 14 February 2017 12.30 EST
  By anyone’s standards, this year’s US presidential election was a dispiriting slog. For Laura Jane Grace of punk band Against Me!, the final hurdle came with one last insult: election day coincided with her turning 36. “It’s odd wanting your birthday to be over already,” she said the day before the US went to the polls, calling from the Chicago studio where she rehearses while her seven-year-old daughter is at school. Her main concern was how the campaign’s hysterical tenor meant that the candidates rarely engaged on the issues that define her life. “LGBTQ stuff was almost completely absent from any of the debates, and it hasn’t been at the forefront of what’s being talked about,” she says. “And it should totally be.”

  Laura Jane Grace: 'So I'm a transsexual and this is what's happening'
  Read more
  Grace has spent her life railing against the status quo, forming righteous crust-punks Against Me! in Gainsville, Florida in 1997. Through hardcore touring and some fine polemical rock music, the band became scene legends – only for Grace to find herself imprisoned by what she describes in the song I Was A Teenage Anarchist as punk’s “bloodless ideology”: when Against Me! left Fat Wreck Chords, the label owned by NOFX’s Fat Mike, for a million-dollar deal with Sire Records, they were decried as sellouts. The band released two albums for the label before the contract collapsed in 2011 following a staff reshuffle. Original members quit. Grace’s best friend broke his foot while rigging a light on tour and died from complications in hospital. To top it all off, her lifelong gender dysphoria became unbearable, and she came out as transgender to her wife, Heather, in early 2012. As one of the world’s few high-profile trans women, she was thrust to the forefront of a new American civil rights movement.

  Facebook Twitter Pinterest
  For any politician looking to get a grip on the reality of trans life, Grace’s new memoir, Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, is a must-read. Compiled from the journals she’s kept since she was eight years old, it traces her peripatetic childhood as the son of an army major through to the moment in 2012 when she decided to begin transitioning, and came out via a profile in Rolling Stone. It is, as its title indicates, an unsparingly honest read that hits as hard as one of Against Me!’s ferocious punk assaults.

  Against Me!: Shape Shift With Me review – punk's raging radicals continue to excite

  Read more
  “A lot of the book deals heavily with shame, internalised transphobia and self-loathing, and I don’t identify with the title,” she says wearily. “I don’t like that word [Tranny], so there’s a certain element of reclamation. And it goes along with ‘sellout’, like: go ahead, say the worst thing you can say about me, because I’m already saying that about myself.” She’s still amazed that it got past the publisher, and winces every time it comes out of a radio DJ’s mouth. “But that’s kind of the cost of it, and I think a worthy cost for a title that fits the book.” Tranny isn’t the soft story of “becoming Laura” that some publishers wanted her to write, but an autobiography that reflects its confrontational title on every page.

  Unlike most punks embarking on their memoirs, Grace didn’t have to reach through a booze-addled fog of memory to piece her life together. It was all there in the immaculately detailed journals she wrote every day, down to the colour of aeroplane carpeting. Even entries written at her most dissolute – she has struggled with drugs and alcohol addiction throughout her career – are lucid about her shortcomings. Nonetheless, she still found surprises within their pages. Most striking was her realisation that “I’ve really been depressed for a while”, she laughs grimly. “Once you can see it all laid out in front of you, it’s like, these are the fucking patterns I’ve fallen into, these are the crutches I’ve used, this has been my coping mechanism, how I’ve survived. To see it from such a distant overview was really eye-opening. You can’t help but be changed by that.”

  Laura Jane Grace performs with Against Me! at the Governors Ball Music Festival.
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest
  Laura Jane Grace performs with Against Me! at the Governors Ball Music Festival.

  Transgender singer of Against Me! burns birth certificate over North Carolina bill
  Read more
  The distance allowed her to portray her experiences of coming out more honestly than she did at the time. Back then, she presented a sunny face to the world. The Rolling Stone feature painted Grace, wife Heather and daughter Evelyn as a happy family. She wrote a peppy Cosmopolitan article with a section on her first miniskirt. But, in reality, that piece coincided with the crest of a breakdown, when she fantasised about stopping her hormones and taking her own life. “The peak illusion of me telling myself everything’s OK: ‘Don’t worry, your marriage hasn’t totally fallen apart.’ I didn’t see what was really happening, and then when I did, it destroyed me.” Given the lack of positive trans narratives out there, she felt under pressure to present a happy ending. But the book tells the truth of what a “whirlwind it was to come out and start transitioning, to get on hormones, to do that really fucking publicly.”

  Advertisement

  What most media coverage of gender transitioning misses is that it’s a process, not an end point. Venue stage hands still call Grace “bro”, and the dysphoria doesn’t just vanish. In Tranny, Grace writes about her now ex-wife’s pregnancy and her fear that she wouldn’t be able to cope with raising a son (“knowing I wouldn’t be able to be the proper male role model he would need”), but she says it’s been eye-opening to watch her daughter growing up while Grace explores her own femininity. “I feel like she’s already seen a lot of the world and has two parents who can give her a lot of different perspectives on gender,” she says.

  Parenthood defines Grace’s life. Against Me! tour so much that she’s rarely back home in Chicago, and when she is she only hangs out with her daughter. These are moments of normality in “a weird fucking year”, she says. “In 2014 and 2015 when I was out there touring, I felt like I was building up self-esteem and becoming a person again. Like, ‘I’m getting past all this, I’ll file for divorce, take back control of my life.’ Then, all of a sudden, this summer it was like, where did all that go?” She partially attributes her funk to working on the book, and immersing herself in “every shameful moment of when you feel like you fucked things up. ‘Go ahead and re-read that, try to make the paragraph about how you fucked something up more concise.’ It fucks with you. You can’t be unaffected.”

  Against Me!
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest
  Against Me! Photograph: Casey Curry
  Ultimately it was Against Me! that came to the rescue. Writing the band’s seventh album while completing her memoir allowed Grace to forge her next chapter, which she describes as a “second puberty”. Where its predecessor, 2014’s brilliant Transgender Dysphoria Blues, confronted her transition head on, current album Shape Shift With Me is her “dumb love songs” record: the toughened power-pop of Crash is as potent as any teen high, while Boyfriend is a bittersweet subversion of gender norms that could only come from lived experience.

  “It would be weird enough just being in a band trying to date,” she says. “It makes it harder being a parent. And it makes it really interesting when you’re trans. But at the same time, being in a position where I can be open with myself, and I’m not having to hold anything back, that’s liberating, and that’s amazing.” Having been married twice (once in her early 20s), she also sings about not wanting to fall in love again. “You really start to think about what does marriage mean, you know? How much of what I’ve been seeking was just programmed into me? You get married. You have a kid. You buy a house. You raise a family. American dream. Fucking consume, procreate, all that bullshit. Maybe monogamous relationships aren’t the way to go. Maybe I’m still not mature enough to really even know what love is. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace.
  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace. Photograph: Hachette
  At a time of global turmoil, some have criticised Grace for turning away from politics, but when trans lives are under siege, her love songs feel radical. “The personal is very much political” For an example of what she’s talking about, behold the ceremony of her burning her birth certificate onstage in North Carolina in protest at the state’s transphobic bathroom bill. As the paper goes up in flames, she bids, “Goodbye, gender!”

  On election night, Grace hung out with her daughter and went to bed at 10pm. “Awaking to a Trump presidency,” she tweeted. “Today, just like yesterday, I woke up, picked up my pen and notebook and kept on writing.”

  “I wrote about the election mainly,” she reveals two weeks later, on Thanksgiving. Writing, she says, is “the radical act of not losing hope. What choice do you have but to keep on going? I really don’t think panic is the answer. I don’t want to contribute to hysteria.” While she doesn’t want to assist in making a Trump regime the new normal, she also doesn’t “want to pretend that there isn’t a militarised stand-off against pipeline protestors in the Dakota. Or that the past few years haven’t been filled with headlines of racist cops killing innocent people. This, and so much more, is all happening under Obama after all.” If Tranny tells us one thing, it’s that there’s rarely a binary system.

  Against Me! are touring to Sunday 11 December; Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is out now

• Entertainment Weekly - http://ew.com/music/2017/06/20/laura-jane-grace-icon-award-interview/

  Laura Jane Grace to receive Icon Award at AP Music Awards: 'It's really surreal'
  Plus, the Against Me! frontwoman previews what’s next for the band

  NOLAN FEENEY@NOLANFEENEY

  POSTED ON JUNE 20, 2017 AT 11:00AM EDT

  D DIPASUPIL/GETTY IMAGES
  Laura Jane Grace is having a full-circle moment. Three years ago, the Against Me! frontwoman presented Joan Jett & the Blackhearts with the Icon Award at the Alternative Press Music Awards. Now, EW can exclusively reveal she’ll be receiving the very same award herself at the this year’s APMAs, which will take place on July 17 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. Below, Grace talks to EW about what this award means to her, her musical heroes, and her complicated history with AP.

  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How does it feel to be an icon — officially!
  LAURA JANE GRACE: It feels weird! [Laughs] It’s flattering as f— to be given something like that or be acknowledged in that way. It also makes me feel the way I feel when I open presents in front of people: wanting to be thankful, but the attention is a little bit like, “Whoa, that’s crazy.” I can’t help but be thankful for that. It’s really an honor.

  Previous recipients of this award include Marilyn Manson and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. That’s impressive company.
  I gave Joan her award and gave a speech in 2014, so in that respect, it’s really surreal! Only three years ago I was handing off this statue to Joan, and now you’re telling me someone’s going to be handing me that little statue?

  You’ve graduated into the club.
  That day I remember so fondly. I did a song with Joan & the Blackhearts, and Slash [from Guns N’ Roses] did a song with Joan too. Going down there that morning and being on the side of the stage and being like, “Oh my God, literally just me and my daughter and the crew are sitting here watching Slash and Joan Jett soundcheck ‘Starf—er’ by the Rolling Stones” was the coolest thing ever. My daughter’s going to come with me for this, so it’ll be special in that roundabout way too.

  Does she understand awards shows?
  I don’t think she fully understands. You’ve also got to realize the AP Awards show is a way different environment than the Grammys or the Emmys. In 2015, I was nominated for an Emmy for the docu-series I did [True Trans], and that was very different, much more of a suit-and-tie event. Not a ton of screaming kids in a huge outdoor festival environment with a bunch of bands, like it’ll be for this. It’ll be a really fun evening.

  Who are the musical and non-musical icons you look up to?
  I mean, when I think of the word icon, I think of Joan Jett! I just walked into my living room right now and I have a picture of me and Joan from that night on my wall. That picture is next to a picture of Jayne County. That is next to a picture of the New York Dolls, next to a picture of Candy Darling. When I think of icons in a musical setting, I think of Joe Strummer, Kathleen Hannah. Those people. People who forever changed me musically.

  This awards show is about musical achievement, but does receiving this award feel especially meaningful as a highly visible figure in the LGBT community as well?
  I think that’s really commendable of them, for shining light on that by having me there. That’s a really awesome thing for the event. I’m really just appreciative that it’s AP given the relationship I’ve had with AP over the years. I talked about this a little in my book [Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout]. AP is a magazine and organization that has always supported my band since we first started getting record reviews or doing press. But we did have a tumultuous relationship over the years. There was a period when I was going through a really hard time and really struggling with dysphoria and trying to self-sabotage my career because I didn’t want to have my picture taken and do interviews. I was terrible to them. I talked s— about them. I was really rude and not cool to them. That night in 2014, I was able to apologize in-person to a lot of the people at AP that I had bad interactions with. At the time, that felt like a good bit of closure. It was full circle: You can make amends with people and heal and come back and be supportive of each other, and I appreciate that a lot. I appreciate being given second chances with people.

  What are your obligations with this award? I assume you have to give a speech and perform?
  If it was like it was in 2014, I think I do have to say something — I can’t just walk up there and do a microphone drop and peace out! But other than that, we get to play a couple of songs. I know that within our set we’re allowed to try and make collaborations happen. I want to make something cool happen. A lot of that depends on who else is going to be there, and who could come there just because of where it is. I think our only limitations are who can be physically present.

  Do you still get starstruck at events like these?
  Hell yes! Totally. That starstruck-ness creates the opposite of “Oh, I want to go talk to these people.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to stand here and be terrified in the corner.” When my daughter and I were watching Slash and Joan Jett, I went up to Slash after he came off stage and was like, “Hey Slash, my name is Evelyn, this is Laura — I mean, I’m Laura, this is Evelyn.” I totally called myself Evelyn when I introduced Slash to me and my daughter.

  She could be a great icebreaker: “My daughter really wanted to meet you!”
  Yeah, except for the fact that at no point did Evelyn give off the impression that she gave any kind of s— about meeting Slash. She’s like, “Who? Slush? Sure, whatever. Let’s move on.” Kids are a little less impressed with that. It might be hard to pull off using them as your excuse.

  Last fall, you were putting out a new album, readying a memoir, juggling producing projects. How is your 2017 going? A little calmer, I hope?
  Yes and no. We’ve been doing epic touring. This year we were just out with Green Day for a month and a half, which was amazing. Talk about icons and being really nervous around people! I’m fumbling through a conversation because I’m like, “Oh my God, you’re Billie Joe Armstrong!” I’m heading to Europe in July, and we’ll be playing festivals and shows over there, and then I’m coming back from the AP Awards. I have time off in July and August, and then we have a full two-month-long headlining tour with Bleached and the Dirty Nil. After that, it’s December! It’s good having it like this. I have my touring year lined up, and I know how to do that. It’s different than writing stuff. Now there’s a little bit of relief where I realized I can give myself a second! I can just play some shows! At the end of the year, I’ll get my headspace into what’s next: What cool project can I work on? It’s a nice place to be. I’m really thankful for it.

• NewNowNext - http://www.newnownext.com/laura-jane-grace-transgender/04/2017/

  LOGO Home
  Shows
  Movies
  NewNowNext
  Watch Live TV
  facebooktwittertumblr
  logo
  NEWNOWNEXT

  Desiree Navarro/WireImage/Getty Images
  TRANSGENDER
  Laura Jane Grace: Gender Dysphoria Made Me Think I Was Schizophrenic
  "I didn't hear the term transgender until I was probably, like, 19 years old."
  by Kristina Marusic 4/7/2017

  Against Me! front woman Laura Jane Grace made punk rock history when she came out as transgender in 2012. Now she’s opening up about her long, difficult struggle with gender dysphoria.

  As a 13-year-old in small-town Florida, Grace “actively sought out self-destructive things, like deciding, like, I’m going to smoke cigarettes,” she shared on NPR’s Fresh Air “[I thought] ’This tastes terrible. It just made me throw up. But I’m going to keep going until I like these cigarettes.'”

  She also engaged in cutting and sought out hard drugs. “I didn’t know—I had no resources,” Grace explains. “I had no one to turn to to talk about it.”

  LONDON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 08: Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! performs at Electric Ballroom on December 8, 2016 in London, England. (Photo by Imelda Michalczyk/Redferns) Imelda Michalczyk/Redferns/Getty Images
  In the interview, Grace connects the anger in her early music to that struggle. “A hundred percent. I mean, there’s, like, no other way really to describe it or categorize it.” Dressing, talking, or behaving femininely—even in private—elicited “intense feelings of shame and self-hate.”

  To make matters, worse Grace lacked the language to describe what she was feeling.

  “I didn’t hear the term transgender until I was probably, like, 19 years old. Who wants to grow up to be something that, you know, you feel like is going to cost you a normal life?”

  Gabriel Olsen/FilmMagic/Getty Images
  Because she couldn’t name her struggle, she grasped for other ways to label it: “I thought I was quite possibly schizophrenic,” she admits. “Sometimes I kind of romanticized that as, like, oh, maybe I was, like, born with a twin soul and these two twin souls are, like, warring for control over me constantly.”

  But mostly, she hoped the feelings would go away on their own.

  CHICAGO, IL - SEPTEMBER 11: Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! performs during Riot Fest Chicago 2015 at Douglas Park on September 11, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Redferns) Daniel Boczarski/Redferns/Getty Images
  “I hoped it would pass, you know? And that it wasn’t, like, a lifelong thing,” she says. “So that’s, like, the cycle of binge and purge. Like, ’Okay, no more. I’m done. Now I’m a man. Now I’m going to grow up and I’m going to live the rest of my adult life and forget this ever happened.'”

  Even though transitioning has provided its own set of challenges, Grace says her sense of self is radically different.

  “It’s put me in touch with myself,” she explains. “It broke down a wall… I realized the more important part of transition is, if you’re living a closeted life and you’re living a life where you feel like you can’t be yourself, then of course you’re not acting like yourself.”

  “But once you embrace yourself and you come out and you start living your authentic self and living as yourself,” she adds, “then you can just be who you are.”

  Kristina Marusic
  I believe that true, well-told stories have the power to change the world for good. I also love a good listicle.
  @KristinaSaurusR

  TRENDING

  Caitlyn Jenner Responded To Trump's Transgender Ban—And Then Twitter Went IN
  07/26/2017

  A Hot Gay Couple Are Actually Angels In The Supernatural TV Series "Midnight, Texas"
  07/26/2017

  Did Disney Cut A Gay Kiss From "Descendants 2?"
  19h ago

  Andy Cohen Reveals Anderson Cooper's Biggest Turn-On
  18h ago

  Gaming Convention Marred By Transphobic Incident
  17h ago

  SPONSORED STORIES
  Choose Your Own Car Adventure: Design the 2017 Subaru Forester
  Choose Your Own Car Adventure: Design The 2017 Subaru Forester
  Kelley Blue Book
  The SIEMENS Primax hearing aid of the future is here
  The SIEMENS Primax Hearing Aid Of The Future Is Here
  Hear.com
  9 Out of 10 Women Don't Know These 24 Brilliant Makeup Tips
  9 Out Of 10 Women Don't Know These 24 Brilliant Makeup Tips
  Front Page Weekly
  Empty Bottle - Pilot Iroshizuku 50ml
  The Goulet Pen Company
  This Card Has An Insane $200 Bonus Offer For New Customers - Plus Unlimited 1.5% Cash Back & No Annual Fee
  This Card Has An Insane $200 Bonus Offer For New Customers - Plus Unlimited 1.5% Cash Back & No Annual Fee
  creditcards.get.com
  Scientist Predicts Exact Date Next Economic Collapse Starts
  Scientist Predicts Exact Date Next Economic Collapse Starts
  Money and Markets
  Recommended by
  MORE: #AGAINST ME!#TRANSGENDER

  Gaming Convention Marred By Transphobic Incident
  07/27/17

  Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff: No Change To Military's Policy On Transgender Service Members
  07/27/17

  The Canadian Military Just Epically Trolled Donald Trump's Trans Ban
  07/27/17

  FOLLOW LOGOTV

  LOGO LINKS
  About Logo
  Press
  Advertising Info
  Privacy Policy NEW [Updated 3/14/2017]
  Terms of Use NEW [Updated 3/14/2017] Closed Captioning
  Copyright Compliance
  Ad Choices

  © 2017 Viacom International Inc.
  All rights reserved. Logo and all related marks and designs are trademarks of Viacom International Inc.

• AltPress - http://www.altpress.com/news/entry/against_me_laura_jane_grace_performance_icon_award_2017_apmas

  Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! achieves APMAs Icon status
  July 17 2017, 10:22 PM EDT By Jason Pettigrew

  FacebookTwitterGoogle+More5.5K

  [Image credit: Steve Thrasher]

  PVRIS vocalist Lynn Gunn presented the Icon award to Laura Jane Grace, founder of strident punk band Against Me!, at the APMAs.

  Read more: And the 2017 APMAs winners are...

  As the founder of Against Me! (along with guitarist James Bowman), Grace brought a great sense of raucous character and excitement to America’s early-2000s punk underground with such acclaimed works as Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose and Searching For A Former Clarity. Five years ago, Grace came out as a transgender woman, backing up her conviction and determination with the release of Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the first release on her owned-and-operated Total Treble imprint. That attitude and vision was further manifested on that album’s follow-up, 2016’s Shape Shift With Me.

  In this year’s APMAs issue, Grace told AP that “I look at it as a collective effort. When you’re trans and you’re still hidden about that, when you see other trans people, you feel like the universe is putting that for you to help push you on your way.” Yet as the current social climate has been more receptive and responsive to the LGBTQ community, Grace has been celebrated for giving this culture a forward-facing figurehead, defining and embracing gender/social politics to a generation that’s never been more aware and accepting. The indisputable fact that her uncompromising music prefers positive affirmation to market share cements Grace’s stature as a bona fide icon.

  "Four years ago, I was here at the APMAs giving this exact same award to my hero Joan Jett. This is both surreal and incredible," reflected Grace.

  Grace also spoke about the award at the LGBTQ in Music Panel, "I did not get involved into punk rock for terms like icon ... I'd like it to be reflective of an iconic scene." said Grace.

  Check out some tweets reacting to her truly amazing speech!

  Got a little emotional during @LauraJaneGrace 's speech, thank you for being a warrior & icon ♥️ #APMAS #apmas2017

  — Teddy Horansky (@tjhoransky) July 18, 2017
  Laura Jane Grace's speech nearly brought me to tears omg. The most genuine soul this planet has to offer #APMAS

  — dani california (@daniileis_) July 18, 2017
  Watch Against Me!'s amazing performance below!

  Catch Against Me! on tour this fall:

  09/02 – Winnipeg, MB @ Garrick Theatre
  09/03 – Saskatoon, SK @ Louis’ Pub
  09/05 – Edmonton, AB @ Union Hall
  09/06 – Calgary, AB @ Marquee Room
  09/08 – Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre
  09/09 – Seattle, WA @ Showbox at the Market
  09/10 – Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom
  09/12 – Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades
  09/12 – San Francisco, CA @ Regency Ballroom
  09/12 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda Theatre
  09/15 – Pomona, CA @ The Glass House
  09/15 – San Diego, CA @ The Observatory-North Park
  09/19 – Albuquerque, NM @ Sunshine Theater
  09/21 – El Paso, TX @ Tricky Falls
  09/22 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger
  09/23 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
  09/24 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall
  09/26 – Oklahoma City, OK @ Diamond Ballroom
  09/27 – St. Louis, MO @ The Ready Room
  09/30 – Chicago, IL @ Concord Music Hall
  10/01 – Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre
  10/03 – Cincinnati, OH @ Bogart’s
  10/04 – Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues
  10/05 – Buffalo, NY @ The Waiting Room
  10/06 – Toronto, ON @ The Phoenix
  10/07 – Montreal, QC @ Corona Theatre
  10/08 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Small’s Theatre
  10/10 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Lounge
  10/12 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
  10/13 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
  10/14 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel
  10/15 – Asbury Park, NJ @ The Stone Pony
  10/17 – Norfolk, VA @ Norva Theater
  10/18 – Charlotte, NC @ Neighborhood Theatre
  10/20 – Nashville, TN @ The Cannery Ballroom
  10/21 – Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel
  10/22 – Atlanta, GA @ CenterStage
  10/24 – Ft. Lauderdale, FL @ Culture Room
  10/28 – Gainesville, FL – The Fest @ Bo Diddley Plaza

  Read more: Take a look at the rest of our 2017 APMAs coverage

• Lamda Literary - http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/11/22/against-mes-laura-jane-grace-on-crafting-her-new-punk-rock-memoir/

  QUOTED: "I’ve always kept journals with no real intention of doing anything with them but also never throwing them away. About four years ago the sheer weight of the lived writing (both the metaphysical and the actual physical weight of the journals) ... it got to be too much to ignore and I thought it was time to do something about it. I decided I wanted to turn them into a book. I was going through gender transition at the time, and it seemed like the first step forward was to reconcile with the past."

  Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace on Crafting Her New Punk Rock Memoir
  by Seth Dellon
  November 22, 2016

  “I FOUND A LOT OF PARALLELS BETWEEN RECORDING AN ALBUM AND WRITING A BOOK. I CAME TO FIND MYSELF LOOKING AT EACH CHAPTER LIKE A SONG.”
  In the world of punk rock, it’s almost sacrilegious to aspire to make money, write critically acclaimed records, and play sold out shows, but over the course of their nearly 20-year history, that’s exactly what Against Me! did. Started by Laura Jane Grace in 1997 as an anarchist-leaning DIY punk rock band, Against Me! is considered by many to be this generation’s The Clash, with Grace as its complicated lead singer and songwriter.

  Assigned male at birth, Laura Jane Grace came out as transgender in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2012, dropped her birth name, and started living openly as a trans woman. In the years following her coming out, Grace has become a visible face in the trans community, an outspoken advocate for transgender issues who burned her birth certificate during a concert in North Carolina.

  In her new book, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, Grace tells her life story, including Against Me!’s roller-coaster trajectory and her own personal battles, shared through journal entries and a narrative weaved with the help of co-writer Dan Ozzi. Grace was kind enough to chat with Lambda Literary about her new book.

  With Against Me!’s new album out and the publication of Tranny, how are you feeling?

  I’m feeling pretty relieved. There was a lot of hard work put into both of them, so to see them born into public existence is both exciting and kind of surreal.

  Why did you decide to write a memoir, and why now?

  Writing a book has always been an aspiration of mine. I’ve always wanted to be an author. I’ve always kept journals with no real intention of doing anything with them but also never throwing them away. About four years ago the sheer weight of the lived writing (both the metaphysical and the actual physical weight of the journals) I guess got to be too much to ignore and I thought it was time to do something about it. I decided I wanted to turn them into a book. I was going through gender transition at the time, and it seemed like the first step forward was to reconcile with the past.

  You’ve said that no matter how much production goes into an album, you know that the lyrics are yours and you have control over them. How does the experience of writing lyrics differ from writing a book, especially when working with a co-writer?

  I found a lot of parallels between recording an album and writing a book. I came to find myself looking at each chapter like a song.

  There are parts of doing both that are really solitary acts but also parts that you need other people involved.

  If you’ve been alone in a studio for a week working on a song, you’re hearing of it is skewed versus hearing it for the first time. You need other ears to bounce things off of. Same with writing: having other people involved, whether that’s working with a co-writer or editor or even the marketing staff, puts your convictions to task. When other eyes are looking at what you’re writing you figure out quickly what you really mean and what you don’t. You also realize that nothing is precious. Sometimes you have to cut ideas that you may have initially thought were gold.

  Song lyrics appear throughout the book within your journal entries. Would you consider Against Me!’s catalog to be a companion piece to Tranny, and is Shape Shift With Me [Against Me!’s new album] the potential next chapter?

  The back catalogue is definitely the soundtrack to the book. How could it not be? I’d also say the other bands we toured with over the years are a part of that soundtrack too. I thought about starting off each chapter with a song list suggestion to listen to while reading, but I think it would have ended up being way too many songs to choose from.

  Shape Shift With Me is kind of an odd duck of the bunch, really. It’s detached from the book. It’s what I was working on while finishing the book, kind of at my breaking point with the book. I needed a distraction from the pressure, so ironically that became songwriting. Usually all the pressure is on the songwriting. So in some ways the record is the ‘anti-book’.

  Writing a memoir is all about reflection, chewing on the past. I was writing songs about the immediate. What I felt right then, not what I felt about way back when.

  A recurring theme in the book is the identity you take on to satisfy other people’s expectations—whether as an anarchist, a rock star, a partner, a parent, or a trans woman. As your level of celebrity continues to grow, do you feel any sense of expectation to represent any of the communities to which you belong?

  Having felt all those pressures before, and having felt like I was always kind of a let down when facing them, that’s my immediate feeling when facing any new sense of expectation. I just think “That’s nice but I’m eventually going to let you down so…”

  I’m just trying to live, you know? Be the best version of myself.

  What are you working on now?

  Well, now that I’m done answering these questions I think I’m going to get back to writing a new song.

QUOTED: "brutally honest, soul-searching memoir."

Print Marked Items
Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Sellout
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Sellout
Laura Jane Grace, with Dan Ozzi. Hachette, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-316-38795-8 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In 2012, Grace, the founder, guitarist, singer, and songwriter of the Gainesville punk band Against Me!, came out as transgender, a secret she'd kept for some 30 years in the spotlight. In this riveting and at times harrowing biography, Grace recounts in unflinching detail her path to self-realization. In many ways, Grace's story follows the arc of many rock bios--plenty of drugs, sex, broken marriages, lots of time spent in dingy vans on exhausting tours that left the band penniless and at each others' throats, and, eventually, a major label record contract that left the band disillusioned and in tatters. That story would be enough for a compelling book, but Grace's gender dysphoria adds a remarkable twist to the tale. Bolstering the narrative with years' worth of journal entries, Grace intimately shares her difficult journey--a story not for the faint of heart--as the she deals with her own personal transition, along with the scorn of a reactionary punk scene that resents the band's success and a music industry that wants only to cash in. She survives, and today Against Me! has entered a new chapter. This brutally honest, soul-searching memoir reads like precisely that--one chapter, in a life story that has many more to come. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Sellout." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 48. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459035&it=r&asid=54dc13075047b97180c6cdd49e121b30. Accessed 28 July 2017.
about:blank Page 1 of 3
7/28/17, 7(42 AM
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473459035
about:blank Page 2 of 3
7/28/17, 7(42 AM
Tranny
Leah Greenblatt
Entertainment Weekly.
.1439 (Nov. 11, 2016): p63. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenblatt, Leah. "Tranny." Entertainment Weekly, 11 Nov. 2016, p. 63. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA486627334&it=r&asid=3ee511481008a0c457dd7495ebb890a1. Accessed 28 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A486627334
about:blank Page 3 of 3

"Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Sellout." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 48. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459035&it=r. Accessed 28 July 2017. Greenblatt, Leah. "Tranny." Entertainment Weekly, 11 Nov. 2016, p. 63. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA486627334&it=r. Accessed 28 July 2017.

• Punk News
  https://www.punknews.org/review/14840/laura-jane-grace-tranny-confessions-of-punk-rocks-most-infamous-anarchist-sellout-book
  Word count: 950

  QUOTED: "Tranny is a triumphant story of fear and strength, and a great peek behind the curtain of one of the most important bands in punk today. Laura Jane Grace proves herself to be as good of a storyteller as she is a songwriter, making Tranny a must-read for anyone dealing with their own gender dysphoria, or anyone who just wants to learn more about the topic. Tranny is the kind of book you're going to want to read again and again."

  For a long time, there have been few role models for trans people. There have been few stories about trans people in the media. We have rarely been able to see characters that reflect ourselves in movies and television. I've talked to a good number of other trans women who have talked about how seminal a moment The Drew Carey Show was for us, because, while it was someone who still identified as male, we at least had a crossdressing character on television. It was imperfect, but it was at least something that sparked that idea in the back of our heads that this sort of thing might be possible. People say we now have Caitlyn Jenner to turn to as a role model, but a Trump-supporting reality TV star who narrowly avoided manslaughter charges is not my idea of a role-model. Thankfully, we're entering an era when better trans role models are starting to gain notoriety, like Laverne Cox and Jamie Clayton, but none of them mean as much to me and gave me as much inspiration to pursue my own journey with gender identity as Laura Jane Grace. For me, the idea of wanting to be a woman was always in the back of my mind, but it seemed like such an abstract. I had met few other people who had gone through it, and didn't see much of it in the media anywhere. I was already a fan of Against Me! when Grace made her announcement, and her coming out made the idea real to me. It became a possibility that I could actually see, rather than an abstract that I could never imagine actually going through. So for myself, and for other people like me who were inspired by Laura Jane Grace to follow our paths to our real selves, her memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, is an opportunity to delve more into the story of the woman who inspired us.

  That's not to say that Tranny is only going to appeal to trans people. It's as much the story of Against Me!'s history as it is the story of Grace's transition, as Grace's career and gender identity are forever intertwined. It's the most fascinating biography of a rock band I've read since Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash. Grace and her co-author Dan Ozzi weave a compelling narrative, with all of your favorite musicians from punk and beyond showing up as characters along the way. Fat Mike plays the role of the punk scene's benevolent mob boss who welcomed Grace into the punk rock family. Anti-Flag show up and, predictably, come off as uptight and finicky for a punk band, but ultimately, Grace admits to being the bad guy in her friction with them. Chuck Regan, Blink-182, Joan Jett, and Rancid show up along the way, as do, surprisingly, Bruce Springsteen and Max Weinberg.

  Grace isn't afraid to let you know which stories relate to which Against Me! songs, with chapter titles mostly named after the band's song titles. Grace has kept a journal for a long time, and transcribes some of her journal entries into the narrative. Some of the lyrics from songs can even be seen in their earliest forms in these journal entries. I wouldn't be surprised if Grace and Ozzi doctored the journal entries a little bit to help them fit the narrative of the story better, but they still add a great sense of authenticity to the book. I recommend listening to Against Me! as you read the book, particularly listening to each album that the band is working on at the point in the book that they're working on it. For me, this resulted in a rather bittersweet coincidence, as the Black Crosses version of "Because of the Shame" came on just as I was reading the journal entry about the very funeral described in that song. Half of the lyrics to the chorus appear in the journal entry.

  But the biggest strength of Tranny is Grace's vulnerability. She is brutally honest about her gender dysphoria from the beginning, and all of her insecurities are on full display, especially in her journal entries. Rather than causing me to lose faith in my heroine, I found all of Grace's insecurities and fears about her gender identity to be empowering. To know that someone who I consider as strong as Laura Jane Grace had the exact same fears and insecurities when she was in the place that I'm in right now, well it reminds me that I'm in good company and my insecurities are pretty common.

  Tranny is a triumphant story of fear and strength, and a great peek behind the curtain of one of the most important bands in punk today. Laura Jane Grace proves herself to be as good of a storyteller as she is a songwriter, making Tranny a must-read for anyone dealing with their own gender dysphoria, or anyone who just wants to learn more about the topic. Tranny is the kind of book you're going to want to read again and again.

• AV Club
  http://www.avclub.com/review/laura-jane-grace-puts-face-and-name-gender-dysphor-245507
  Word count: 691

  QUOTED: "In a time where the world is becoming increasingly more aware of transgender issues, Grace’s memoir offers something more than just a quality read. It’s a poignant and timely look at a still-emerging cultural issue worthy of serious discussion."

  Laura Jane Grace puts a face and a name to gender dysphoria in Tranny
  By Ryan Bray @FeedbackBos
  Nov 14, 2016 12:00 AM

  Photo: Marcus Nuccio
  Photo: Marcus Nuccio
  21

  A-
  Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout

  Authors: Laura Jane Grace & Dan Ozzi
  Publisher: Hachette Book Group
  Community Grade (4 Users)
  A-
  Your Grade
  ?
  Most memoirs wait to be written until their writers have lived a full life. At 36, Laura Jane Grace doesn’t need to wait for her twilight years to tell her story. Her experiences in that comparatively brief time have already afforded her a narrative that earns its keep in the rock memoir cannon.

  Tranny, co-written with Noisey editor Dan Ozzi, will understandably be viewed through a rock ’n’ roll lens given Grace’s role fronting the political punk outfit Against Me! But even as the book tracks the band’s trajectory from its Gainesville, Florida origins to its ascent to modern-day punk-rock stardom, Tranny is Grace’s story to tell. Less the story of a band and its singer, the memoir lays bare its subject’s life-long struggle with self acceptance and identity crisis. What begins with the story of Tom Gabel ends with Laura Jane Grace, who wrestled gender dysphoria and braved years of confusion and self doubt to emerge as a latter-day transgender hero.

  Grace’s memoir doesn’t eschew the rote narrative of the confused, fucked-up kid who turns to punk rock for comfort and guidance. Much of Tranny delves into Grace’s unsettled childhood, strained parental relationships, drug use, and school-day truancies that helped drive her to punk music. Broken homes and adolescent anger have long made for punk rock fodder, but in Tranny’s best moments, Grace takes that oft-told tale and transforms it into something entirely her own. The memoir wastes little time jumping right into her earliest moments identifying as a woman. She recalls watching Madonna on MTV as a young boy living the Army brat life, her first time trying on women’s clothing, and the admonishment she received from her father in those early years for exploring her femininity. From there, Tranny uses Grace’s own first-person account and scattered journal entries to tell the story of how she reconciled those two parts of herself—the boy she was born as and the woman she knew in her heart she was destined to grow up to be.

  It’s a war she waged not only with herself, but also with those around her. As she kept her true self at bay from the world, Grace recounts the distance and separation her own insecurities created between those closest to her, from bandmates and family members to her first and second wives. It’s a bruising tale, but Grace writes about juggling the pressures of grappling with dysphoria and keeping her band together with such naked honesty that you can feel the weight being lifted off of her shoulders. After years of closeted living, there’s liberation in Grace’s words as she comes clean about her struggles. Tranny is rarely a sunny read, but it’s a page turner that brims with hard emotional truth.

  Now some four years removed from Grace’s official coming out as a woman, Tranny leaves her in a much better place, even as she admits that her transition is still a work in progress. Still, the hardest part of Grace’s journey feels like it’s been completed by the memoir’s end. In a time where the world is becoming increasingly more aware of transgender issues, Grace’s memoir offers something more than just a quality read. It’s a poignant and timely look at a still-emerging cultural issue worthy of serious discussion.

• New Noise Magazine
  http://newnoisemagazine.com/book-review-tranny-confessions/#
  Word count: 579

  Book Review: Tranny – Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
  BOOK REVIEWS
  0 8:40 pm November 14, 2016
  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
  By Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi
  (Hachette Books)

  From a young age we’re encouraged to act like who we are deep inside. Adults tell us to “Be yourself,” which usually means, “be yourself within certain parameters that allow you to still fit in.” But what if being you feels like it’s not socially accepted? It’s an age-old phrase weighed down by its social caveats. Laura Jane Grace of punk band Against Me! learned this all too well growing up in suburban Florida—a life shunned by school, police, religion, and family. Being an anarchist punk caused trouble every step of the way, and she wasn’t even offering her true self yet as a transgender woman.

  Against Me! have torn up stages worldwide with a growling machismo for nearly two decades. Through different points in her career Laura Jane grace has felt like a sellout. Stepping out of basement shows and signing to Fat Wreck Chords or into the majors of Sire Records, “fans” have been sure to remind her of this notion. Beyond the “broken rules” of the scene, however, nothing ever felt as scarring as selling out her self-identity. Good money, good drugs, and commercial luxuries were in Grace’s arsenal to mute the suffering inside. None of it mattered, until she could be her true self.

  Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout starts at the beginning of her life with time spent sifting from city to city in a military family, an upbringing that taught her to void out attachment to friendships and appreciate the road. Years of life spilled out words of daily existence into her journals all along the way. These pages honestly, painfully, and realistically expose her gender dysphoria in the wake. The reading of Tranny feels like a long conversation with a close friend. She’s detailing the pain she’s been going through. With each step and struggle, you feel more love and support for this friend. You’re in her corner. At her point of self-revelation and acceptance, it’s a very celebratory moment. The personal thoughts scribbled become familiar as the lyrics fans shout together.

  Earlier this year I had the chance to see Grace perform a pared-down version of songs accompanied by journal entry readings. It was one of the most personal, moving shows I’ve ever been to. It was a cathartic for not only her to share these stories, but the momentum was felt throughout the venue. The songs felt more invigorated than ever before, like they were being sung at full force like never before. Grace had found the voice she’d been searching for.

  This book emerges one week after a tough election cycle that could threaten equal rights. While the punk rock scene has not always promoted the purest of minds, it often encourages progress—even when it’s just a bunch of pissed off mohawks yelling into a mic, it’s raising awareness. Never become complacent. Everyone deserves to have his or her life. Punk rock is freedom of genuine self. Laura Jane Grace’s story shows how vital that phrase “Be Yourself” truly is.

  Purchase the book here.

• Rolling Stone
  http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/laura-jane-graces-new-tranny-memoir-10-things-we-learned-w449686
  Word count: 2312

  Memoir: 10 Things We Learned
  When Against Me! singer's gender dysphoria first struck, how Bruce Springsteen helped her tune out haters and more from candid new autobiography

  Against Me! have been mesmerizing audiences (and starting many a good mosh pit) since their inception nearly 20 years ago. And in that time, while the Gainesville, Florida, group steadily rose from bedroom recording act to playing in stadiums opening for the likes of the Foo Fighters, their vocalist, Laura Jane Grace (née Tom Gabel) was in the midst of a very private and painful war with herself – a struggle to reconcile with the gender dysphoria she'd been battling since childhood.

  RELATED

  Laura Jane Grace: A Trans Punk Rocker's Fight to Rebuild Her Life
  Four years ago, Against Me! singer announced she would begin living as a woman. Turns out, that was the easy part
  "I would glance out into our audience while we played and my eyes would fix on an attractive woman and keep finding their way back to her throughout the set—not because I wanted to fuck her like rock stars are supposed to do, but because I wished I was as pretty as her, and because of how much I wished her body was my own," Grace explains in Tranny, the potent new memoir she co-wrote with Noisey's Dan Ozzi. In the book, subtitled Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout and out Tuesday, Grace writes viscerally about her experiences grappling with this condition throughout her life, falling in and out of love, parenting, the hard road to rock stardom and how she eventually made the decision to transition.

  It was a hard-won victory, and one that took 30 years. Grace came out as transgender four years ago, in Rolling Stone. "The cliché is that you're a woman trapped in a man's body, but it's not that simple," she said then. "It's a feeling of detachment from your body and from yourself. And it's shitty, man. It's really fucking shitty." With humor and wit, Grace writes about how she was able to come out on the other side, stronger and with war paint on. Here are 10 things we took away from this tale of tenacity, tragedy and ultimate triumph.

  1. Her earliest memories involve feelings of dysphoria.
  Tranny combines anecdotal accounts and excerpts from Grace's journals, which she's kept since the third grade. Many of these journals document life on tour, and were a space where Grace was able to pour out her feelings, desires and daydreams of being a woman – feelings she's had since Day One. "My earliest memories are of dressing up in my mother's clothes, and I am constantly reduced by the shame I feel in remembering," she writes in an entry dated February 18th, 2005. "Five years old in a fort made of sheets, blankets, and chairs, enamored with the feeling of my legs in pantyhose. I was not taught nor did I learn the behavior by example; it came to me naturally. It's part of me."

  Laura Jane Grace Book Cover
  2. Grace's first musical performances were in front of church congregations in southwest Florida.
  As an Army brat, Grace lived in a number of places growing up, including Tennessee, Italy and Ohio, before her family settled in Naples, Florida. Grace's mother enrolled her and her brother Mark in after-school programs while she worked, and it was through a church youth group that Grace got her first taste of the stage. Along with two other kids in the program, Grace formed a band called the Black Shadows, and they covered the likes of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and John Lennon's "Imagine" in front of church congregations at talent shows. Grace writes that "while playing, I felt filled with the Holy Spirit," but ultimately her nascent ability to shred took over. "Finally, after ripping through Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box' as a fully electrified band, the church asked that I no longer participate," she writes. The gig may have been over then, but the moment signaled the beginning of Grace's ability to electrify audiences around the world.

  3. She began aligning herself with anarchist punk politics following an arrest as a teenager.
  Grace writes that upon moving to Florida, she "didn't fit in with my classmates in my new high school, and none of them befriended me, which was fine because I didn't want to be their friend anyway." Punk rock soon became a refuge against the jocks, God and teachers alike. Her perspective shifted dramatically, however, when she was arrested as a teenage punk, and tried on charges of resisting arrest with violence and battery on an officer.

  "Suddenly the dick and fart jokes in the NOFX songs I'd grown to love seemed less appealing," she writes. "My arrest and conviction were a catalyst, politicizing my teenage mind, opening up new worlds of thought, and turning me on to anarchist philosophy. I had seen the way the system worked firsthand, and I knew I wanted nothing to do with it." Soon she began reading fanzines, collecting records and going to shows, absorbing a DIY and anarchist ethos that would guide her musical endeavors for good.

  4. Against Me!'s big break came when they turned down an offer to release an EP on Fat Wreck Chords.
  Following the self-released cassette and a scrappy debut album on No Idea Records, Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose, heads began turning. One of those to take notice was NOFX frontman "Fat" Mike Burkett, also the owner of notable punk label Fat Wreck Chords. The label got in touch with the band and asked if they'd be interested in recording an EP for the seven-inch club. Against Me! weren't yet well known, but even early on, Grace knew that they to be daring in order to get noticed. "I turned him down and somewhat brazenly asked if they would instead put out our new record," she writes in Tranny. The gutsy move paid off. The label released Against Me! as the Eternal Cowboy in 2003, an event that kicked off what would be years of major-label bidding wars and international acclaim.

  Against Me! live in Athens, Georgia; 2002 Joe Leonard
  5. During their peak of their popularity, Against Me! began unraveling.
  In the mid-2000s, Against Me! seemed to rule the world. The band was touring internationally, being wined and dined by the likes of Virgin, Warner, Sony and Universal, and soaking up critical and commercial praise. But the more popular they grew, the more pronounced Grace's dysphoria became. "When the band's success couldn't keep the dysphoria at bay, I relied on cocaine and sex to do the trick," she writes. It all caught up with her at once, though, and she began attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

  Grace made major strides in putting her health first. Yet she quickly found that her newfound sobriety made it more difficult to "chase away my dysphoria," as she writes. It also brought along an unexpected rift in the band, fueled by the pressures to produce a hit album for Sire Records, a major label they'd recently signed with. "Oftentimes on tour, the guys would go out and party through the night, and I'd be the lone weirdo who stayed behind at the hotel to write, trying to stay focused, trying to stay sober," she wrote in 2006. "This dynamic put a divide between me and the other members."

  6. Butch Vig was a father figure for Grace.
  When the band signed with Sire, Against Me! went through a list of producers to possibly work with. They ended up choosing Butch Vig (Nirvana, Foo Fighters and many others), because he was "the only one that didn't make us all cringe," Grace writes. They flew out to Los Angeles and recorded what would become their 2007 album, New Wave at Paramount Studios. That experience kicked off a lifelong friendship with Vig, whom Grace would work with again for her 2008 solo debut Heart Burns and again for Against Me!'s 2010 LP White Crosses. When Grace and her then-wife were later expecting their daughter, Evelyn, she writes about how the producer brought over his daughter's old crib for them to use: "He passed it down to us as it had been passed down to him. He even helped me set it up."

  Grace, who had a fraught relationship with her father growing up (she describes him as a "warm man grown cold through military service") poignantly writes of the crib encounter: "I couldn't help but feel that it was a moment that should have been shared between a father and son, and I wondered how many moments like this I'd missed out on in life. I had a better relationship with my producer than I did with my own father."

  7. Grace's most serendipitous moment as a songwriter also found her speaking out more explicitly about her dysphoria.
  Songwriting is a fickle craft, as Grace notes in the book. "Some songs take time, some songs dissolve into nothing, and very rarely, a song will simply find you in the night," she writes. One night in France, she walked along the shore alone when "a fully formed song – lyrics, melody and all – crashed onto me like one of those incoming waves. It was the kind of moment you live for as a songwriter – true inspiration. A gift."

  That gift was "The Ocean," a song that also found Grace writing more directly about her dysphoria. It wasn't the first time she'd done it ("The Disco Before the Breakdown," for example, addresses Grace's relationship with "her," the elusive woman she would become behind closed doors). But this time, she made her feelings more explicit: "If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman. My mother once told me that she would have named me Laura. I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her. One day I'd find an honest man to make my husband."

  8. Bruce Springsteen offered Grace some salient advice about dealing with former fans who demonized the band's success.
  Punk's DIY ethos is a large part of why Grace formed Against Me! Yet that support began waning after Against Me! released their second album via the independent No Idea Records. "Punks are particular like that," she writes. "Any hint that you might actually be making a few bucks off your art and they're ready to come after you with pitchforks." It got worse. When they signed with Fat Wreck Chords, the fanzine Maximumrocknroll published a column imploring people to "sabotage" the band's shows. "People tried to take the instruments out of our hands while we were playing, they threw stink bombs at us on stage, they poured bleach all over our merch, our van became a traveling canvas for their graffiti," she recalls.

  Years of vitriol came to a head a couple of years later, in 2007, when Grace was in an altercation in a Tallahassee coffeeshop that got her arrested. But she got an unexpected letter from Bruce Springsteen, a fan, who encouraged the band to keep performing and climbing to the top. "If you're not reaching out beyond the audience you have to the greater audience you might have, you'll never find out what your band is truly capable of, what it's worth, and how much meaning you can bring into your fans' lives," Springsteen wrote.

  Springsteen and son Evan with Grace Courtesy of Laura Jane Grace
  9. Removing a tattoo was the start of Grace accepting that she was going to transition into a woman.
  In 2009, Grace's journals began reflecting a tidal shift when she realized she couldn't hide her true self anymore. "It's unrealistic to think that I can go on living this way," she wrote in December. "I now fantasize constantly about coming out and being honest about the way I feel and really am with everyone I know." The moment when Grace began to make that fantasy a reality, though, came unexpectedly: She looked at a wrist tattoo of hers, reading "Ramblin' Boys of Pleasure" (a drunken matching tattoo she had gotten with her friend Brendan Kelly) more closely. "I woke up one morning and made the decision – I wanted it gone, off my body forever," she writes. Whether I realized it not, this was my first step; the start of my acceptance that I was going to transition into a woman."

  10. Against Me!'s audience expanded in unprecedented ways after Grace came out.
  When Against Me! embarked on the Transgender Dysphoria Blues tour in late 2013, a year after she had come out as transgender, Grace felt a sense of security being back on the road. And the music became, once again, a unifying force for listeners. "One of the first thing I noticed at our shows was that our audience was different," she writes. "Our crowd it was the most diverse it had ever been." This included punks who had been fans from the early days, fans they'd picked up opening for the likes of Mastodon, and "even the angry punks who still popped up every album cycle to call me a sellout gave me a pass this time."

  While Grace is unsure what exactly caused that change of heart, the point was that the band was starting anew and people were along for the ride. "In way, [Transgender Dysphoria Blues] was the record I'd been working on my whole life ... there was no filter, and I fired away with everything I'd been holding in for three decades," she writes. Ultimately, she says, "Against Me! Could be anything I wanted it to be now."

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/10/laura-jane-grace-against-me-tranny-memoir
  Word count: 1637

  Laura Jane Grace: 'Punk was more closed-minded than the church'
  In Tranny, the Against Me! singer writes a memoir about transitioning while in a successful punk band and the slow, difficult journey towards self-acceptance
  Laura Jane Grace and Atom Willard of Against Me! play in Atlanta, Georgia: ‘So much of my experience has been about internalized transphobia’
  Laura Jane Grace and Atom Willard of Against Me! play in Atlanta, Georgia: ‘So much of my experience has been about internalized transphobia.’ Photograph: Chris McKay/Getty Images
  View more sharing options
  Shares
  106
  Jim Farber
  Thursday 10 November 2016 05.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.34 EDT
  For the title of her new memoir, transgender rock star Laura Jane Grace borrowed a word she hates: Tranny.

  “It’s not a word I want to identify with,” she said. “But so much of my experience has been about internalized transphobia. I still have transphobic thoughts against myself. That’s the inevitable result of living in the world I live in.”

  The lacerating effects of those thoughts tear through nearly every page of Tranny, a book which takes as its subtitle Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sell-Out. That cheeky phrase reflects the often misunderstood politics of Grace’s successful band, Against Me!, an outfit she formed as a teenage outcast while living in the benighted suburbs of Gainesville, Florida in the late 90s. While Grace, now 35, came out as a trans person in Rolling Stone in 2012, only in the memoir does she reveal the complexity, and the unresolved ache, of her quest for self-acceptance.

  Sign up for the Bookmarks email
  Read more
  That’s communicated most poignantly by the inclusion of pages ripped from the diaries Grace has kept for years. “I am completely lost,” begins a typical missive from 2004. “What voice do I listen to? What urge do I follow? I can never be anything more than a pervert dressed up in women’s clothes.”

  Grace says one motivation for writing the book was to unburden herself of the literal weight of her voluminous journals. “I wanted to do something with them so I no longer had to lug them everywhere I went,” she says with a laugh.

  The book traces Grace’s gender issues back to age five when she identified with Madonna’s Material Girl video when she saw it on TV . “Every kid has that moment when you look to your elders to try and see who you could be when you grow up,” Grace said. “It was watching Madonna when the gender dysphoria hit me. My sense of self-identification didn’t align with what other people expected from me.”

  After all, she had been raised as Tom Grace in a military family, a situation which led to confusion, depression and shame. “That was compounded by the fact there was just no information,” Grace said. “I didn’t know the word transgender and I had no internet to search or book to read.”

  Facebook Twitter Pinterest
  As a teenager, Grace sought escape in the fog of drink and the creativity of punk. She loved the purity and conviction of the punk scene. “It meant so much to me that someone would mean what they said,” Grace recalled. “It was about wanting something to be real.”

  Advertisement

  Grace formed her band at age 15 with drummer and friend Kevin Mahon. In Tranny, she writes about exploring the possibility of sex with Mahon, without resolution. “I was recognizing that maybe he had a thing for me – which made me realize that maybe I might have a thing for him too,” the singer said. “I wasn’t able to understand any of it. I had no understanding of sexuality or gender.”

  Besides, the possibility of a gay identity didn’t fit into the punk world that Grace knew. “Punk was supposed to be so open and accepting,” she said. “But when it came down to it, it was still hard to be queer in any way and not face judgment for it.”

  When Against Me! began to get popular and attract major label attention, they fell afoul of punk’s suspicions about success. In the memoir, Grace paints punks as even more rigid in their thinking about music than many people are in their approach to gender. “I turned to the punk scene because I thought it would be a more open-minded place,” she said. “But I found that it was more closed-minded than the church.”

  Grace began to defy the rules of punk as fervently as she did the codes of masculine identity. In her band’s lyrics she started to write lines that expressed her feelings of gender dysmorphia. “At first, I attributed it to my subconscious pushing me forward,” Grace said.

  The lyrics sailed right over the heads of both the fans and her band-mates. “It became this game of ‘OK, how much can I get say and get away with it?’” Grace said. “When I was still getting no reaction it became disheartening. I was [like] ‘OK, are you listening to any of the lyrics?’”

  At the same time, she began to test the waters of presentation by increasingly dressing in women’s clothing, though always in secret. The fear of discovery highlighted Grace’s sense of shame. In the meantime, she pursued the most conventional personal life possible, maintaining deep romantic relationships with women and, later, marrying and having a child. The seriousness of her commitments greatly intensified Grace’s feelings of entrapment. Her book relates, in harrowing detail, the fear leading up to finally coming clean to her family and to her fans. But her turmoil became even more intense after those disclosures, once she realized that little of the serious, internal work of self-acceptance had begun. Once she got the book deal in 2012, she sank to a new low. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’ve got to write a fucking book and they expect it to be some “Becoming Laura” story in which transition solves all my problems’,” Grace said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  She also felt pressure to act as a role model for the transgender community at a point when doubts still crowded her own mind. “People would come up to me and casually say, ‘Hey, you inspired me to start hormones.’ I don’t want to discredit someone’s decision-making ability but at the same time I don’t want to be responsible if they have a negative experience. Hormones are a really big thing. They can do crazy things with your head. And anyway, your identity shouldn’t be based on whether or not you’re doing hormones.”

  Laura Jane Grace, second from left, with the rest of Against Me!
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest
  Laura Jane Grace, second from left, with the rest of Against Me! Photograph: Record Company Handout
  For Grace, the more profound transition has to do with “smashing the male ego. If you’ve been raised and socialized, as a male, and you’re transitioning to living your life openly as female, then you have to destroy the male ego you’ve been raised with. For me, coming out to my friends and family wasn’t enough to fully destroy it. It was everything that happened internally afterwards that did.”

  Advertisement

  Grace said that’s why it took her four years to write the book. She needed that time to more fully become herself. Meanwhile, the world of began to change around her. “There have been so many milestones that I never thought would happen,” Grace said. “You have a trans person like Laverne Cox on the cover of Time magazine!”

  Still, she doubts these media representations translate to everyday issues for trans people, such as being able to walk down a street safely, be treated fairly in the workplace or have adequate healthcare. A recent experience demonstrated the disconnect. While on tour, Grace was walking through the Detroit airport when she saw a giant TV broadcasting comments from attorney general Loretta Lynch about transgender rights. The sight made her swell with pride. Yet, minutes later, at the airport bar, Grace heard the staff spewing ignorant comments. “I went down to them and said ‘I’m transgender and you’re wrong about this’,” she said. “The first thing out of someone’s mouth was, ‘Is it true that Caitlyn Jenner resents changing from Bruce?’ What do you say to that?”

  Issues also remain in the artist’s personal life. Her wife left her after she came clean about her identity and for a while, they didn’t speak. After reading the memoir, her former partner called Grace a narcissist. “Fair enough,” Grace allows. ‘There is something inherently narcissistic about writing a memoir at 35.”

  There’s also something unfinished about it. Grace realizes she has a lot more of life to navigate. In the meantime, some very positive things have happened for her, including a new sense of camaraderie with her band and a growing base of supportive fans. Still, such things can’t instantly erase the traumas of the past. “It’s impossible not to be somewhat fucked up after spending 30 years dealing with dysphoria and then being out for five years,” she said. “That’s a lot of baggage and mental issues to work through. It’s not like because you accept a certain part of yourself that, all of a sudden, you’re solved as a person. It’s just a good first step.”

• Rock Revolt Magazine
  http://rockrevoltmagazine.com/book-review-tranny-confessions-of-punk-rocks-most-infamous-anarchist-sellout-laura-jane-graceagainst-me/
  Word count: 1369

  QUOTED: "Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is a must read for anyone finding themselves, or someone they love, in the grips of gender dysphoria. Laura Jane Grace’s honesty is unmatched by many public figures who have been through the trials of coming to terms with being transgender."

  BOOK REVIEW – TRANNY: CONFESSIONS OF PUNK ROCK’S MOST INFAMOUS ANARCHIST SELLOUT, LAURA JANE GRACE/AGAINST ME!
  Albums/CD/EP/Books/Films / Music News / Reviews / Vans Warped Tour / November 23, 2016
  “I don’t want to settle for a half-life.”
  Laura Jane Grace is the unlikeliest of heroines; to hear her tell it, she’s lucky to be alive. Moving from a rocky upbringing into an adolescence and adulthood riddled with Punk successes and failures with lines in between blurred by countless and seemingly endless supplies of drugs and alcohol, Laura Jane has been through shit that many would simply call it quits over – and she almost did. However, through discovering who she really was and finally obtaining the medical and emotional support to become her true self – in all of her beautiful glory – Laura Jane Grace has survived and thrived to tell her tale in her new book, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. And her tale has made her a heroine for many who have felt, or currently feel, as she once did, as readers can see from this book.

  “Cross-dressing feels like self-mutilation. I can never be anything more than a pervert dressed in women’s clothes. So sick, sick, sick. I want to black it all out.”

  Within the pages of this incredible, emotional, moving book, based on real journal entries that Laura Jane Grace had written over the years, unfolds the story of Tom Gabel (Laura Jane Grace’s name given to her at birth) of iconic Punk band, Against Me! Readers are taken along the journey of the band’s anarchist roots to “selling out” in the industry to where they are today. In the past, Laura Jane was constantly plagued by gender dysphoria, and self medicated with drugs and alcohol to suppress the yearning to dress and act more feminine. She knew nothing felt right physically – the body she was assigned at birth was not the one she inhabited – and through real-life scenarios that absolutely broke my heart, readers see Laura Jane struggling with her identity. She also knew that telling her friends and family would mean the destruction of relationships, and it was that knowledge that kept her from being honest with the world for as long as she was able.

  “I can’t help but wonder how different of a person I would have turned out to be had I simply been born her.”

  From dressing as who she fondly called “her” in secret to finally realizing she would only be happy when she fully became “her”, Laura Jane Grace takes readers from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. To learn the origin of her name to seeing her at once as father doting on his daughter to a mother taking the stage with her child, every single moment in this book made me feel something. As readers, we grieved when she did, laughed when she did, and were cheering through tears as she came out to friends, family members, and the music media about being transgendered and transitioning. Not all of the relationships in her life survived, but she held her head high, knowing she finally had to do what she needed to do to feel complete – to feel like herself. Readers can see that it wasn’t an easy journey, and it’s a road that Laura Jane still walks herself, but she doesn’t walk it alone. And it is through that honesty in her journey, that has led her to become a heroine for many. It was through bravery and a sheer will to continue on that she was able to emerge as herself – and for that, she holds a special place for youth struggling with gender dysphoria, crippling self-doubt, and a need for acceptance in a world that, even in many places today, cannot wrap its head around where transgendered people can use the restroom, let alone exist in peace.

  “I’m not fucking anyone but myself.”

  Laura Jane wrote this book with such poise and profoundly painful memory recollections – from her two marriages that did not stand the test of time to the losses of two people with whom she was very close and even her own suicidal thoughts and intentions – and it is clear that every piece of this book was intentional, from her words to the graphics inside. It was incredible learning the background meaning of some of my favorite songs, and to see her bravery in including her transition and struggles into her music was truly eye opening.

  “I find the major label world attractive in the way that I do any other vice. It makes you feel great while making you hate yourself at the same time which makes you need it more until you can’t remember any other way to feel love.”

  This book is a must read for anyone who is a fan of the punk industry. As readers, we learned a lot about how the industry works – at least as far as the experiences of Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! – in terms of the insider experiences that many folks outside of the business are not privy to. From contract dealings to upfront expenses and just how much money it takes to make a record, there are details in here to captivate any person interested in the business. The band members become real people with real problems, and it is through the pages of the book that readers see that snapshot.

  “The band and crew can find me blue-faced and cold to the touch in the morning.”

  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is also a must read for any fan of the band, anyone interested in Laura Jane Grace’s beginnings and experiences, and anyone who wants to understand what exactly has gone into the music of the band. The lyrics of so many songs make sense once explained through Laura Grace’s voice. And her voice in this story is strong – the emotions she poured into every single page come through so that readers are not just seeing words but are watching a film behind their eyes, feeling everything. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is easily one of the best books we have read this year, if not ever, and it is because of the language she uses to tell her story. It’s simply beautiful, even when it hurts – much like punk music itself.

  “There are moments when I believe it and I can visualize myself as her, fully female, rare moments when life does not seem so daunting. I can imagine an emotional wall coming down and a part of me finally coming to life.”

  Lastly, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is a must read for anyone finding themselves, or someone they love, in the grips of gender dysphoria. Laura Jane Grace’s honesty is unmatched by many public figures who have been through the trials of coming to terms with being transgender. Other transgender individuals can find comfort knowing that they are not alone, and sometimes, that knowledge is enough to make someone realize that they, too, can continue and fight to live their lives as fully as possible. In Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, there is no shortage that the final message – even through the torment she felt – is one of hope. And it is this message of hope that will keep readers coming back to this book long after their first reading.

  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout can be purchased wherever books are sold.

• Entertainment Weekly
  http://ew.com/article/2016/11/11/tranny-laura-jane-grace-ew-review/
  Word count: 390

  'Tranny' by Laura Jane Grace: EW Review
  LEAH GREENBLATT@LEAHBATS

  POSTED ON NOVEMBER 11, 2016 AT 12:00PM EDT

  Against Me!
  TYPE:MusicCURRENT STATUS:In Season
  WE GAVE IT A
  B+

  An itinerant army brat and displaced child of divorce, Tom Gabel was exactly the kind of alienated ’80s kid punk rock was made for. By junior high he’d grabbed on to it like a life raft, finding release in three-chord rebellion and community in the few willful freaks and anarchists stranded in the staid backwater of west Florida.

  Music offered an identity and eventually a full-blown career fronting the band Against Me!, underground heroes who earned a reputation for incendiary live shows and flirted with the mainstream enough to earn a major-label deal and praise from Bruce Springsteen. But Gabel, now Laura Jane Grace, also burned through two marriages and an Olympic amount of drugs and alcohol trying to push away the truth: that the female heart and mind inside didn’t align with the undeniably male body in the mirror—and that that otherness went way beyond the Manic Panic mohawks and knuckle tattoos of her peers. As a child watching “Material Girl”-era Madonna on MTV or a pixie-cut Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, she felt a jolt of rightness and recognition but had no idea how to bridge the gap: “I didn’t have a name for the way I felt. No information was available, and there was no adult that I could trust with my secret.” Instead she thought she might be schizophrenic, or even possessed; for every furtive experiment with wigs and women’s clothing, there were months or years of avoidance and self-loathing.

  Tranny—which pulls heavily from a decade of tour diaries— is actually a traditional rock bio in a lot of ways, full of road-dog debauchery, studio tales, and score-settling with ex-bandmates and managers. The physical transition, which doesn’t come until the last few chapters, feels almost like a postscript, and the prose swings between blistering and banal. But the book is also a powerful, disarmingly honest portrait of becoming, and the new last name feels like more than a coincidence. As Laura Jane, she’s found what eluded Tom for more than 30 years: Grace.

• The Observer
  http://observer.com/2016/11/laura-jane-grace-reveals-her-trans-struggle-in-vulnerable-autobiography/
  Word count: 2010

  QUOTED: "Maybe back in the day when I was first putting out records [I was] fearful. At this point I’m a little callused to that and my confidence as a musician is stronger. ... But the book is more like letting someone read your diary. And you sit in your room knowing that someone read your diary. It’s that kind of unguarded feeling. With music and songs, I always play around with metaphor and phrase, and in memoir I have to be more direct."

  CELEBRITY| TV| MOVIES| MUSIC Subscribe
  Observer
  OBSERVER MUSIC
  Laura Jane Grace Reveals Her Trans Struggle in Vulnerable Autobiography
  By Katherine Turman • 11/15/16 4:03pm

  Laura Jane Grace performs with Against Me!
  Laura Jane Grace performs with Against Me! Wikimedia Creative Commons
  When Laura Jane Grace sings the entreaty, “C’mon shape shift with me / What have you got to lose,” the answer is “everything,” despite the bold punk posturing of the lyric that follows: “fuck it.”

  Grace is used to spilling her guts for an audience—the precocious punk rocker started Against Me! at 17, in 1997, when, pre-transition, she was known as Tom Gabel.

  As the title of Grace’s new autobiography, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (Hachette Books), suggests, the journey from Tom to Laura has not been easy.

  Her lyrics, especially on her band Against Me!‘s 2016 album Shape Shift With Me, a record written concurrently with her book, are likewise blunt and revealing. As she sings in “Norse Truth”: “Walking on broken glass while holding my breath / I wouldn’t dare step on a single crack…Just because I can intellectualize it doesn’t mean I feel it in my chest.”

  Speaking from Tempe, Ariz., prior to Against Me!’s penultimate tour date with Bad Religion, Grace reflects on the similarities between releasing a book and a record, a career where punk rock became a painful payday, and how her literal “shape shift” caused loss, offset by the pain of gain.

  ENTERTAINMENT
  Observer Delivered to Your Inbox
  Get reviews and inside takes covering tv, movies, music and books.
  SIGN UP
  “It’s an interesting thing where people come up to you and say, ‘I’m excited about reading your book,’ and all I can think is ‘I’m fucking terrified; please don’t read my book! And if you do, don’t talk to me about it.’ ”

  Grace realizes that’s not a response she should give to strangers, so her reply is a gracious, “’thanks, I hope you enjoy it.’”

  A similar apprehension occurred when first releasing Against Me! demos and EPS—and the 2002 debut album by the Gainesville, Florida-based band, Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose.

  “Maybe back in the day when I was first putting out records [I was] fearful. At this point I’m a little callused to that and my confidence as a musician is stronger,” she says. “But the book is more like letting someone read your diary. And you sit in your room knowing that someone read your diary. It’s that kind of unguarded feeling. With music and songs, I always play around with metaphor and phrase, and in memoir I have to be more direct.”

  Indeed, much of the book comes from Grace’s detailed journals, which she mined for three years before hooking up with Noisey editor Dan Ozzi for the final year of cutting, shaping, and honing her 303-page memoir. In a diary entry in Tranny, dated February 18, 2005, Gabel wrote, “My earliest memories are of dressing up in my mother’s clothes and I am constantly reduced by the shame I feel in remembering.”

  Four years later: “I need to kill Tom Gabel, destroy his ego.”

  Though as a teen he didn’t know the term “gender dysphoria,” Gabel was certain he was meant to be woman, and for lack of a better term, felt “trapped in a man’s body.” But it took 31 years—of angst-exacerbated booze, drugs and art—for that process to begin in earnest, and when it did, in 2012, Gabel was married to a woman with a young daughter, Evelyn.

  Laura Jane Grace with Against Me!
  Laura Jane Grace with Against Me! Wikimedia Creative Commons
  Despite the heavy personal and career risk of hormone-replacement therapy and transitioning, Gabel knew it was destiny, even with uncertain reward and results.

  The ultimate decision—when he was “just a faggot in a dress with my dick tucked between my legs”—was agonizing; he was fearful of the commitment to hormones and plastic surgery. At 6-foot-2 with long brown hair and her bright blue eyes often lined in black, Grace, now 36, says her myriad tattoos and stature get more looks on the street than her changing visage, which is feminine, though low-key rather than frilly.

  With the landmark album 2014’s Gender Dysphoria Blues, Shape Shift With Me, and now, Tranny, Grace’s own words and art about her dysphoria, coming out and transition are if not complete, very detailed, and like the auteur herself, constantly evolving.

  Completing Tranny took a lot out of her, she says. “I’ve been surprised; I’ve been exhausted by the process.” When finished, “once you read through the finished thing, you have this realization that, for me, kind of broke me down emotionally,” Grace observes. “There’s a lot of ugly things there and there’s a lot of things that I’m proud of, but I’ve got to kind of own that now and hopefully learn from that.”

  If the book, which ends in about 2014 with (spoiler alert!) her divorce, a supportive new community of trans and gender queer fans, and the acceptance of her daughter, has a happy ending, it also marks a new beginning.

  Against Me! and Laura Jane Grace.
  Against Me! and Laura Jane Grace. Wikimedia Creative Commons
  And maybe even some questions have been definitively answered. “Like, O.K., I don’t have to keep coming back to these things anymore; that’s the past and I’ve got to accept that; there’s a certain amount of catharsis in that,” she says. “At one point it became: ‘if anybody’s getting thrown under the bus here, it’s me.’ I accept as much responsibility as I possibly can for anything that went wrong, and any time I could possibly be perceived as an asshole, and I potentially was.”

  Although Grace read a lot of rock biographies, she became a literary autodidact thanks to a 2008 New Year’s resolution to read 12 classic novels in 12 months. “Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, all that stuff you’re supposed to read in high school that I probably didn’t because I dropped out,” Grace says. “I have just as much of a huge appetite for reading as I do for music, and my attitude has always been that the more input you have, the more output you have, and that goes for writing music and writing lyrics. Just having the right word, you know?”

  Her favorite read was John Steinbeck’s final novel, 1961’s Winter of Our Discontent, and Grace considered the fact that she completed her own book while living in Oak Park, Ill., two blocks away from Ernest Hemingway’s birth home, a good omen.

  Writers are known for creative delay tactics, but instead of organizing drawers or falling down an internet rabbit hole, Grace wrote songs.

  “Songwriting became my procrastination tool. It’d be like, ‘O.K., I have a chapter due, I really should be working on this, but maybe instead I’ll pick up my guitar and write a song.’ Before, the songwriting was always where the pressure was, and goddammit, if I can’t take the pressure I don’t know what to do! So the book turned songwriting into an escape, but consequently it became the polar opposite of the book. The book is so much about reflection, rereading the past,” she reiterates.

  “Coupling the songwriting with that, it had to be immediate. Songs had to be like, ‘O.K., what am I feeling now at this very moment?’ If I had a crush on someone, I was gonna write a song about it. I’m not gonna think too much about and it’ll be fun and there won’t be any deep meaning behind it.”

  That said, a stated goal for Shape Shift With Me was, she told Rolling Stone, a “commentary on living from a trans perspective. I wanted to write the transgender response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St., Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville and the Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come For Free.”

  In making such a heady musical statement, is she concerned with her potential role now as a spokeswoman for the trans community?

  “It’s a pressure that I immediately scoff at in my mind,” she replies immediately. “Any time someone hurls a label at you, or an expectation, my thought is, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like when I disappoint you, when I do something that doesn’t fit into what your projection of what you want me to be, which I inevitably will.’ It’s strange growing up in the punk scene and seeing the parallels,” she muses.

  “Putting people on pedestals and looking for heroes is something that I’ve never been interested in doing. I can only be myself and say what I’m thinking and say what I’m feeling, and if people identify with that and if people resonate with that, great. If they don’t, it’s still true nonetheless.”

  SEE ALSO: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Failed Us Again This Presidential Election

  PROMOTED STORIES
  What Causes Psoriatic Arthritis?
  What Causes Psoriatic Arthritis?
  Yahoo! Search
  If You Own A Home You Must Claim Your $4,240 Before Time Runs Out!
  If You Own A Home You Must Claim Your $4,240 Before Time Runs Out!
  The Better Finance
  Join Booking.com – Market Your Property Worldwide
  Join Booking.com – Market Your Property Worldwide
  Booking.com
  Have an Unruly Dog? See All the Dog Training Programs at Petco
  Have an Unruly Dog? See All the Dog Training Programs at Petco
  Petco.com
  recommended by
  Melania Trump Proudly Wore Red, White and Blue This Weekend

  Powered by

  SPONSORED STORIES
  How To Fix Aging Skin (Do This Every Day)
  How To Fix Aging Skin (Do This Every Day)
  Health Headlines
  Your New Kitten Is Going To Love These Toys From Petco
  Your New Kitten Is Going To Love These Toys From Petco
  Petco.com
  How To Fix Your Fatigue (Do This Every Day)
  How To Fix Your Fatigue (Do This Every Day)
  Health Headlines
  Caran d'Ache Museum Aquarelle Waterbrush Pen - Large Brush
  The Goulet Pen Company
  Obama's Post Presidency Style is Infuriating to Republicans
  Obama's Post Presidency Style is Infuriating to Republicans
  Travelwhip - Travel Tastefully
  Thinking About Installing Solar Panels? Read This First
  Thinking About Installing Solar Panels? Read This First
  Energy Bill Cruncher
  Under The Radar Stock Has Been Gaining Huge Momentum
  Under The Radar Stock Has Been Gaining Huge Momentum
  Stock Report
  Swingline Precision Pro Desktop Hole Punch - 74037 - $10.07
  MyBinding.com
  Recommended by
  ENTERTAINMENT
  Observer Delivered to Your Inbox
  SIGN UP
  MUST READS

  Observer
  POLITICSENTERTAINMENTLIFESTYLEARTSHEALTH

  ContactAboutNewsletters

  PrivacyTerms
  Powered by WordPress.com VIP

• Paste Magazine
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/11/tranny-laura-jane-grace.html
  Word count: 770

  QUOTED: "A book like this, warts and all, might be the just the note of truth that will help a reader through their own dysphoria and recognition of their true self. That alone forgives all the shaggy sins Grace commits here as a writer."

  Against Me! Frontwoman Laura Jane Grace Offers Blunt Confessions in Tranny
  By Robert Ham | November 18, 2016 | 3:09pm
  BOOKS REVIEWS LAURA JANE GRACE
  Share Tweet Submit Pin
  Against Me! Frontwoman Laura Jane Grace Offers Blunt Confessions in Tranny
  Laura Jane Grace’s new memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, is as blunt as the vicious snap of a song by Against Me!, the snarling punk outfit she’s led since the late ‘90s. Her band’s trajectory from crust folk ne’er-do-wells to electrified major label shit-kickers is told in unblinking detail, including conflict with punk purists and A&R reps, lots of intraband fighting, and even more booze, weed, pills, and powder.

  Grace is also self-aware enough to note that all of the outward conflict and inner turmoil that fed her hunger for drugs and alcohol, in some degree, stemmed from the gender dysphoria she’d struggled with her whole life. Until just a few years ago, she was known as Thomas Gabel. But as Grace hit her thirties, she more fully accepted the truth that she was a transgender woman and began to transition.

  1trannybookcover.jpgThe section of the book that chronicles Grace coming out to herself and then breaking the news to the rest of the world is, naturally, the most engrossing part of this otherwise frothy bit of nonfiction. Her slow reveal to her now ex-wife, band mates, and parents is loaded with tension and heart that turns quickly sour as she watches her marriage crumble under the weight of this huge change and her admitted selfishness.

  For fans of the band, this is a full meal. There’s a wealth of detail about their touring and recording life, as well as a requisite amount of shit talking about ex-members of Against Me! and other artists that they ran into along the way. Jay Weinberg, son of Bruce Springsteen’s longtime drummer and current member of Slipknot, gets thrown under the bus with the most force as he’s portrayed as a preening egotist. But Alkaline Trio, Blink 182, George Rebelo of Hot Water Music, and various employees of Sire Records are portrayed in an equally unfavorable light. To be fair, Grace reserves the harshest criticisms for herself. She just drags a lot of people down in the muck with her.

  Curiosity seekers have a lot to wade through though to get to what gave this book its title. Grace fought with her feelings for years, suppressing them over and over before slipping on a dress and high heels and experiencing a small measure of relief. Her more complete acknowledgment of the truth is a long time coming, and the solace that she feels as she moves towards it is palpable.

  Laura Jane Grace stopped by the Daytrotter Studio in 2014 to sing “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” in a rare solo session.

  The unintended effect, though, is that it casts the rest of Tranny in far more negative terms. Grace’s admission of narcissism and her guilt about her actions do not make reading about them any easier. And after a short while, the constant recounting of compromises made to appease a record company in an attempt to come up with a hit, the long lawsuit with a former manager, and the backstage drama starts to come off like whining. It’s all tied in with her self-loathing, but a little perspective at how good this band has had it would have been welcome.

  The flipside is that Tranny is constructed to feel like you’re sneaking a read of someone’s personal diary. There are actual journal entries stitched in throughout the narrative, and as wearing as the dishy stuff can get, it also proves entertaining to eavesdrop on the gossip.

  Transgender issues may be in the forefront of our popular culture these days thanks to Caitlyn Jenner and Transparent, but there’s still a lot of stigma attached to them. A book like this, warts and all, might be the just the note of truth that will help a reader through their own dysphoria and recognition of their true self. That alone forgives all the shaggy sins Grace commits here as a writer.

• Plenitude
  http://plenitudemagazine.ca/magic-words-a-review-of-tranny-by-laura-jane-grace/
  Word count: 1043

  Magic Words: A Review of Laura Jane Grace’s Tranny
  March 14, 2017
  Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane

  During an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Laura Jane Grace addressed the title of her recent memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, released in 2016. Her response to Noah was similar to her response on The Late Show with Seth Meyers and to her explanation on Twitter: she called her book Tranny because the word had power, and she had anticipated the wound the word would make ever since her 2012 transition. To her surprise, though, the first person who called her a tranny was another trans person. They’d removed the dangerous association of the word by using it in a friendly manner. And because the first time Grace was hit with that particular slur wasn’t in a moment of violence like she’d feared, she’d been healed by it instead.

  Marginalized communities have been reclaiming words for decades, so what Grace is proposing to do with her title isn’t new—but I do think there’s a magical quality to it. I say “magic” because of my own connection to the word. The first time I heard it used against me was when my then girlfriend claimed that hanging around her led me to my trans identity. “I got you with my tranny wand,” she joked. “Now enjoy your magical transformation.”

  Since so much accurate information about trans identity is obscured by media stereotypes, meeting a trans person can prove to be a personal revelation of identity at the same time as it’s a dismantling of false expectations. Because of that, it really does feel like magic as an entire world of options opens up. My then girlfriend and her group of friends had met one another and transformed together, and she brought that magic with her when she met me—the “tranny wand” in action.

  Grace’s Tranny is evidence of that particular kind of queer magic. From a neo-pagan perspective, all spells are words arranged in a particular order with a direct intent, and through that intent, the person’s wants and desires manifest. It’s clear from her title and interviews that Grace wants to imbue the slur with new meaning and turn it into a healing token. My only qualm is that I don’t think Grace’s spell-casting is strong enough.

  The book has a co-author, but it’s not the same kind of co-author relationship that Ivan Coyote had with Rae Spoon when they wrote their musical tour and gender memoir Gender Failure. This is a co-author who is staying in the shadows, helping the original author along. When I see a co-author like this in trans memoirs—such as Chaz Bono’s Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man—I’m on guard. Since information about trans people is hidden, I worry that the person assisting the memoirist may make changes to the trans person’s experiences so that their expression falls in line with an accepted image of trans people. In other words, I worry that the co-author will shape the prose of Grace’s life, similar to how Harry Benjamin shaped the lives of the trans people he worked with. The doctor’s image of trans people, and the co-author’s, can become eerily similar.

  That is not to say Grace’s memoir is boring or transphobic. No, not really. Grace deals with self-hatred and uses outdated language at times (like the heavily medicalized term “transsexual”), but again, most of that comes from an internalized place of transmisogyny which she discards by the end of the memoir. During Grace’s tour for the book, she’s been consistently well spoken about political and social issues affecting trans people and cognizant of the trans community and other trans writers. But the structure of her memoir itself leaves me wanting more because it seems so standard.

  The memoir opens with Grace’s first moment of difference—realizing that she wants to be Madonna—then moves into her struggle as she seeks to come out. Most of the book is about that inner turmoil, the bread and butter of most trans memoirs. Grace also writes about her band and her characteristic excesses alongside periods of sobriety, another standard in the realm of trans autobiography and behind-the-music specials. It’s not until the last quarter of the book when she comes out and deals with the gendered expectations of those around her that the book starts to become interesting to me. Because that was the point when it became interesting, it left me wanting so much more by the time the memoir was over. The standard arc of the trans memoir was complete, however, now that she had transitioned socially and medically, so the story had to end.

  The thing is: that’s usually when the story is over for cis people. For trans people, it’s just beginning.

  If Grace came out with another book, I’d read it in a heartbeat because I’d hope she’d pick up the story from the last page of this one. Until then, I’m left feeling like her reclamation of the slur isn’t enough to heal; it’s merely a band-a solution. She’s anticipating violence, not disavowing the violence. So there is still a lot more work to be done.

  Tranny is a good book for punk rock historians, especially those concerned with gender, and it’s a good primer on the basics of transgender narratives (as told to doctors/cis people), but I’m hoping for a little more magic in my life.

  Laura Jane Grace, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. (Hachette Books, 2016.) Hardcover, 320pp, $17.50 CAD.

  Evelyn Deshane has appeared in Bitch Magazine, The Rusty Toque, and Briarpatch Magazine. Their poetry chapbook, Mythology, was released in 2015 with The Steel Chisel. Evelyn (pron. Eve-a-lyn) received an MA from Trent University and currently studying for PhD at Waterloo University. Visit them at: evedeshane.wordpress.com

• Blurt
  http://blurtonline.com/review/tranny-laura-jane-grace/
  Word count: 473

  Tranny, by Laura Jane Grace
  Leave a reply

  Title: nny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout

  Author: Laura Jane Grace

  Publisher: Hachette Books

  Publication Date: November 15, 2016

  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  tranny

  The Upshot: Against Me! founder details the life, the lifestyle, the music, and the transition in a remarkably candid memoir.

  BY JOHN B. MOORE

  Against Me! were being called sell outs years before they ever signed a major label record deal.

  The Gainesville, FL-based band that played a brand of fiery acoustic DIY protest anthems were first slapped with the label when they tightened up their once sloppy sound, opting simply for better production and electric guitars in the studio. The second wave of slurs came when they left the tiny independent punk rock labels and opted to put out a couple of albums on Fat Wreck Chords, a slightly bigger independent record label. But, the suburban anarchists that keep score really lost their shit when Against Me! signed a deal with Sire Records (once home to everyone from The Ramones and The Replacements to The Dead Boys, all oddly considered beyond rebuke based on punk rock rules).

  So, by the time Tom Gabel, founder and singer/guitarist for Against Me! decided to go public in 2012 and tell everyone about his struggles with gender dysphoria and that he would now be going by a different pronoun and changing his name to Laura Jane Grace, she was all out of fucks to give about what people would say. Her memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, is just as defiant and compelling and she is. Written with the help of music journalist Dan Ozzy, the book includes plenty of Grace’s writings from personal journals giving the memoir an of-the-moment accuracy that is often missing from rock bios that rely mainly on decades-old recollections to fill in the details.

  Deeply personal, the book dives into her childhood, being raised mainly by a single mother with a weedy relationship with her ex-military, conservative father. Plenty of space is devoted to the band’s founding, line-up changes and a sometimes rocky relationship with the punk community gatekeepers quick to judge every decision a band makes. It’s Grace’s journal entries about her at-the-time secret realization that she was born the wrong gender that is the heart of this memoir. It’s shattering to read the writings of a teen and eventually young adult struggling to keep this life a secret from every person in her world.

  Defiant, at times heartbreaking, but ultimately empowering, with Tranny Laura Jane Grace turns in one of the most important rock memoirs in years.

• Chorus FM
  https://chorus.fm/review/laura-jane-grace-tranny-confessions-of-punk-rocks-most-infamous-anarchist-sellout/
  Word count: 2127

  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout - ''
  Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi • Nov 15th, 2016
  Highly RecommendedBook Review
  Reviewed by Thomas Nassiff
  Buy it on Amazon.
  Being drawn to Laura Jane Grace’s memoir, TRANNY: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, is a natural side-effect of being hypnotized, mesmerized, and forever in awe of Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues. I appreciated Transgender Dysphoria Blues for a myriad of reasons: It’s a hell of a rock-and-roll album, it’s intimate and personal in its storytelling, the way my favorite artists have always sung their stories, and it made me a better person. The latter point is not something that can be said for a ton of my favorite albums.

  Grace’s lyricism on Transgender Dysphoria Blues paints a stark photo of a confused and hurt person becoming stronger and more fully formed by acknowledging and actioning on internal strife — in this case, gender dysphoria and Grace’s path through it. The album is focused internally, on Grace’s experience growing up with the feeling of being born in the wrong body. The album does much more than “open your eyes” to gender identity and gender dysphoria: It drops you directly into the world of a woman who took major steps forward into changing her life by understanding, over the course of decades, who she was meant to be. I learned more about gender through listening to that album, and through reading more about gender identity inspired by listening to that album, than I’d learned in the ~24 years of life I’d lived before it was released.

  Transgender Dysphoria Blues instantly became my favorite Against Me! album — as a temporary resident of Gainesville, Fla., I’d listened all of the band’s records almost out of a sense of responsibility, but as a teenager who grew up with New Found Glory and Yellowcard, I’d never fully appreciated the band in their more punk/anarchist era. I just never knew them as that band, and listening to their earlier work as a college-aged idiot never lit any type of fire in me. Blues turned my mind on in a new way, and it’s an album I’ll forever be in debt to for the ways it made me think and learn.

  When you read TRANNY, though, it becomes clear that Blues is more of an appetizer course. That album seems to contain so much detail when you listen to it (“Your tells are so obvious / Shoulders too broad for a girl / It keeps you reminded / Helps you remember where you come from / You want them to notice the ragged ends of your summer dress / You want them to see you like they see every other girl” …. “Chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress / Is your mother proud of your eyelashes? / Silicone chest, and collagen lips / How would you even recognize me?” … The list of lyrics that could be called forward in this parenthetical is a long one, even longer than this parenthetical already is!), but it’s obvious through only one chapter of TRANNY that Grace is giving you more here. Consider Blues the 140-character version of the story Grace has to tell; TRANNY is probably not all of it, but it’s a lot closer to the whole thing. After finishing it, I get a feeling she perhaps won’t ever be able to tell it all.

  The standout point about this book, the point I should make early on for the sake of encouraging the largest number of readers to buy a copy of it, is that it will appeal to many different people. It will certainly appeal to long-time Against Me! fans — the fans who stuck through every aspect of the band’s career, which gets delved into in great detail here. It will appeal to folks who just like to read books about rock-and-roll bands, if there are such folks reading this blog. It will appeal to people who want to learn more about gender, people who need to learn more about gender, people who already know plenty about gender, and many in between.

  Grace accomplishes an incredible balancing act of detailing her personal life and struggles with gender dysphoria while penning the incredible story of one of the best punk bands of our time. Perhaps only here can you find a detailed and exhaustive reasoning of a wildly successful punk act signing to a major label with aims to become an enormous arena rock group amongst the same pages that dive into the story of a woman dressing up in her wife’s clothes, on their couch, getting high and wishing she had been born a different person.

  TRANNY succeeds because of its abrupt transparency and immediate intimacy. It isn’t very long before you’re dropped into the first journal entry of the book — one dated August 10, 2000, from Gainesville, Fla. — where Grace describes, in minute detail, an occurrence of her cross-dressing at the communal punk house she lived in for a while, her door as locked as it could be, one of the most intimate moments in the early portion of the book. Journal entries like this tell most of the story throughout, as Grace, a remarkably consistent journaler for most of her life, provides narration and commentary between entries to fill in holes and explain certain things further. You’re taken through an entire Warped Tour via journal entries; you meet Grace’s primary love interests via journal entries; you live out multiple instances of cross-dressing, and you read along as Grace makes the decision to finally transition and come out to her wife, band and the public. You’re taken through the raw and intense path of the writing and recording of Transgender Dysphoria Blues itself.

  Grace’s gender dysphoria simultaneously takes center stage and provides the backdrop for every single portion of her story. Even before she chronicles the beginnings of Against Me!, she notes her first memorable bout of gender-related confusion (age 5, watching Madonna dance on television). Before you experience her band’s rise off their first two full-length albums, you read through the difficulties inherent in living such a confusing life as an emotional and politically active young person; you learn about the beginnings of her addictions to drugs and alcohol and sex. You note all the Against Me! lyrics that originated from journal entries and piece together a person’s whole life. You become emotional at moments where Grace is filled with self-doubt and self-hate, suicidal, seemingly gone, considering herself incapable of love, considering herself incapable of being loved. The lows of Grace’s addictions and dependencies are absolutely brutal. Her moments spent “as her” (this is how Grace refers to her moments of cross-dressing) are concurrently joyous and grippingly sad.

  Never does Grace back down from a tough subject, either. She chronicles a failed marriage at a young age, reconciles her band’s growth and popularity with her own politics in the context of the punk DIY scene she grew up in, gets arrested and goes to jail more than once, suffers a draining lawsuit and the ups and downs of relationships on the road. She delves into these events without pause, annotating them in full, rarely seeming to hold much back. Even as her internal thoughts become heavier and heavier, you realize that you’re experiencing Grace’s growth in multiple ways: as an artist, a human, a writer, a friend, a person who feels they were born in the wrong body.

  I haven’t pulled any direct quotes from the book yet, for fear that I’d wind up quoting half of its 300ish pages (I’ve never received a “review copy” of a book before and I’m unsure what the 303 pages here will wind up translating to in its final form). I wanted to keep myself to one quote, for this reason, and it was very difficult to not pull the bit about a major label A&R man, courting Against Me! to join his roster, acknowledging a cover of The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” on a demo tape as the best AM! song ever recorded. Here’s what I’ll choose instead; it’s part of a journal entry from December 2, 2009, as Grace’s feelings of gender dysphoria are beginning to overwhelm her. It’s still over a year before she’ll finally decide she needs move forward with her transition; it’s over two years before she’ll come out as transgender to her wife:

  It’s unrealistic to think that I can go on living this way. I’m completely unhappy. The way I feel inside is never going to change. This is how I felt when I was six years old, when I was 14 years old, and this is how I feel now at 29 years old. Why wouldn’t I continue to feel this way for the rest of my life? A successful career doesn’t change it. Marriage doesn’t change it. Having a kid doesn’t change it.

  How do I reconcile the person I am now with the person I want to be? How would the people in my life handle such a drastic change and how would it change our relationships? My wife? My mother? My friends? The producer? The record label? Our audience? How would making a change like this affect my daughter’s life? So many unknowns and so many terrifying possibilities.

  I wanted to share this quote for a few reasons. I think it exposes the scope of the decision to transition that Grace struggled to make for years, and I think it identifies the many ways in which her brain worked at the time. The pressures she had to deal with, the expectations she put on herself. This quote, to me, encapsulates the crux of Grace’s story: To become the person I want to be, what about my current self do I have to give up?

  TRANNY is out on November 15 via Hachette Books. Reading it made me feel humbled and insignificant because of how much it taught me and how emotionally exhausting it ultimately proved to be. I do feel fully qualified to recommend it to anyone reading this article, though. It will change the way you listen to Transgender Dysphoria Blues and every other Against Me! album for the better, and I imagine for many people, it will change the way they view gender and individualism for the better as well.

  Post-script:
  I wrote this whole thing before Donald Trump was voted to become the next president of the United States. I didn’t feel confident in my ability to try to weave a mention of this into the post as I had written it above, but I do feel compelled to mention it here. Donald Trump is an evidently cruel man who harbors no favor for the LGBTQ community, and his running mate, Mike Pence, is arguably worse. Pence, as an example, is a man who has expressed interest in using federal dollars to fund conversion therapy “treatments.” Aside from the desire of the next administration to abolish gay marriage, there will undoubtedly be a larger platform for hateful people to speak out against and attempt to shame members of the LGBTQ community.

  This is perhaps a more important time than ever to become a little more mindful and educated about issues surrounding this community, gender fluidity, and more. The day after Trump got elected, I became a monthly donor to RAINN and Planned Parenthood; while this isn’t necessarily a plea for you to donate, and it’s certainly not meant to be any type of self-pat-on-the-back, there are many organizations that are going to be in a position where they could use donations now more than ever once Trump takes office. It’s going to be important to make every attempt at making the world feel a little bit safer and more welcoming for the LGBTQ community, for all women, for all people of color, for anyone marginalized, once he’s inaugurated. Reading and learning about things like this — reading a book like this — will make you a kinder and more compassionate person, which really does make a difference in daily life. Donating to organizations that attempt to make the world a little safer is a good way to help as well.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/laura-jane-grace/tranny2/
  Word count: 381

  TRANNY
  Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
  by Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi
  BUY NOW FROM
  AMAZON
  BARNES & NOBLE
  LOCAL BOOKSELLER
  GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
  Email Address Subscribe
  Email this review
  KIRKUS REVIEW
  A visceral memoir that deftly explores Grace’s experience fronting seminal punk band Against Me! as well as the years she spent grappling with gender dysphoria.

  From the time she was 5 watching Madonna perform “Material Girl,” Grace, who was born in 1980 as Thomas James Gabel, knew that she wanted to be a woman. Her father was an Army officer, and Grace’s family moved frequently. In 1991, Grace’s parents divorced, and she moved to Naples, Florida, with her mother. Frequently bullied by her peers, she turned to music as an escape. After playing in local bands and getting into the punk scene, Grace decided to create her own solo music project, Against Me!, which eventually grew into a successful and highly influential punk band. The author traces her band’s slow but significant rise to fame, discussing the many issues she faced as they rose—most significantly, the constant worry that the originally anarchist group was “selling out” as well as the debilitating substance abuse that went hand in hand with a touring lifestyle. Grace also explores her constant feelings of gender dysphoria, her attempts to suppress them, and, eventually, her realization that they were not going to go away, which ultimately led to acceptance. Throughout, the author’s voice is candid and raw, and she delivers a touching, occasionally heartbreaking firsthand narrative of what it feels like to be born in the wrong body. “By coming out,” she writes, “I indirectly triggered changes around me….People I’d known for years and saw every day cycled out of my world. It wasn’t that they were transphobic or unsupportive, it was just that things were different.” The book is also a revealing look behind the scenes at the music industry and what it takes, and means, for a band to “make it.”

  A fascinating, gripping, moving memoir perfect for anyone interested in learning more about gender identity or about the complicated inner workings of the music business.

• LitStack
  http://litstack.com/litstack-review-tranny-confessions-of-punk-rocks-most-infamous-anarchist-sellout-by-laura-jane-grace/
  Word count: 876

  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout
  Laura Jane Grace
  Hatchette Books
  Release Date: November 15, 2016
  ISBN 978-0-3163-8795-8

  In 1997, seventeen year old Tom Gabel dropped out of school and decided to become a punk rock musician. In his Gainesville, Florida bedroom he recorded ten original songs using an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a four-track cassette recorder and some stolen microphones. While designing the cover for the cassettes, he decided to call this new venture Against Me!

  Over the next fifteen years, Against Me! added additional members and became a bona fide punk rock band, recording three EPs and five full length albums, garnering critical acclaim, opening for headliners such as Green Day and Foo Fighters, and touring extensively in the USA and abroad. But despite all the success, living the punk rock lifestyle, and amassing adoration from his fans (plus some charges of “selling out” when the band started making money), Tom felt dissatisfied, like his whole life was a lie.

  In 2012, thirty-one year old Tom Gabel transitioned into Laura Jane Grace, going public in the May 24 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is her story.

  Tranny is an eye-opening biography, not just because of the gender dysphoria element which runs through the entire book, but in glimpsing all that encompassed Laura’s life. Utilizing not only first person narrative but also verbatim entries (often gut-wrenching) from her personal journals dating from 2000 to 2011, we follow Laura’s wayward youth, touring debaucheries, relationship struggles, and getting caught up in the music industry machine, but also her growing compulsion to retreat into a secret persona she dubbed, simply, “her”, where a stressed out and agitated Tom could feel free and in control – until the fear of discovery and shame intruded once again.

  The book itself is compelling, but uneven. Laura’s early life feels like a recitation, glancing off her relationship with her divorced parents and barely mentioning her younger brother. And while her years with Against Me!, which understandably make up the bulk of the book, are vivid, the performances themselves seem to blur in a constant repetition of substance abuse and conflict, absent of any save the most fleeting of redemptive qualities, and every recording session seemed discordant and unsatisfying. It made me wonder why she persevered when at every turn the effort appeared to be such a hassle.

  But despite the unevenness, the book is potent and incredibly engaging. Laura does not mince words, nor does she try to soften the effects of her rowdy, loud, and substance fueled lifestyle. No holds barred and absolutely no shits given. Yet there is a humanity under all the bluster and blow; friendships, even tumultuous ones, were cherished, relationships were lasting even when they were over, at its core the music was always genuine and who cared what anyone else thought? The system was messed up, but oh, how fun it was to play it – until it wasn’t. Then it sucked, big time.

  But what is most gripping is how honest Laura is when she talks of the gender dysphoria that affected her most of her life, going unrecognized for what it is until she made the decision to transition. Once she makes the decision to stop fighting it, the need to embrace who she truly is becomes almost compulsive. (“If I felt this way when I was 8, and the way I felt when I was 13, and the way I felt when I was 20, 25, 28, and still now at 31, then this is going to be the way I’m going to feel forever.”) After years of living with such a deeply held secret, only cryptically hinted at in oblique, soul bearing lyrics, she virtually blurts out the news to her bandmates. Coming out to her family was much harder, but the public declaration via Rolling Stone made the decision irrevocable.

  Still, she had doubts, and that is what truly broke my heart. With the band in turmoil, her family reeling, and her professional support in Florida reluctant if not nonexistent, she backslid, second guessing a decision that had finally given her a modicum of peace after years of internal conflict. Were it not for a (finally!) supportive endocrinologist in Chicago, this story might have turned out very differently – and one has to believe, far more tragically.

  Let’s face it – gender transitioning, transexuality, gender dysphoria – these are issues that many of us struggle to comprehend. Yet they are part of the human condition, and merit our efforts to understand regardless of our own internal responses, perhaps in spite of them. Reading accounts such as Tranny helps to take the words, the concepts, the clinical explanations, and give them a face and a name; it makes them not only human, but part and parcel of this particular human, of this particular story. It is incredibly brave of Laura Jane to share her story with us, especially given the chaotic stage on which she had – and does – live her life. The least we can do is listen.

  ~ Sharon Browning

• Punk Rock Theory
  https://www.punkrocktheory.com/music_reviews/laura-jane-grace-tranny-confessions-punk-rocks-most-infamous-anarchist-sellout
  Word count: 381

  While biographies are usually reserved for people at least a couple decades older, Laura Jane Grace already has plenty to talk about at age 36.

  An army brat, Grace already got a tast of life on the road early on in her life, before eventually settling in some backwater in Florida as the child of divorced parents. There she became friends with the few other outcasts who also suffered the discomfort of being stranded in the same place and found salvation through punkrock. She was quick to embrace the lifestyle and while Against Me! started as a creative outlet more than anything else, it eventually turned into a full-blown musical career.

  With success however came disappointed fans who considered them sell-outs for flirting with a major label, two failed marriages and a shitload of drugs and alcohol. Up until this point the same could be written about Mötley Crüe’s biography. But Tranny also tells the story of how a young Tom Gabel already felt different, sensing recognition and belonging every time he saw “Material Girl”-era Madonna or Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. He didn’t have a name for what he felt though. And for every experiment with wigs and women’s clothing, there were even longer periods of time filled with self-loathing.

  While a large amount of the book is spent detailing Against Me’s history, complete with tales from the road, and settling scores with former bandmates, Laura Jane Grace’s struggle with gender dysphoria is touched upon throughout the entire book. Along with Noisey’s Dan Ozzi, Grace makes clear we understand the kind of impact it had on her entire life.

  While it’s not an easy book to read (I lost count of how many times I felt like yelling ‘cheer up and smile dammit’), it is a moving and incredibly honest story of embracing your true self. Which is how come I found it a bit weird that the actual coming out part of the book is treated almost like an afterthought. Overall though, Tranny more than deserves your attention. Especially in a time where someone like Trump gets elected and threatens to undo years of hard work for LGBT rights.

• Third Coast Review
  https://thirdcoastreview.com/2016/12/19/laura-jane-gracestranny-confessions-of-punk-rocks-most-infamous-anarchist-sellout-is-a-heartbreaking-trans-memoir/
  Word count: 1346

  Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout Is a Heartbreaking Trans Memoir
  BY KATE SCOTT ON DECEMBER 19, 2016 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )
  tranny-laura-jane-graceStanding onstage, Laura Jane Grace is the embodiment of a punk rocker. Part Joan Jett, part Debbie Harry, Grace commands her pop-punk band Against Me! with ease and a crooked smile. Yet, after having read her memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, it’s clear that Grace’s confidence often only runs skin deep. The transgender frontwoman depicts her life with brutal honesty and catharsis, prompting the reader to support, question, judge, and empathize with the author. Beginning with stories of her childhood, Grace (born Thomas James Gabel on November 8, 1980) depicts herself as an unhappy kid who ran the gamut of cliche adolescent problems: anger at her parents’ divorce, melancholy over being an outcast in school, and fascination with drugs and alcohol. What separates Grace’s story from the rest is her constant struggle with gender dysphoria.

  Simply put, gender dysphoria is the medical condition in which a person experiences distress and upset over the gender and sex they were assigned at birth. Often, this condition leads to the self-identification as a transgender (or trans) person. As Grace mentions throughout her memoir, gender dysphoria was not a term she knew of as a child, and it was only through music that she feels she made it through.

  “While drugs and sex could reliably hold me over, my biggest distraction and relief from depression came when I discovered punk rock,” Grace wrote of her teenage years. After Grace ran away from home several times, was arrested, and continually failed classes, Grace’s mother agreed to let her drop out of high school as long as she stopped running away. After dropping out, Grace formed Against Me! with childhood friends Kevin Mahon and Dustin Fridkin and began performing DIY punk shows in garages and shitty dive bars. During this time, Grace wrote in her journal about the future of the band and the doomed relationships that came from sex in the back of a car or dangerous flirtations in bars. She describes her past loves without a filter, imploring her readers to find their own similarities in her stark relationships.

  While the ‘rags to riches’ narrative has become as ordinary as the pop bands that accompany them, Against Me! were hated by the DIY punk community; the more commercial success they achieved, the further they were cast aside by the ones who were inspiration for the band’s formation. Signing with several record labels over the years, Grace assumed the role as bandleader and often did what she thought was right for the band, regardless of what the other members thought. In her younger days, Grace came off as arrogant, but as she continued down the same path over the years, her arrogance morphed into genuine selfishness.

  Taken from her Instagram @LauraJaneGrace
  Taken from her Instagram @LauraJaneGrace
  What keeps the reader from finding her actions reprehensible are journal entries written at these moments of raw ego. We are taken back to the scared, skinny girl who’s trapped behind the guise of a hardcore, angry frontman. These moments of fear and curiosity stop Grace from becoming a character in her own life story and bring sympathy to her actions. In a particularly moving entry, Grace and her band encountered a group of transgender women walking down the road in Milan, and the group all laugh and joke about how ridiculous they look.

  “I laughed at them along with everyone else, the whole time knowing the truth about myself, that I wished I were so brave…I’ve been called a ‘sellout’ many times in life for the choices I’ve made in my musical career. But this experience, that moment–that’s what it feels like to truly sell out.”

  As the band gained more notoriety and commercial fame, Grace found herself increasingly depressed. What seems to have saved her from death, either from suicide or drugs, was meeting Heather, her now ex-wife and the mother of her child, whom she still respects and cares for. People fall out of love, and often that experience shifts the relationship to hatred and resentment. Grace and Heather fell in love fast and hard, with Heather becoming pregnant fairly quickly at the start of their marriage. At the same time, Grace was secretly dressing as a woman, something she’d been doing for years, always doing it ‘one last time,’ like a drug addict getting ‘one last fix.’ The difference is that transitioning into a woman would be the healthiest thing Grace could do for herself, but instead she continued to hide her identity and drop hints of her true self in Against Me!’s lyrics.

  After her daughter was born and Grace continued to tour with the band, she finally found the courage to come out as trans to her friends and family. While it’s a relief to read that her mother, wife and band members were open to the transition, the pain that trans people go through bleeds through Grace’s journal entries and reckless behavior. Grace’s life story offers a glimpse into a punk rocker’s world, but the real emotion comes from her pull to be the woman she wasn’t born as and the parent she’s still scared to be.

  Buy Tranny for $20 at your local bookseller. It’s published by Hatchette Book Group.

  SHARE THIS:
  Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
  Related
  Best of 2016: A Few Final Thoughts on Music and Art
  January 5, 2017
  In "Art"
  Best of 2016: The Lit Scene in Bookstores and Books
  January 4, 2017
  In "Lit"
  Zoe Zolbrod's Thought Provoking Memoir "The Telling" Out in May
  April 5, 2016
  In "Lit"
  Categories: Lit, Music, Reviews
  Tagged as: bookclub, memoir, nonfiction, punk rock, rock memoir, trans
  Review: Moholy-Nagy: Future Present Reveals a Multimedia Master The Christians Dramatizes a Crisis at a Megachurch–With Music
  Leave a Reply

  Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  COMMENT
  NAME *
  EMAIL *
  WEBSITE

  NOTIFY ME OF FOLLOW-UP COMMENTS BY EMAIL.
  NOTIFY ME OF NEW POSTS BY EMAIL.
  3CR’s Favorite Events

  July 28, 2017 from 11:00 am Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones @ Navy Pier, Festival Hall B
  from 11:00 am 45th Annual Fiesta del Sol @ Pilsen
  from 12:00 pm 33rd Annual Newberry Book Fair @ Newberry Library
  from 5:30 pm Fed Up Fest @ Co-Prosperity Sphere
  from 8:00 pm DREAM LOGIC and “A Life With No Limits” @ The Edge Theatre
  from 8:00 pm Fool’s Journey: A Misfit Circus Cabaret @ Chopin Theatre
  July 29, 2017 from 10:00 am 33rd Annual Newberry Book Fair @ Newberry Library
  from 11:00 am Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones @ Navy Pier, Festival Hall B
  from 11:00 am 45th Annual Fiesta del Sol @ Pilsen
  On from 12:00 pm Wicker Park Fest @ Wicker Park

  View Upcoming Events This Month
  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa

  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
  6
  7
  8
  9
  10
  11
  12
  13
  14
  15
  16
  17
  18
  19
  20
  21
  22
  23
  24
  25
  26
  27
  28
  29
  30
  31
  « ‹ Jul 2017 › »
  Social

  View thirdcoastreview’s profile on FacebookView @ThirdCoastRvw’s profile on TwitterView thirdcoastreview’s profile on Instagram
  Contact us

  Click here to go to our contact form
  TOP CATEGORIES: SCREENS/MUSIC/STAGES/FILM/THEATER/REVIEW/LIT/REVIEWS/ART/FRONT PAGE
  TOP TAGS: ART HOUSE CINEMA/ CHICAGO/ LINCOLN HALL/ ART/ CHICAGO MUSIC/ EMPTY BOTTLE/ SCHUBAS/ TCR MIXTAPE/ MUSIC BOX THEATRE
  PROUDLY POWERED BY WORDPRESS | HOSTED AT UTOPIAN DESIGNS | COPYRIGHT 2016 - NANCY S BISHOP, EDITOR AND PUBLISHER, THIRD COAST REVIEW. | LOGIN

Word Count