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.”



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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.



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.

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“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.”

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

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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.”

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.”

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.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 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