Because of the Shame: Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! - Part 5

2012–2014: True Trans Soul Rebel
Originally published May 23rd, 2014 by Flink (Offline)

After meeting a transgender fan in 2012, Tom Gabel decided to move on with his transition. He told his wife and band members, and in May, Gabel publicly came out as being transgender in a Rolling Stone interview with writer Josh Eels. Gabel chose to take on the surname Grace, his mother’s maiden name, and, as foretold in “The Ocean,” chooses the name Laura, the one her mother would have given her. According to the Rolling Stone interview, Jane just sounded pretty. Hannoura agrees. Grace then started undergoing the medical transition, with electrolysis and hormone replacement therapy. In the interview, she also brings up an interest in eventually getting plastic surgery, breast implants, and possibly a full sex reassignment surgery.

Grace’s decision to come out was widely supported, both within the music community and among her family, especially Hannoura and Grace’s mother. She informed her father of her decision, but the two have since stopped communicating.

The experience of transiting and living as a transgender woman make a huge impact on the band’s next releases. In 2013, Laura Jane Grace releases Against Me!’s next single by herself, titled True Trans, featuring two tracks, “FuckMyLife666” and “True Trans Soul Rebel,” both solo acoustic versions of songs that would later appear on the band’s next record, 2014’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues.

With both the single and the album, the band made a u-turn in production. According to an interview with Radio.com, Grace found there to be “Too many cooks in the kitchen,” in with Sire, with too many people trying to direct the band’s creativity. For the new record, the band ditched the big label approach for an independent, tight recording and production process.
“Knowing the personal subject matter that was going on with this record, I didn’t want to go into a studio that was filled with strangers and work out what I was working out, in front of them. I needed to build up walls,” Grace told Petra Davis in an interview for The Quietus.com.

No longer needing to vail the album’s true intention as a concept record about a transgender prostitute, she wanted the record to be as natural and uncut as it could be, and that’s exactly what came out.
“Probably 70% of the record was written before I had come out, and the other 30% afterwards. And initially, going into it, I was afraid of what I was talking about, yeah. And I tried in some ways to project into another character and disassociate myself from it, even though the lyrics were based on my life experience,” said Grace to Davis.

The example she uses is the second last track on the album, “Paralytic States.” The song was written on one of the hotel trips Grace took around the time of White Crosses. It’s put into third person, but it directly reflects Grace’s feelings and experiences at the time, from the description of the hotel and baths to the feelings of dysphoria. “She spent the last years of her life running from the boy she used to be,” Grace sings. “In her dysphoria’s affection, she still saw her mother’s son.” The chorus remains the most telling of all: “Never quite the woman that she wanted to be.”

The title track is a perfect example of a song about Grace’s experience transitioning. “Your tells are so obvious. Shoulders too broad for a girl. Keeps you reminded, helps you remember where you come from…You want them to see you like they see every other girl. They just see a faggot.”
Told from the perspective of a transgender prostitute, “True Trans Soul Rebel” is about the struggles faced by Grace and other transgender individuals, in this case those who have attempted suicide, which make up 41% of trans people. “Yet to be born, you’re already dead. Sleep with a gun beside you in bed. You follow it through to the obvious end. Slit your veins wide open, you bleed it out.”

Both “Dead Friend” and “Two Coffins” are about death, something that had consumed Grace’s thoughts through her time leading up to her transition, and the album’s centrepiece, “Fuckmylife666,” is about the way transitioning effected her relationships. In her interview with The Quietus.com, she said the song is about, “The worry of knowing that you are who you’ve always been, but other people are now seeing you in a different way, and worrying about the people you love, whether they’re going to continue to love you in the same way, or you know, the person that you’re attracted to, whether they’re going to continue to be attracted to you… it’s terrifying and there’ve been a lot of changes in my life that are heartbreaking, that have been a part of my transition.”

With six Against Me! albums, a solo record, plenty of singles and EPs and 17 years of music behind her, the only thing that hasn’t changed about Laura Jane Grace is her passion for the craft. Coming from a boy in Florida, singing folk punk anthems wherever he could, to a successful rockstar role model for transgender men and women. What the future holds for Laura Jane Grace isn’t clear, but whatever she faces, there’s no doubt she’ll be blazing a trail with the strength and character she always has.