transgender dysphoria blues

TRANSGENDER DYSPHORIA BLUES
U.S. PRESS KIT
LABEL: TOTAL TREBLE
RELEASE DATE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2014
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MAGNET
About
A Girl
Laura Jane Grace
came from Naples,
F.L.A. DIY’d her
way across the
U.S.A. Plucked her
eyebrows on the
way, shaved her
legs, and then he
was a she. MAGNET
talks Transgender
Dysphoria Blues
with AGAINST
ME! frontwoman
Laura Jane Grace,
formerly known as
Tom Gabel.
story by
jonathan valania
photo by
drew reynolds
in 2012, tom gabel, the then 31-year-old
frontman for Florida-based million-dollar majorlabel punk band Against Me!, announced to the
world that he was transgender and had begun the process of transitioning into a woman. Tom Gabel was dead, long live Laura Jane
Grace. Grace tells MAGNET she knew, deep down, since the age of
that are still being answered. How would her wife, daughter, mother
understanding and supportive, but like her transition, it’s a work in
the triumphs and travails of the transition process on Against Me!’s
Transgender Dysphoria Blues.
MAGNET
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AGAINST ME!
Let’s start at the beginning. You’re born in
1980 in Fort Benning, Ga. Your father was a
West Point grad, and for the next 10 years
you lived the nomadic life of an Army brat.
{Laura Jane Grace}:
The first proper Against Me! album was called
Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose. Were
you just fucking with Axl Rose?
in rest stops for spare change. I was 18.
So, why Gainesville? We were both involved
with the radical activist network that was hap-
-
for that time in Cincinnati. We then moved to Fort
was Gainesville. I mean, Gainesville in general is
da. There are bands, there are record labels, and
more dangerous that I had ever heard than Appetite For Destruction. I remember hiding the tape
and the radical activist scene, which was all about
info shop called the Civic Media Center, and it’s
at that for a while, and then moved to Fort Leoninfo shop, and activist meeting place. So, that was
was happening there, and there was better oppor-
When did you discover punk rock?
the house in Fight Club
ed getting beat up a lot around that time, too. And
and bands like that, and to us, it seemed like the
message going with those bands was less of the
hippie message of “take the beating” and more of
a message of “at least throw some punches back
the utilities and rent and still have some drinking
So, where does the name Against Me! come
from?
sounds, it was about feeling like the world was
When did Against Me! start up?
-
Right, you against the world—that makes
sense. Eventually Against Me! evolves into
a proper band. You get James Bowman, who
you were friends with since growing back up
in Naples, correct? Yeah, then went on tour,
It was awesome: We had our own van with a loft,
them onto cassette tapes and stole photocopied
-
were driving back, we were just north of Atlanta,
and a semi-truck hit us from behind as we were
So, I set that one goal and accomplished that.
and our two left side tires blew out, so we rolled
set. So, we built this homemade drum set out of a
-
of pickle buckets. So, we just started jamming like
that, and recorded another 10-song demo tape like
of been with the band. He tore his ACL. That was
just gone.
head that I have to fucking work out. I don’t want her friends
to make fun of her. I don’t want her to be ashamed of me.”
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MAGNET
PHOTO BY RYAN RUSSELL
deconstructing the rock star, and like not seeing
the stage as a pedestal, and kind of seeing that
whole idea of music as full of shit. It was kind of
I watched the set and wished I hadn’t.
and were just gone all the time. There was a lot of
major-label interest that began to come about. We
were starting to take meetings, and it got fucking
How does the signing to Sire Records come
about?
-
all that great to make it work, and I didn’t want to
cess. After Reinventing Axl Rose, we did an album
called As The Eternal Cowboy, and we signed to Fat
-
MAGNET
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AGAINST ME!
whole life. There’s been
times when I’ve been able
cocaine abuse or alcoholism,
or I was on tour for 300
have time to think about
us taking the piss out of them and put it out on
DVD. And then we were like, “That’s the end of
that. We’re never going to get another major-label
deal after making fun of them.”
right about it. I didn’t want to do it at the time.
So, we just turned it all down. We ended up doSearching For A Former Clarity, and the A&R reps
came back with a vengeance. It was much more
-
Tom Gabel,
2008
He’s a rad dude.
How many different labels were courting you?
album for Sire in 2010, White Crosses, and
you’re about to go on tour … Well, it was a weird
to Sire for a million dollars.
from the record. We drove ourselves into the
Wow. Now, how did that work: You got a million dollars to make three records over a
certain period of time, or what? No, we got a
-
How did the record do?
million bucks to make one record. And then the
thing kind of going into it: We knew that it was
a little over half a million. The recording process
New Wave for me was just one of the
us, it was our highest-selling record. It sold more
were stoked. I don’t know where it’s at now, but
at the time, we sold like 100,000 records. We were
of the decision to sign with a major record label.
The recording process was rad, and then we did
a co-headlining tour with Mastodon, which was
MAGNET
That’s part of the settlement? You had to sign
a non-disclosure agreement?
mean that much.
So, let’s jump ahead. You record a second
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PHOTO BY CHRISTIAN LANTRY
nal factors hanging over our heads, and we were
just falling apart as a band, so we kind of went back
to Florida and regroup. We had to pull it together
as a band and make a record. So, White Crosses for
Enough to save our band out of the situation we
So, let’s talk about gender dysphoria. How old
were you when it started?
for some people it’s all the time. And the terms
won’t line up with the image of a male kid around
-
give into gender variant people that want things to
themselves gender variant. So, a lot of it is kind of
-
-
seeing Madonna on TV in some kind of performance and feeling self-recognition. Like, “That
is me. That is what I want to do. I want to be on
were kind of giving us the “You got some stink on
And then White Crosses
before it was supposed to come out. So, Warner
panicked, and I don’t even remember what their
stupid fucking plan was to release the record. So,
Rosemary’s Baby around
and rushed to get the record out, and pulled out all
So, there’s all these things that kind of hap-
You’ve been quoted as saying—and I’m paraphrasing—it’s not just that you feel like a
woman trapped in a man’s body; it’s more
complicated than that. Can you unpack that
a bit? I think it’s important to remember that
some bonus songs on a version of the CD, and
were just browbeating us about the artwork. It just
being a woman with a penis, and do not want to
compelled to dress in women’s clothing, I didn’t
we worked with. Like our whole team. Our A&R
people were gone. Our marketing people were
gone. Our publicist was gone. Radio department
that. It was just this thing that I felt like, “This is
for the reverse of that, with people that are male
transgender people that don’t have penises and
part of me.” It was like this thing that would build
we’re going to bring in the new team of people,”
but it could take months before that happens. Our
record was just dead in the water. We’re out on
tour and we have no support. No one is pushing
the record. We’re just screwed.
-
like, “We’re done. We’re so screwed. We’re fucked.
So, let’s just break up the band.” So, we broke up
done. Warner was cool enough to let us out of our
White Crosses
us ownership of the masters. No strings attached.
Nothing. Whatever. So, we ended up re-releasing
And that just kind of continued as I got older.
pot and doing acid, it was something that would
-
detach and tune out and become her, for the lack
of a better term.
was born with that’s there. Same with a woman
the blanket fort.
Explain to me the difference between transvestitism and transsexuality? Well, I guess it’s
Fast forward a bit. You regroup and start
working on what would become Transgender
Dysphoria Blues. When you started writing
the album, you told the band that you were
making a concept album about a transsexual
prostitute. Is that what the record turned out
to be, or is the record really more autobiographical?
-
How old were you the first time that you actually cross-dressed?
just about understanding that there are a whole
which is what governs, like, hormone replacement
Let me just take a moment here to express
my admiration for the courage it must take
to go through all this, and that my heart goes
out to transgender people everywhere. I can’t
think of a greater existential hell than feeling like you’re miscast in the play, as it were.
Is it just the act of expressing yourself as a
female—or cross-dressing—that makes you
feel more at home in your own skin? Feeling
like you are who you really are, that you’re
being true to your nature? Well, for me, I was in
life. There’s been times when I’ve been able to
treme cocaine abuse or alcoholism, or I was on
a front because I was uncomfortable with it obviBlues
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AGAINST ME!
and I just tell them I want to continue HRT, give
that I could just forget about it and fall into this
Reason number 7,631 to get the fuck out of
Florida. Is it true that when you were living in
Florida, there was a group of evangelicals that
prayed over your wife at Chick-fil-A because
they thought that she was a Satanist? Yeah.
For me, it was such a stress relief. I had the
like all these things, I have the satisfaction of walkI can now be me,” and I can turn this male role
There was a group of people in St. Augustine that
did do that.
when people use “he” to refer to you when
you were Tom Gabel, that it’s perfectly fine to
use male pronouns in those instances. Yeah.
some of the people who I know in the trans com-
guitar.” There’s a million pictures of me when I
was Tom Gabel. At the same time, if up to a point
I read somewhere that when you signed to
Sire Records, you threw out all of your women’s clothing and you were going to be done
with it because you were afraid that if you
were found out, it would somehow hurt your
career or the band. Is that true? Of course,
-
of focus in interviews. And I get that right now.
suppress the feelings for so long that it gets to this
How did you summon up the courage to tell
your wife? That must’ve been the hardest decision to make out of all of this. At the risk of
getting too personal, why did it happen when
it happened? Well, as I had said, I reached that
-
“I’m never going to do this again. I’m a man. This
is ridiculous behavior. I’m putting this behind me.
I’m moving on.”
not going to think about things, unless I feel the
know, it’s one of those things, that looking back
-
But you did drop little hints here and there in
your lyrics. And then you pretty much came
right out and said it in “The Ocean” with the
line that goes “If I could’ve chosen, I would’ve
been born a woman/My mother once told me
she would’ve named me Laura/I would grow
up to be strong and beautiful like her/One
day, I would find an honest man to make my
husband.” I don’t think you can get any more
explicit than that, and yet no one picked up on
this. Right. And on the last song on Searching For A
overcome something that was holding me back in
Former Clarity
secrets/Of dressing up in women’s clothes/Com-
euphoria is even greater than it was before. Like
standing onstage and singing a song that I wrote
-
real better phrase that I can sum it up with other
than being at this point and being like, “Fuck it.”
kinda came out of the other end of all that seven,
eight months later like, “Whoa. I cannot believe
that all just happened.”
one. Nothing. Never. I think people just thought
Can you walk me through the actual process
of transitioning from a man to a woman? The
first step is to get an endocrinologist to sign
off on it ...
In Florida, where I started to transition, I had to go
chotherapist to sign a letter that’ll allow an endocrinologist to start me on hormone replacement
and one option for an endocrinologist. I moved
to Chicago in August. Chicago is just informed
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MAGNET
whole band, singing that line about how if I could
have chosen I would have been born a woman, etc.,
-
I know it’s a very polarizing and divisive question as to which pronoun—he or she?—to use
when referring to transgendered people back
before they transitioned, but you don’t mind
And the outcome, which is well known at this
point, is that your wife was incredibly understanding, and that you guys are still together.
And you told your band; they stood by you.
And your mother was very supportive—well,
that’s not a surprise. Your mother always
loves you. If your mother is worth anything,
even if you kill someone, she still loves you. It
didn’t go so well with your father, and the last
I’d heard was that basically there’s been no
real communication between you guys after
you initially disclosed to him. Is that correct?
Yeah. I haven’t spoken to him since. It’s interest-
reassignment surgery or the transitioning
process? No. A lot of people end up going to plac-
Well, their action is anger because they feel
like they’ve been drawn into being homosexual, and in their mind they are so clearly
heterosexual-identified. Well, I think the thing
that people need to understand, though, is that
thing that most transgender people don’t have acHow about your daughter? How do you explain this to a three-year-old? Do you have
therapists who are kind of guiding you
through to deal with the transition and how
that affects the various relationships in your
life? Or are you just making it up as you go
along?
focus of interviews. Gender is not about genitals,
and to perpetuate that is a fucked up thing to do
-
still attracted to women.
Do you still identify as heterosexual? I guess
to women.
that just accepts gender variances, and accepts the
or something like that. So, it’s like I go to pick her
One of the biggest points of issue, and it’s such
a stupid fucking point of issue oftentimes, is the
bathroom situation. Of being stuck being in the
that, and I’m still at this point where, depending
We went through how most everyone reacted to this. The one constituency we haven’t
talked about is your fan base and Against
Me!’s audience. Tell me what the reaction
has been to your experience so far? Over-
to be people being supportive, but I’ve defi-
-
have been, and just how cool people have been.
You know, I got a letter not too long ago from a
transgender male who had been a fan of the band
are women, who are full-on women, other than
reach a point where that’s not the case, and it’s
head that I have to fucking work out. I don’t feel
-
And I know there will be points where she is like
fun of her. I don’t want her to be ashamed of me. A
It’s just this weird thing where, for some reason,
“We signed to Sire for a
million dollars. We got
a million bucks to make
one record. And the
about it with people. A friend of mine named Paris
do that. I have to have that. I can’t not have that.
-
that, but sometimes I get up onstage and people
Are you planning to have sexual reassignment surgery?
of interviews that I have to live in a place of, like,
“That’s a male, that’s a female, that’s a male, that’s
a female,” without even thinking about it. And to
challenge that fucks with people. It makes them
Cognitive dissonance makes people uncomfortable. I think almost everybody walks down
the street and says, “I’d fuck her. I wouldn’t
fuck him.” I think people instantaneously categorize, even if it’s only subliminal.
rected at female trans. It’s because most males are
over half a million.”
loved Against Me!, but to have this be something
that we shared the whole time, and to come out
vorite punk band to be trans-fronted means so
much to me.” And just hearing something like
that, where there’s people that were there all
has been coming out to Against Me! shows for
and knew she had a distinct look or whatever.
ing. She’s trans. That’s not the punk kid I used to
see at shows.” And feeling like this person looked
-
Does most medical insurance pay for sexual
there’s something that reads that, “Wait a second,
that’s not a woman,” or something like that, then
their action is anger.
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