By Seth Sommerfeld
Music is humanity. Experiencing music provides a window to the beauty in the world and helps us sort through all our messy emotions — love, hate, bliss, sorrow, rage, sadness, humor, discomfort — in a cathartic way. Even when done in solitude, music creation offers a way for a person to unpack and work through the din of thoughts cluttering their own brains. Performers often take the stage as a way to feel connected to humanity via an empathetic bond — to prove they’re not the only ones feeling these soaring high and crushing lows.
Musicians can truly help people develop a worldview beyond the insular prism of self.
Laura Jane Grace did that for me.
I wasn’t a teenage anarchist, but as my years as a minor were drawing to a close I discovered Against Me!, the Floridian punk band that Grace fronted. As a pop punk kid, Against Me! felt like a wallop in the gut in the best way possible. Grace’s throat-shredding singing and ripping guitar work still carried a melodic underpinning under its wall of harsh noise, and the band’s beaten down, but not broken, underdog spirit shone through on the type of angrily empathetic and politically pissed off lyricism. The songs on Against Me!’s 2002 debut LP — the punk classic Reinventing Axl Rose — and the great albums that followed like The Eternal Cowboy, Searching for a Former Clarity and New Wave felt like anthemic calls to actually give a f—.
It wasn’t long before Against Me! ranked among my favorite bands. I converted my college roommate into a fan, and we’d bang out acoustic AM! covers in our dorm rooms. I stuck out like a sore thumb wearing my New Wave hoodie with its screaming panther logo walking around the nice boys and girls at my Jesuit university (I still wear the now-tattered garment to this day). As my travels took me elsewhere I took every chance to see Grace and Co. tear it up with their undeniably infectious frenetic energy: from sweltering garages in Montana and sun-baked parking lots in Denver to proper venues in Seattle, Toronto, Buffalo, Wyoming and more. To paraphrase Reinventing Axl Rose‚s title track, I wanted a band that played loud and hard every night, one that struck chords that cut like a knife, one whose shows felt like you could dance like no one was watching with one fist in the air. Against Me! was that band for me.
But all of that chaotic musical bliss wasn’t the main way Laura Jane Grace impacted my life.
In May 2012, Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman via an article in Rolling Stone. Grace shared her story, her fears and her truth in a time well before issues of trans rights became a national talking point.
And it kinda broke my brain.
I vividly recall sitting down to read the story in my Seattle abode and soon after discussing it with my roommate (the one I’d converted to an Against Me! fan all those years back). As a straight cis white dude who grew up in the relatively sheltered Montanian culture, I’d never actually thought about trans folks before. The mainstream pop culture only rarely ever mentioned trans folks, and when it did it was usually shrouded in camp (Rocky Horror Picture Show) or someone misusing the slur „tranny“ as an interchangeable term for any cross-dressing man.
My first instinctual reaction to reading about Grace coming out wasn’t some puritanical revulsion, more just a general ignorant shock. Boiled down my thoughts closer to something like, „Huh… huh… that’s really weird“ (not great!) and (very selfishly) „I hope this doesn’t mess up Against Me!’s music somehow.“
But it also wasn’t a news story that left my mind quickly. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s something I thought about every day over the next month, spinning around feelings of discomfort and understanding like mental Baoding balls. There was almost a forensic element, as many of the Against Me! songs that I loved but always felt slightly off like „Pretty Girls (The Mover)“ and „The Ocean“ suddenly made perfect sense in context of someone hiding their trans feelings under the crushing weight of gender dysmorphia (one of many new-to-me concepts I’d read up on).
After copious hours spent thinking about Grace’s transition, it became abundantly clear how I felt about it. On a personal level, I was just glad that a musician I adored could feel more comfortable in their own skin.
But on a more important level, it didn’t f—ing matter how I felt about it. It’s not my life, it’s hers. She wasn’t throwing herself into a category of folks seen as societal outcasts for attention or to hurt anyone. She was just a person trying to feel less internal mental anguish for merely existing.
That personal freedom led Grace to craft Against Me!’s monumental 2014 album Transgender Dysmorphia Blues. The album is a punk masterpiece, distilling the feelings of anxiety, longing, fear, and rage that trans folks are forced to live with on a daily basis, and turning it into an anthemic burst of rock grace. It’s not only one of the best and most critically acclaimed albums of the 2010s, but it’s also one that placed trans issues at least on the periphery of mainstream musical culture in an in-your-face and personal way that had really never really happened prior.
While Against Me! has been on hiatus ever since 2020, Grace has remained active as a solo artist putting out great records like Hole in My Head and Stay Alive, as well as albums with various bands sporting her name: from Laura Jane Grace & The Mississippi Medicals‘ Give an Inch to Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes‘ upcoming LP, Adventure Club.
But there’s still more to how Laura Jane Grace helped me.
In 2016, my sibling came to visit me in Seattle. Near the end of their visit, they wanted to have a conversation. After some nervous buildup on their end, they decided to come out to me as nonbinary.
To be honest, I kind of no sold their announcement. I almost didn’t even react. I just shrugged and told them that’s perfectly fine. As our conversation continued, I just let them know that I fully supported them and that how they identified didn’t change my love for them.
Exposure breeds understanding. It’s the reason bigots fear diverse hubs like major cities and college campuses and paint them as places of societal decay — they know that if you spend time with the folks they want you to fear, it will humanize them because you’ll realize that the faux boogeymen they claim are so dangerous are just people trying to live out their lives.
Getting that initial dose of trans culture via Laura Jane Grace dispelled any notion that trans folks were anything more than people just trying to be themselves. I made trans friends in the years that followed whom I cherish deeply. Not only do trans folks not negatively impact my life, they enrich it every day.
As my sibling slowly came out to other people, I was able to be there to comfort them at times when they ran into people who didn’t immediately accept their gender identity. I was able to hold them close through the moments of fear and tears.
As right-wing politicians around the globe have fabricated reasons for trans hate and made them tenets of their platforms over recent years (ignoring history to act like trans folks are new and discounting scientific research on the gender spectrum), it’s become a scarier world for all of my gender nonconforming friends and family. The only way to even begin to fight against the hate and ignorance is through radical empathy.
That empathy is easier when you’re willing to listen to trans folks‘ stories. That empathy is easier when you realize people are just trying to be themselves and nothing about that detracts from your own life. And that empathy is easier when you can experience a modicum of other people’s plights via their art and music.
Laura Jane Grace and other artists like her offer us all a chance to see a fuller world.
Choose empathy. ♦
Laura Jane Grace & The Mississippi Medicals, Rodeo Boys • Fri, April 25 at 8 pm • $30 • 21+ • The District Bar • 916 W. First Ave • sp.knittingfactory.com
The original print version of this article was headlined „True Trans Soul Rebel“
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