Laura Jane Grace: “True Trans Soul Rebel”

Abstract

On a cold May night in Durham, North Carolina, Laura Jane Grace stepped out on stage to meet a roaring crowd in the tightly packed Motorco Music Hall. Pulling out her birth certificate emblazoned with her birth name, “Thomas James Gabel,” she raised the document high for all to see before defiantly lighting it on fire. As Grace waived out the smoldering paper, she shouted, “Goodbye gender!”

Long before either Grace’s coming out, or the release of Against Me!’s 2014 album, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the band has been reshaping contemporary conceptions of protest music. The punk group first rose to fame within their circles in the early 2000s, but have since experienced more widespread attention following Grace’s public transition. The singer has made no efforts to alter the sound of her deep, raspy shout, maintaining that, “this too is what a woman sounds like.”

Grace has been a pivotal figure in bridging the popular music scene to transgender equality issues. This piece discusses the artist’s construction of a trans-female identity in the punk community and in relation to the turbulent social-political climate faced by LGBTQ individuals. In exploring Grace’s gender nonconformity in a musical community dominated by masculinity, I consider cultural expectations of gender, performed both visually and aurally, and the ways in which Grace uses her stance as an empowered public female figure to transgress cultural expectations and draw large-scale awareness to contemporary human rights topics.