Have you ever felt, in a brief yet overwhelming moment, that the life of a public figure has some message for you?
I normally feel kind of embarrassed when I feel an emotional attachment to a public figure. I’ve never been into celebrity culture, and oftentimes I feel like I’m on the outside looking in when people are celebrating or admonishing a public figure for doing this or that. The awkward part is that because of our societal structure, what these people do (or are reported to have done) admittedly has some effect on the wider population. If a celebrity wants to bring awareness to an issue, for example. At the same time, another part of me is certain that following these reported actions are for the most part inconsequential in terms of their intent. (The first example that comes to mind is Beyoncé’s celebrated clothing line and its sweatshop production — there’s reason for people to feel touched, confused, and/or repulsed at this scenario).
The public figure I want to talk about is Laura Jane Grace, the singer/songwriter of the punk rock band Against Me!.
I was in undergraduate school in North Florida when the band’s fourth album New Wave had come out. This was their first release on a major label. Why is this relevant? Most of my friends at the time were in the punk scene of Tallahassee where we went to college. Against Me! was, in a sense, the preeminent punk band for us, and their music was vital during our formative years in young adulthood, more so than I think we realized at the time.
Punk, at least as I experienced it, is driven by very strict values. Anti-capitalistic, primarily. Yet, intersectionality wasn’t fervent in the scene — there were wisps of it in the way people talked, but as one of the few black people in and around the scene, the feeling of how the majority white men interacted with sparse black presence said otherwise.
I never considered myself punk or an actual part of the scene. But because my friends were, I was always around it and grew to appreciate it. And we would listen to Against Me!’s first three albums and their EPs religiously. But around the time New Wave came out, punks were starting to have doubts about the band’s, and primarily Grace’s, integrity. This meant that when their second major label album White Crosses came out, there was an unspoken responsibility the punks had to be more critical of the band’s music. But the funny thing was, when you’re a fan of an artist and they’ve “sold out,” you can usually tell with a lot of certainty: their music changes drastically, their values become absent, the “product” might be well-made but the soul of it is gone. In our case, the fourth and fifth Against Me! albums were still amazing. The sound quality had improved because the band was able to record in studios versus DIY studios in people’s bedrooms, like my friends would do for their recordings. The folk punk of their earlier albums had shifted to more punk rock. And in Grace’s autobiography “Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout,” there are clearly more musical influences that Grace had besides the “lowest-fi” punk. Meaning, the evolutions expressed across nearly ten albums of Grace’s discography are more based in sincerity than not. But we were all hesitant to like the new albums immediately, especially White Crosses. (Which meant of course, that while at first it was daring and valorous of us to reject the album, shortly it became daring and valorous to say that you did like the album no matter what anyone else said — such is punk). Surprisingly though, my friend group was silent on one of the songs, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” a song with a cosmetic callback to a crowd-favorite punk ballad from their first album Reinventing Axl Rose, called “Baby, I’m an Anarchist.”
I remember listening to White Crosses privately. I remember liking it quite a bit. But the pressure to disown it and therefore the band was too strong for me at the time, so I listened to it once and then put it aside for years.
White Crosses came out in 2010. Two years later Grace publicly came out as transgender. The reaction to this in our friend group was revealing. We were stunned into silence. Grace was someone who led a band formed a mere two and a half hour drive away from us. My friends would drive down to Gainesville every year for the annual punk music festival called “The Fest.” This was someone who, after performing where we lived, was arrested on battery charges because the coffee shop next door to the venue were putting up protest signs calling Against Me! sellouts. (Her quote: “Why are you protesting me? Protest the fucking war!”) This was someone who my friends and I would anxiously wait each year to see if tensions had cooled down enough between Against Me! and the punk scenes in North and Central Florida for them to end up on the The Fest lineup.
In the moment of learning Grace had come out, the silence we all had told me this: all the posturing about whether she or the band had sold out and how that affected whether we listened to them anymore, etc., was suddenly simple bullshit. This was real. In 2012, the Netflix show Orange is the New Black hadn’t come out yet, introducing the world to Laverne Cox. Caitlyn Jenner wouldn’t come out publicly until three years later. Trans representation was hardly the “thing” it is now. So when Grace came out, we were bowled over by the reality of someone whose legend was as local as it was personal for us. And while we were stunned, we accepted it as real, despite none of us having a strong grasp on the concept of a gender spectrum at the time.*
Recently, Laura Jane Grace released a surprise solo, mostly acoustic, album called Stay Alive. I follow her on Instagram, so the next day I listened to her new album on my way to work. I hadn’t listened to any Against Me! songs probably since White Crosses came out. But listening to her voice again was so welcoming. It was better than nostalgia. It was as if she was telling me, “You couldn’t understand me back then, but you’re better able to now.”
For most of my life, I would almost never go back and listen to music that I used to like. I always found it embarrassing for myself. Not because there was anyone for me to impress, but because of an impossible standard I’ve put on myself for developing as a human being (whatever that’s supposed to mean). In the week or two before Stay Alive came out, I had slowly begun listening to favorite albums of mine from my teenage and college years. It’s still true that some I’ll never go back to, but it had already been feeling good to hear anew the songs and albums I used to listen to and search for life’s answers in religiously.
Listening to Stay Alive, then Against Me!’s sixth album, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, led me to return to all the other songs my friends I used to listen to and worship. It’s one thing to appreciate just how amazing of a songwriter Grace has always been, especially her penchant for great hooks and melodies — whether she was screaming at the top of her lungs near-incoherently in 2002 or singing at steady, higher pitch today. But it’s another thing to think about what I’m going through now — the reason for this blog — and see that all along there was someone in my actual vicinity, someone who’d given me so much meaning in my younger years, following a path I myself might take.
Part 2: Myself
When I first understood myself as nonbinary, I was still in the motions of feeling like I had to throw all of myself into the lowest common denominator narrative of how being trans is supposed to go. I had a strong urge to begin changing my appearance without knowing how or having a particular thing I wanted to change. So my first step was to do something that before all this I never would have done on purpose: I shaved my beard. It was a way of acknowledging that I am not completely masculine. In other words, it was a way of acknowledging that some part of me is feminine. I even equated it to, maybe hastily, the Buddhist monk practice of shaving one’s hair as a renouncement of seeking worldly status.
It’s been about two and half months since then. I don’t feel as frantic about needing to know my whole story and future right at this moment. And lately, I’ve been feeling as though cutting off my beard has been the first step where the second one doesn’t follow. Or hasn’t quite yet. In other words, I’ve had an agonizing feeling of inertia for about three months. There are still things I hope to find clarity about within myself and my sense of gender. There are still times when I feel truly “nonbinary;” times where I feel or picture myself as a woman; and times when I feel male — though I don’t know yet if that’s simply social conditioning or a sincere part of me.
I’m so, so scared of doing things the wrong way. But I’m thinking of letting my beard grow back for now. I know it’s a small thing. And I don’t really know if having a beard will cause me dysphoria. It’s just that when I began questioning, my reasons for always having had a beard didn’t make sense anymore; those reasons simply vanished. If I’m hard on myself, I’ll tell myself that I’m growing a beard because I’m giving up understanding myself and am too weak to make a difficult decision on a long process — which in all truthfulness would be the biggest thing (without caveat) I’ve ever done for myself. If I’m being kind to myself, I’ll tell myself that I’m letting my beard grow back again because I don’t have all the answers or certainty right now, and that’s okay. That by letting it grow I won’t always feel like I’m listening to a ticking clock counting down to no end. That it’s a way of giving myself a break and some time to breathe. A way of relieving some pressure. Who knows if I’m right? Maybe I am giving up in some partial way. But I do know that my life wouldn’t be mine if I were to stop searching for my sense of self.
*[As usual in our culture, a fringe figure will be the vanguard of a movement by taking the first bold step, and then be nearly written out of the story and forgotten by the cannibalistic nature of capitalistic opportunism. Basically, Grace deserves a lot more credit for current trans representation than she gets.]
