It’s an eventful year for Against Me! vocalist/guitarist and international trans-rights activist Laura Jane Grace, with the September release of Shape Shift with Me—Against Me!’s seventh studio album—and the November publication of her autobiography, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.
Grace is also slated to appear at this year’s Thinklandia, where she will be speaking about gender issues. Grace is no stranger to speaking about social and political issues and working in the activist community; having cut her teeth in the political punk rock scene, she’s most recently been working with New York-based Gender is Over.
“There’s this saying, I forget who said it, ‘Passion before practice.’ I definitely started out with a lot of passion, and then kind of learned how to do what I wanted to do along the way,” says Grace. “Oftentimes people will remark, ‘Oh, your voice has changed so much over the years,’ and it’s like, yeah, when I started doing this I didn’t know how to sing or anything, I was just going up to a microphone and screaming my head off, which isn’t a realistic thing to do night after night after night for 20 years; you’ll have no throat left.”
Grace says that about four years ago she decided to go back through all her old journals and start working on putting them together to create Tranny, co-written with Dan Ozzi.
“I’ve been an avid journal collector since I was about eight years old. About a year and a half ago, I started having my friend Dan help me out with that; it’s kind of an insurmountable task. When I went through and fully transcribed my journals, I had about a million and a half words. I had the problem of having too much stuff.”
Grace’s autobiography is unique among memoirs in that it’s a near-perfect recollection of her life, due to her constant journal-keeping since she was a young child.
“Yeah, I had some people kind of joke about it with me, that it’s kind of a cliché,” she says. “When most musicians decide they want to write something they have to struggle to remember things, whereas I just have perfectly kept records. If I was flying on a plane I wrote down what seat I was in; staying at a hotel, I’d write down the room number, what the room looked like, you know? I didn’t have to lean on memory too much; that was really important with the book, to represent how I felt at the time, and to not go back and qualify it with present-day reflections. My band has a long history and that’s all in the book, as well as a lot of my personal life, and the experience of what it was like being positive as a transgender person while playing in a punk rock band for 20 years.”
Grace’s work raising trans awareness helps to sheds light on a demographic which is so often misunderstood or the target of oppression. For anyone out there who feels like they are living a double life, is frightened, or is nervous about societal pressures, Grace says that it’s time to stand up for who you are.
“Fuck feeling like you’re asking for permission to be who you are or feeling like you’re apologizing for who you are,” she says. “Coming out to people can sometimes start to feel like that, and it’s important to not carry that weight. It’s all on the person you’re coming out with to be cool; it’s not about you. There is nothing wrong with you; if someone has a negative reaction, then there is something wrong with them.”
Thinklandia
Friday, September 9 to Tuesday, September 13
Various prices, Dockside Green
thinklandia.ca