Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist SellOut

Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi

Four years ago, the leader of the successful punk band Against Me! came out as a transgendered person in Rolling Stone. Yet only in her full memoir does Laura Jane Grace reveal the layered meanings, and the unresolved ache, behind her long quest for self-acceptance. Grace communicates it most poignantly in pages included from the diaries she kept that date back to her days as a closeted teen outcast in the backwater suburbs of Gainesville, Florida in the late ’90s. Raised as Thomas James Gable in a military family, the artist faced confusion, depression and shame. The enormity of Grace’s burden in coming out to her fans, her band, and to the wife and child she lived with while presenting as a man, proves an often agonising read. In detailing what it took to make those steps, Tranny offers a poignant profile in courage. Jim Farber