In Conversation: Laura Jane Grace
Ten years after Transgender Dysphoria Blues, she has a new album, a new wife, and a new lease on life. Just don't call it "a happy ending." Laura Jane Grace is still thriving in the middle.
When Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman in Rolling Stone in 2012, it was the end of an excruciating period of suffering, self-loathing, and secrecy—many of the harsh details of which she shared in her 2016 memoir Tranny. But coming out in public sometimes means seeing your story reduced for public consumption; the demand for a “happy ending,” Laura says, persists in spite of the reality that coming out is more about the beginning of a new life than it is the end of an older one. Which is to say that, twelve years later, there are most likely sharper insights that have yet to be gleaned from the experience.
With the release of a new solo album, Hole In My Head, and the tenth anniversary of Transgender Dysphoria Blues, her landmark album with Against Me!, intersecting this year, it seemed like a good time to reflect on the chain of events that followed her coming out—as opposed to the well-documented events that preceded it—in addition to marking the personal and creative progress (as well as the setbacks) that she’s made in spite of it all. For her part, Laura arrived to this conversation with the same disarming honesty and acerbic wit that have guided her songs since 1997, when she first came onto the scene with an acoustic guitar and a six-song tape.
It’s difficult to believe that it’s been ten years since Transgender Dysphoria Blues came out, so I kind of wanted to start there. I remember reading an interview back then where you made this comment about “not having any trans friends” when you came out as trans—which means that you literally went from not having any trans friends to becoming a major public figure in the trans community in a matter of weeks or even days. How did you navigate becoming such a public figure for a community that you maybe didn’t have such a strong connection with yet?
LAURA: Well, I started writing that record the second I finished writing White Crosses. Like, literally, I wrote the song, “Paralytic States,” within a month after finishing mixing that record. At the time, I was living in L.A. and my daughter had just been born and I was in a really tough spot. The band was going through this terrible lawsuit, and it was just really low and miserable times. But I was writing in a way of like… not trying to out myself [as trans], but as an outlet to put my deepest secrets into it and to deal with what was really going on in my head because I had no one to talk to.
At first it was easy. I had this one song that was transgender-related. I could pass that off to the band. They’ll never notice because I’d already done it on a couple of records before. But after a while, with the stress level that I was under and with what I was going through, I just became unable to stop writing about what I was writing about. When the songs started to come together, it became more and more apparent. And as I accepted what I was going to go through and what I was going to do—that I was going to come out and that I was ready for that—these two things kind of fueled each other in positive ways. Until it came to actually recording it.
It’s hard to separate normal band drama shit and the particulars of my circumstances of coming out and going through this terrifying situation, but the band was really unstable at this point. Like, the drummer we were playing with at the time, I think I subconsciously knew I did not want to make a record with him. So I was kind of delaying stuff, and then I pushed things to a point where I exasperated Andrew [Seward] on bass, and he quit the band. Then the drummer quit. So the band was falling apart. By the time it came to tracking it in the studio, it was just me and James [Bowman], really. Atom [Willard] had come into the picture, but it wasn’t clear that Atom was going to be in the band yet.
I full-on had a nervous breakdown while we were tracking the record. I was going through some medical issues with my hormones, and it just kept getting worse and worse. My personal life was falling apart. We were hanging on by a thread to finish the record—and we did, in July [of 2013]. The release date was set for the end of January [of 2014], so in between July and January, my life continued to spiral. I moved from Florida to Chicago, my marriage just completely fell apart, and I was just in the darkest place for three or four months—until we left on tour. I will never forget that feeling of getting on the bus and leaving Chicago with a month of dates ahead of me. I was finally able to exhale. I felt that feeling of being surrounded by your friends and surrounded by your crew. And you have a mission, a focus that’s beyond you. There are these shows. And that just pulled me through.
On the one hand, it was great being surrounded by friends and playing shows. But on the other hand, there was the public pressure of being in the public eye and what that meant for my gender transition. And what that meant for what we’re talking about: I didn’t have any queer community. That’s not to say I didn’t know queer people or that I hadn’t met trans people, but I just didn’t have that kind of socialization. It’s kind of like feeling like you’re raised by wolves and then you have to adjust. You’re unlearning stuff while trying to accept things about yourself. You don’t have a map for gender transition. It’s one thing to come to the point where you’re like, “OK. I accept myself. I am transgender.” But just because you accept that doesn’t mean you know what to do next. And then being put in a position where you’re on a platform, and you kind of have to speak for people, and there’s all this pressure on you—it was a lot. It’s still a lot to this day. Even now, I kind of feel collapsed in it, you know? Like, burnt out on gender.
I think I get that. Like, what you did… well, I didn’t do that. I quit my band before I came out [as gay]. And part of the reason for that, I’d say now, is that I think I had this intuition that coming out wasn’t the end, right? I think a lot of people get to this place of coming out as queer or trans and they feel like, “Once I do this, the world will open up!” But it’s more like once you do it, you’re staring at a fucking group of broken pieces all around you, trying to put yourself back together, and trying to figure out what was real and what was not real. Who am I, really?
LAURA: Yes. Totally.
So I had this feeling, for me, that going through this in public could be an inhibition to getting there quicker. Did you feel that at all?
LAURA: Oh, totally. And I mean, ultimately, I don’t think it’s healthy to come out in the public eye like that. You should not do that, really! [laughs] But in a way, it’s almost like sobering up—where you can sober up and you may not be “fucked up” anymore, but you’re still fucked up. And then there’s all this work that needs to be done. One of my therapists told me, very early on, “You need to understand that the person you think you’re becoming is not who you’re going to be.” I think, subconsciously, I realized that before they said it, but that was what’s so ultimately terrifying. I realized that I had no idea what was about to happen, really.
That first year was the most intense year ever. It was overwhelming and terrifying and everything. But there were subsequent years that were even more overwhelming and terrifying. Even more change happened on emotional levels than what happened in that first year—and that first year was so overwhelming emotionally. I think it’s different for everybody. Everybody takes time to process things in their own ways. But when you’re doing that in the public eye, you aren’t able to process things in the healthiest ways because there’s that pressure.
The record was ultimately well-received, and I’m sure that must have put some sense of validation on everything you put into it and that entire experience. But I’m curious if you ever felt like the record was somehow also tied into the success of your coming out. I mean, this is a weird question, but did you think there was a chance that the record failing would somehow reflect poorly on you?
LAURA: I think that almost, in that way, I got lucky that I had a nervous breakdown because I wasn’t even thinking about it [laughs]. I had this ultimate sense of fuck-it abandon where I just didn’t care. I didn’t care what happened because I was at the edge of being like, “I want to die.” So anything after that was almost a bonus. But also, ultimately, I knew that I had put in the time songwriting-wise, to where I felt 100 percent certain that I had done my job—despite the fact that I was falling apart emotionally. But yeah, it almost would have been interesting if the record had flopped in that way, right? What then?
In some ways, choosing to break up my band over coming out while in the band was also me thinking that If I’m going to blow up our career, then I’d rather do it in a way where they’re just mad at me, period, and not mad at me for being gay.
LAURA: Well, let me ask you this though: Do you feel like before you came out that there were really negative things about yourself present inside of the band context because you were closeted? Because, for me, I felt like I was breaking up my band because I wasn’t accepting myself, and that coming out was actually trying to fix my band because there were so many negative aspects of my personality from being suppressed. Like, I was an asshole because I was fucking unhappy. But then after coming out and being able to accept myself… I’m not going to say I was, all of the sudden, all sunshine and roses, but I was definitely a way more adjusted person and easier to be around.
There were things in the past that no one could understand. Andrew, for instance, before we would go on stage, we would get in a little huddle and he would be like, “All right, boys! Let’s do it!” And my skin would crawl every time. I’d be pissed off at him and he didn’t know why, you know? But then afterwards, he was like, “Oh!”
That makes a lot of sense, and that’s probably something I didn’t have a lot of foresight about because I was just miserable. I remember the last tour we did, in 1997, I was in my bunk with the curtains drawn for like 80 percent of the day.
LAURA: I’ve done this! [laughs]
So I guess I’m sort of trying to figure out, for you, at what point do you shut the curtain? At what point do you say, “I don’t want to be in public for this part of my life?”
LAURA: Almost now, which I think is weird. Or at least I should have a couple of years ago. I did this Amazon Audible thing a couple of years ago, which was a retelling of my story and everything like that. I did it during the pandemic. And I was really pushing hard for it to be called “The Last Interview.” I was like, “That’s it. I’m done. I’m never doing another interview again.” In my mind, I flirt with that more and more: What if I just didn’t answer questions anymore?
But after things started rolling in 2014, and once I got on the road and started doing press, I kind of had fun with it, just because I had always been so miserable doing press previous to that. And I was in a position to realize that, “Oh. The right answer is the truth. Awesome.” It made me drop all inhibitions because all I had to do was answer every question truthfully and the interview was a success. That made it super easy.
One thing I feel like I’ve experienced as a queer person is this almost dissociative behavior stemming from growing up with a hatred for my queer body—which might be difficult for someone outside of that experience to understand. But over the years I’ve worked towards what I call “re-embodiment,” or realigning my sense of self with my body, and one thing that I’ve been surprised to find is that getting tattooed has been a part of that. It sort of forces me to feel completely inside of and aware of my body in a way that I don’t get very easily in other situations. I wanted to talk about your experience with tattooing, because clearly, you’ve really thrown yourself into it.
LAURA: Sure, yeah. I had been tattooed a bunch prior to 2013, when I had my nervous breakdown, but at the time, when that happened, I was told: “You need to find a different focus in life beyond your work.” So I was like, all right, tattooing. There were these two Japanese artists that were doing a guest spot at a shop in Chicago called Butterfat, so I booked an appointment with one of them, Kenji Alucky, to completely cover my feet. It was one day of tattooing, a break, and then another full day of tattooing. It was so brutally painful—like so brutally painful—on the heel of my foot and onto the pad, but I needed that. The pain felt good in that sort of masochistic way, right? So I’ve spent the last ten years just getting tattooed by those same two artists.
I don’t know how to describe it as far as, like, what it does for the feelings of dysphoria and dysmorphia other than that it made it better. Getting tattooed eases body dysmorphia and dysphoria for me. Looking down at my legs and seeing them almost completely blacked out, something about that just made me feel better. There’s a pain aspect to it, too, but I really compare it more to yoga—where it’s really about breathwork. It’s about focusing on your breath to get through a really long appointment. And if a tattoo artist is really good, they’re paying attention to your breath too because they don’t want to fuck up their line. When you lock into a rhythm with another person like that, and it’s going for an hour straight, it’s transcendental. You are both completely in your body and out of your body.
But similarly, I really like exercise too. I love running and I love going to the gym. Some of it is just scientific: You’re getting serotonin and you’re getting dopamine and that makes you feel better. It’s the same with tattooing. That pain releases endorphins, and scientifically speaking, your brain feels better.
This is a random observation, but before you came out, you had most of your right arm sleeved already and then you blacked it out later. I was curious if this was some kind of pre-transition arm response. Is there a connection?
LAURA: Honestly? Do you want to hear this story?
Yes!
LAURA: OK. I don’t know if you’ve seen the pictures of Machine Gun Kelly and his black tattoo?
I have [laughs].
LAURA: The artist who did that was the [tattooer] who started out on my arm blackout. What happened was that I had been getting tattooed by Gakkin, who was the second Japanese artist I was getting tattooed by, and he did my hands at this shop in San Francisco. It was a queer woman-owned shop, so I was like, this is rad. Rarely are you in a tattoo shop like that. They can be kind of macho dickhead environments, right? So after getting tattooed by [Gakkin] there, I booked a tattoo with the owner. They’re a big shit deal in the tattoo world. They’re the type of artist where they don’t want you to tell them what to tattoo; you either like their work or you don’t. You kind of give them a vague idea and then you go to them.
I had a Virgin Mary tattoo on that arm and I fucking hated it. I wanted that tattoo covered up. But I had the New Wave panther there also and I wanted to keep that. I had a bird here and I wanted to keep that, too. So I told them all this and went out to the shop, which is in the Tenderloin. I was walking to the shop and I saw a suicide jumper on the roof of a building—like, straight out of a movie, where there’s a cop trying to talk him down and a group of people down below. It shook me the fuck up, and that’s an understatement to say. But I still went into the shop, and I just sat down in the chair. They started tattooing, and they just tattooed over the tattoos I wanted to keep. And then they stopped halfway through and left me with half of a black arm. They were like, “Yeah, I’ll have Gakkin finish it up.” I was like, “Um, OK. Fuck.” So it wasn’t fully intentional to black out the arm. I like to think something like that happened to Machine Gun Kelly, too.
OK, wait. Let’s unpack that for a second because I feel like if someone tattooed me in a way that was not previously agreed upon, I would be fucking livid!
LAURA: Well how would you feel if after they did that to you, you watched them take a picture of your arm and then fill it in with Photoshop and post it on Instagram as if they tattooed your whole arm black? I bet you’d be pretty pissed off too. But that’s just hypothetically speaking [laughs].
OK, I wanted to move into this new album and this new era for you, and it’s funny because on one hand, you were just saying, “I’m done talking about this,” but on the other hand, transness is still very much present throughout this record. Which is interesting because, like, I remember a period of time in my life where I thought I felt tired of being “the gay guy” all the time, but at this point in my life, it’s something that I think is just really beautiful. I’d even say I feel blessed to be queer. So I don’t know if you’ve gotten to that place yet or if the public stuff has messed with you in a way where it’s hard to be grateful for exactly who you are.
LAURA: It can be. It can be, for sure. I still struggle with that stuff sometimes. A good example of that would be this charity event in January where I was kind of being a little brat. It was this ensemble cast of fucking amazing musicians and everyone played songs together for this epilepsy organization called Joey’s Song, and I found out at the last minute that the way they were dividing the show was like: There’s going to be the girls. And there’s going to be the boys. Just completely split into a binary, right? I was so pissed off going into it because I was like, “Fuck that. Please, can we just play? Please don’t divide it like that.” But it ended up being awesome. I had a great fucking time and I was so glad with the way it all worked out, but still, there was this level of going into it where it was like, I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want to have to think about gender and music. I want to be judged on the merit of songwriting and the merit of performance.
I think that, in some ways, there’s this other trap I sometimes feel with the way people talk about my music—the way they’ll review it by using that whole thing of it being “her most emotional work yet!” It just can’t get any more deeper after a point, you know? But that’s continually the headline. Feeling that, in order for an album to be well-received, it has to be deeper and more emotional—I don’t want to play that game. And feeling like people always want to tie it up into a happy ending. I feel continually trapped in this happy ending of like, “OK, you came out and now you’re happy. We’re done with you, goodbye.” Or, “OK, now you’re married. You’re happy. We’re done with you, goodbye” [laughs].
It’s frustrating because I get where that comes from. The idea of the “happy ending” is based on the idea that we, as the public, tend to respond to mostly linear stories. But life is not a story, or at least not in the same way that an author writes a story. Life is a bunch of zig-zags. It’s recursive. It’s forward, it’s backwards, it’s both. And there’s no way to really express that in a clean way, so for me, a story that feels too clean is a dishonest one. I like it messy.
LAURA: Same. And I don’t necessarily want to know “what it means” either. I bristle at that as well, being tasked with immediately having to explain something that you’ve done artistically. My least favorite part of making a record is the fucking bio. It’s the part of the music industry that I will be fully happy with AI replacing. Just let AI write that fucking bio [laughs].
You once said that you wanted to carry yourself through the world “looking like the type of person that someone wouldn’t want to fuck with.” That’s a very hard exterior! I’m wondering if you’ve softened your position on that at all.
LAURA: Yes and no. I mean, some of that is a utilitarian stance, right? I’ll pack a suitcase for tour and I’ll bring multiple changes of clothes, but oftentimes I’ll end up wearing the same shirt for a whole fucking tour and I’ll just change my jeans. It’s like, bring the thing that’s going to be warm, but also be comfortable if it’s cold. And then similarly, dress in a way where if you get arrested you’ll have something comfortable to wear to spend the night in jail [laughs]. But it’s also about being unassuming. Not wanting to be fucked with. Like, I don’t want to get mugged. So there’s that side of it, where it gives you that feeling of safety, but then on the flip of that, I will go into Target and security will follow me around the whole time like I’m going to steal something.
Part of it is a crutch. It totally is. It’s like wearing your safety blanket. There’s a song on the new album, “Dysphoria Hoodie,” that talks about that. There might as well have been a song called “Dysphoria Leather Jacket,” too. Because it wraps around you and it feels good and you feel comforted. It goes back to even talking about coming out in public as trans. It’s like, just because I came out, that doesn’t mean that I suddenly got over a lifelong repression over feeling shame for wearing a dress. I came out when I was 32 years old. That’s like 20-plus years of self-disgust. Just because Rolling Stone publishes an article about me doesn’t mean I suddenly feel good about myself feeling feminine. I have so much internalized transphobia that I’m still unpacking to this day. I wish I didn’t, but I do. That just a lifetime of being socialized in the ways that I was and dealing with a lifetime of self-hate, and it sucks. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers and it goes away, you know?
I think a lot of people forget this when we talk about the relationship between queer and trans folks, but my experience as a gay man was essentially a gendered experience. Being gay, at least for my generation, meant that my gender was in question. People were always like, “What are you, a girl?” I had a fear of being feminine, this fear of “being a girl.” So I can sort of relate that to what you’re saying because part of becoming myself was also unlearning that version of masculinity and being able to be as femme as I want to be, even as a cis male. That sort of fucking around with it, for me, is the future—where we can all just get into a place where we’re not performing anything and we’re literally just doing what’s natural to us.
LAURA: Right. That’s it right there: what’s natural to you in that way. And I think that’s the shame of it, too. At some point, it’s taught to you that aggression and screaming your fucking head off on stage, that those are male things. Those are things boys do in punk. But that’s not the case. Feeling those ways are not gendered things. It’s about unlearning that. If there is a woman singing in a hardcore band, then that woman is not “doing something that boys do.” They’re just doing something that comes naturally to them, and it feels fucking good, and it’s a release. And the flip of that is also unlearning the idea that softness is an exclusively feminine trait. It can be very masculine to play music in a soft, subdued, quiet way, too.
OK, so obviously, the big news is that you got married last year. Congrats.
LAURA: Yes! Thanks.
You’ve been married before, but this is the first time you’ve entered into this situation being out and living fully in your truth, as they say. That “big secret” isn’t there anymore. Do you feel the difference?
LAURA: Well, you know, there was a decade-long gap between my last marriage and this one—or maybe more than that, like twelve years. But right after my previous marriage ended, the first time someone had a crush on me and it was vocalized, it was a revelatory feeling to me. It was like, “Oh my God. You like me. Me. Not who you think I am, but me. You know all there is to know. I don’t have any secrets. You like me”—and that was an incredible feeling. So to be married now, and to have another shot at that, but to know that you don’t have those things that fucked you up in the past as an issue is pretty fucking awesome.
You finished this new record before your relationship began. I’m curious if there’s already something on the record that you look back on now and think, “Oh shit. That’s completely irrelevant. I don’t want to sing that.”
LAURA: I think it would have been the same regardless, especially given the amount of time between when it was finished being recorded, in February 2023, and when it was released, in February 2024, right? That period of time between finishing a record and having it released is the worst. You’re stuck in this limbo. So to have a full year in between, even if I wouldn’t have met Paris [Campbell] and gotten married, it would still be tough to re-tap into where I was emotionally when I was recording it.
But also, it’s been really cool. Like one of the aspects of me and Paris’s relationship is that we immediately started making music together. We got married on December 18, and months prior to even meeting, I had booked studio time in Mississippi. I didn’t want to cancel the studio time so I just told her, “Well, you’re coming with me.” Then we got to the studio and I was like, “Do you want to sing, too? Let’s just do this.” And then we ended up recording a six-song EP—me, Paris, Matt [Patton], and Mikey Erg, who’s out playing drums with me on this tour. It was fucking awesome. It came out so good. So to have that be an aspect of a relationship—just being able to play music with a partner and to sing with a partner—that’s something I’ve never had before.
A little earlier you talked about “happy endings,” and I swear I’m not trying to call you out with this, but I’ve been doing some research and reading a number of interviews from the last ten years, and it feels like every other year or so, you make a public statement about how you’re happier than you’ve ever been.
LAURA: Wait, do I make that statement or do other people make that statement for me?
You make that statement. And I was like, wow! That’s some exponential happiness right there! [laughs] So we know the broad strokes of your story, some of which we talked about today. But before we end, can you think of something more seemingly inconsequential that you do that you think might illustrate your current state of happiness?
LAURA: That’s really interesting. This is not an easy question. [Pauses] The first thing that comes to mind is a really weird thing, but… I feel like my digestive tract works better. I just have a way more settled stomach. I don’t know how to explain that? This is so dumb, but there’s just way less gas [laughs]. So the action, then, would be what I’m eating or the way I’m eating it, which to me, would be indicative that I’m eating in a healthier way—either in my actual diet or in how I eat. It’s just better. I don’t even know what I’m doing that’s causing it specifically, other than I notice it.
I mean, that is weird, but it’s real [laughs]. Do you think that it might come from feeling like you have more of a responsibility to take care of yourself now that you’re married?
LAURA: I know I should feel that way, but I think that what’s cooler is that I came into this relationship already taking really good care of myself. I was at a point where, from a health standpoint, I was the healthiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, and I was feeling like I only wanted to continue that. What’s cooler, I think, is coming into this relationship and not feeling the opposite.
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This was such a great piece, thank you for putting it out there. With everything going on in the world today, seeing this interview reminded me that while we are much more accepting these days, even forward-thinking communities like hardcore and punk still have a ways to go. Example: the transphobic rhetoric spewed by people like John Joseph and even the transphobic attacks from Mina Caputo to not just the LGBTQIA+ community but to Laura herself last year.
Thank you for all the great work you’re doing Norman. I still have my original issues of Anti-Matter so it’s amazing to see that you’ve brought it back in such a meaningful way!
Wait...a six song EP?
Wonderful interview. Thanks. I was really struck by the "her most emotional work yet" cycle. I wonder what other artists are held to that unfair standard/expectation. That has given me pause.