Laura Jane Grace, the transgender singer of the punk band Against Me!, made headlines last month when she burned her birth certificate onstage in the middle of her band’s concert in North Carolina.
Protesting the state’s restrictive House Bill 2 legislation, which requires transgender people to use public bathrooms that correspond to the sex listed on their birth certificates, she smiled as the flames rose, declaring, “Goodbye, gender!”
[...] on Tuesday, June 14, when Grace stopped by Pandora’s Oakland headquarters for a fireside chat called “Pride Unplugged,” in front of a standing-room audience of the music-streaming service’s employees, the most pressing matter of conversation wasn’t her dramatic protest against the law.
Grace, 35, who transitioned from a man to a woman in 2012 after a decade of working tirelessly to assimilate into the tight-knit punk community, for once felt at a loss for words over the events that unfolded in the band’s native state.
“I think there’s no other way you can feel right now other than sadness and extreme grief,” she said to Colleen Finnegan, who is on Pandora’s employee experience team, in an exchange that was streamed to the company’s offices around the country.
Grace said that like many other people who make a living performing in public, she was already feeling vulnerable after the massacre at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in November.
Against Me! released its sixth and most recent album, “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” in 2014, just two years after Grace, who was formerly known as Tom Gabel, came out in the pages of Rolling Stone, saying she had been living with gender dysphoria throughout the band’s decade-plus of existence.
Because of this.
Grace now stars in the AOL Original series “True Trans,” which documents the lives of transgender people in their own words.
Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, and Against Me! will release another album.
