HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Transgender Dysphoria Blues – Against Me!
In May 2012, Laura Jane Grace first announced to the world she was a transgender woman. After establishing herself as an unapologetic anarchist in the rock world with AGAINST ME!, it took a chance encounter with a transgender fan to finally give her the confidence to begin living as her true and real self. Someone she was wishing to be since her childhood.
As someone who always shows her honest feelings and uncensored emotions through her medium, Grace went straight to work on a brand new record. After years of ups and downs, and scrapping an almost complete album in the middle of it all, AGAINST ME! finally announced what is considered their greatest release to date. The record that shows more of Grace than ever before. This was the birth of Transgender Dysphoria Blues (2014).
A record that looks and sounds like any other from AGAINST ME!’s discography: it’s rough, it’s real, and the lyrics jump out as far as Grace can blast them with her rowdy voice. A voice one only learns to utilise in the face of fear and discrimination. But there was a secret special ingredient in there. One that may be unnoticeable to an everyday punk rock listener. That one ingredient is authenticity.
With support of her bandmates, Grace could finally make a record that shows every thought and feeling that’s been rocking her brain from her childhood to this point. The words and the sensations that she always locked away and never gave any attention to; the feelings she distracted herself from with music, art, and family life, until now. She doesn’t shy away at all in this record, bringing to light not only her long-term experience with gender dysphoria and transitioning, but how she is now viewing other aspects of her life.
The title track is a despairing poem about living as a transgender person in a less-than-forgiving world; Two Coffins is about holding dear the moments and memories of loved ones, inspired by Grace’s daughter; and the album’s closer Black Me Out is one of the rawest songs fuelled with anger of one being forced into a characterisation that does not fit them and demanding to be erased from these people’s lives. Every song takes a real element in life and shows it for how it is: disruptive, loud, and honestly hardcore to the point of making life feel like a chore rather than a gift from an unknown force of nature that should be lived freely and acceptably.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues as a piece of art is one that speaks to the trans community at large. Many in the rock scene praise it for being that open book that gave them either a new and informed view of transgender individuals, or for giving them the strength and courage to come out as trans themselves. It was a pivotal record in the scene, and although on the surface a 10-track autobiography of Grace’s lowest moments through her journey of self-discovery as a transgender woman, it is the story of thousands around the world. Thousands who have felt out of place in the world; who have lost faith in humanity around them; who have become confused by floods of feelings with no solution in sight. It stands as the proof that there are answers out there, there are good times in the bad and there are happy endings after all.
10 years on, and transgender rights are still yet to be achieved around the world. There are still struggles and the community is still targeted with verbal, physical and sexual abuse regularly. Acceptance has taken steps forwards but leaps backwards, and the teetering is a matter of life and death for these people. Society will shift, change will come, but until then, they will still be playing the Transgender Dysphoria Blues.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues was originally released on January 21 2014 via Xtra Mile Recordings.
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