Max Reviews: Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout – Laura Jane Grace

Growing up, I was a huge fan of the pseudo-punk bands that ruled the Warped Tour circuit. I was also a closetted nonbinary person. Naturally, Laura Jane Grace, frontwoman of Against Me!, was an inspiration to my high-school aged self when she came out as transgender in 2012. In 2016, she released a tell-all memoir titled, Tranny: Confessions Of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, which I just got around to reading. The memoir is based heavily on her journal entries, which she had been writing in since third grade, and holds back nothing. She is incredibly open and honest with her experiences as a transgender woman, struggling with dysphoria and shame throughout her youth, coping with sex, violence, and drugs. She also gives us a lot of details about her entry into the anarchist punk scene, Against Me!’s journey as a band, and the punk scene’s ever-changing opinion of both Against Me! and Laura Jane herself. What really shines through in this memoir is the honesty in which Laura Jane expresses her gender dysphoria and the ways in which she tried to cope with it or ignore it before embracing her gender and coming out fully. And Laura is also courageously honest about the result of coming out publicly. The memoir ends on a hopeful note, but she is candid about the struggles of early-transition: transphobic psychiatrists and legal regulations, access-barriers for HRT, poor reactions to HRT, the shifts and changes in interpersonal relationship after coming out, pressures to conform to a binary view of gender as a trans woman, and the “mandatory happiness” (as she puts it) of newly out trans people. If you’re looking for an intimate exploration of gender and personal identity (or some nostalgia for the early aughts-2010s punk scene), this memoir is definitely worth a read.