Trans Punk Singer Writes About Her First Year as a Woman

Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace penned a pretty incredible personal essay for Cosmopolitan detailing the changes in her life in the year since she came out to her family as trans.

“Can we talk?” I asked my wife, Heather [Hannoura], on February 6, 2012, three days before her birthday. Maybe this wasn’t the best timing, but I couldn’t wait any longer. The pressure that had built up inside me for 31 years was about to burst. We lay down on our bed, Evelyn, our 3-year-old, napping in the other room, and looking into my wife’s beautiful brown eyes, I made my confession: “I’m a transsexual.” I buried my head into her chest and explained that this was something I’d been struggling with all my life. I wasn’t sure how Heather would take it. She said something like “That’s all you were going to tell me?” She later told me she thought I was going to say I had cheated on her or wanted a divorce—which she said would have been worse for her. She told me at that moment—and kept telling me—that she wasn’t going anywhere.

In the Cosmo piece, Grace goes on to talk about the reactions from her bandmates and daughter, the realities of sex, hormone replacement therapy and surgery, and the long tradition of rock and pop artists “blurring gender lines.” Grace seems committed to be open about her life and to being out as trans. And good for her. There’s power in visibility.

In an accompanying interview, Hannoura tells her side of the story. “Laura’s coming out,” she says, “has made me realize, in regard to my own sexuality and ideas about gender, that it’s all more fluid than how society presents it. I’d always thought I was just straight. But now I know that really the right girl hadn’t come along yet. It’s exciting to know that I am still evolving.”