In 2012, Laura Jane Grace told a reporter something that she had been keeping secret her whole life. Two intensely anxious months later, the punk musician and lead singer of Against Me! came out to her fans and to the rest of the world as transgender in an article in Rolling Stone. By then, she had already talked about being transgender with her then-wife, Heather, and members of the band. Heather had greeted the news with immediate understanding and support, and her Against Me! bandmates responded with what Laura calls “the most comically awkward group hug, a horrible mess of pats on the back and overly extended stiff arms.” Her public coming-out culminated this past spring in burning her birth certificate onstage at a show in Durham, North Carolina, to protest the state’s exclusionary transgender bathroom laws.

In her new memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, which was released yesterday, Laura Jane Grace tells us the story of how a wily, anarchist kid from Florida became an activist, a parent, and one of the godfathers of punk. The book, which is co-written with Noisey’s Dan Ozzi, is full of cringingly funny moments, like the band’s awkward group hug, but it is also full of sweet, nostalgic musical moments, like the time Laura played the Replacements’ “Androgynous” onstage with Joan Jett, after which the two women got stoned and talked about gender. Underneath the humor and the musical camaraderie, there’s an enduring undercurrent of shame and the failures of a health system that is unfit to serve transgender people—even when they’re white and even when they have money.

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