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Laura Jane Grace Announces Forthcoming Memoir, Tranny
Laura Jane Grace Announces Forthcoming Memoir, Tranny
The Against Me! singer's book will recount her transition and her struggles with dysphoria.
Laura Jane Grace has penned a memoir.
In a post on Instagram, the Against Me! singer announced that Hachette Books will publish her autobiography, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, November 15.
The book with will chronicle the transition of the singer, who came out as transgender in 2012 in an interview with Rolling Stone, as well as her struggle with dysphoria. It was "written with much help" from her band mate Dan Ozzi.
The Instagram image is of the book's cover art -- a black-and-white rendering of Grace's facial features designed by Christopher Norris.
A photo posted by Laura Jane Grace (@laurajanegrace) on
The book's title, Tranny, is a divisive word in the LGBT community, which some argue is a slur and others maintain is historical and empowering.
The topics within the memoir were also addressed in Grace's 2014 album Trangender Dysphoria Blues, which featured songs with titles like "True Trans Soul Rebel," "FUCKMYLIFE666," "Drinking With the Jocks," and "Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ."
The album, released on the band's own Total Treble record label, debuted at number 23 on the Billboard 200, marking the group's most successful launch.
Grace has long had a reputation for producing powerful, meaningful lyrics, but it wasn't until the release of Transgender Dysphoria Blues that she was able to address issues of gender identity so candidly.
"Spread out face down on those stained, cheap hotel sheets / she spent the last years of her life running from the boy she used to be / cut her face wide open, shaved the bone down, then pumped her lips up exaggerated, a fucked-up kind of feminine," Grace sings on the heart-wrenching "Paralytic States."
Later in the song, she sings, "Standing naked in front of that hotel bathroom mirror, in her dysphoria's reflection, she still saw her mother's son," and laments that the song's subject is "never quite the woman that she wanted to be."
Grace was named to The Advocate's 40 Under 40 list in 2014. Last year she made headlines for performing The Replacements' "Androgynous," which she sang alongside Miley Cyrus and Joan Jett.
