“It’s about me, and how I’m a transsexual. This is something I’ve been dealing with for a long time,” I told them. Once I started explaining it, I couldn’t stop. It was like an out-of-body experience where I saw myself, but was powerless to hold back the flood of words. “I want to start living as a woman, and to be referred to as Laura. This is something I’ve thought about a lot and isn’t going away, so I might as well embrace it.”
No one knew what to say once I finally stopped rambling. The three of them just sat there in the studio control room, looking down at their feet or at whatever lit-up piece of audio equipment their eyes could find, focusing anywhere but on me. We’d had some heavy conversations over the years—emotional moments where we’d told each other off or outright quit the band—but nothing compared to this. Andrew’s usually warm smile was locked in since I started talking, and it looked like it was going to melt off his face. His skin flushed red, trying not to flinch. There was nothing any of them could say. I broke the silence by asking them to come smoke a joint with me. We got high standing in a circle in the open back doorway. “OK, well,” I said. “I guess that’s all we’ll do today. How about we try again tomorrow?”
We shared the most comically awkward group hug, a horrible mess of pats on the back and overly extended stiff arms. They left, and I locked the door behind them. Oh fuck, I thought. I called Heather and told her that I had just come out to them. It felt unreal to speak these secrets aloud, hearing myself verbalize thoughts that had only ever existed in my head.
The guys had an hour and a half back to Gainesville to think about all that had just been unloaded on them. James has since told me that as he sat there stoned on that long drive home, a lot of memories over the past 15 years suddenly started to make sense for him. My lyrics, my behavior on tour; one by one, he had tiny flashes of realization about me in this new light.
Like Heather, the band took in this information without fully understanding its immediate implications. Hell, I was still wrapping my brain around the implications, and was basing my knowledge of what would come next from what I had researched online.
I knew I wanted to start hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, so that my physical changes would match the mental ones. But now I was desperate for it. I also knew that to gain access to these hormones, I needed a letter of approval from a doctor, confirming my mental clarity that I was “true trans.” The only other option was buying them on the black market on the internet, which I had also considered. I found a counselor in Gainesville, one of two options that came up when searching for “North Florida gender therapist.” The first number I called was a disconnected line. The second was answered by a human voice. I had to come out to the stranger on the other end of the line, explaining on the spot that I was seeking access to hormones. I needed to make sure this was a service they could actually provide, and they could.
After making the appointment, I asked Jordan to connect me with the band’s publicists, Ken Weinstein and Tito Belis at Big Hassle Media. The three of us got on a conference call and I dumped everything on them at once—I was a transsexual, I planned on transitioning genders, and I would assume a new name. I would soon be Against Me!’s frontwoman, and needed to figure out a strategy to put this information into the public. I don’t know what they expected the call to be about, but it certainly wasn’t that. After I finished, I heard nothing on the other end for a few seconds until Ken jumped in. “Um… well. OK, this sounds good, Tom,” he said. “I think that… let me… give us a few minutes to think on this and we’ll call you back.” We hung up, and I can’t imagine the conversation the two had after that.
True to his word, Ken came back with an idea. He was friends with a writer at Rolling Stone whom he greatly trusted, and suggested a plan for me to come out to the world via a feature in the magazine. It would be tasteful and sensitive, and require several interviews and a photo shoot. I agreed, and he went about making the arrangements.
I liked the Rolling Stone plan because it meant talking to one person and would be easier than having a thousand private conversations with everyone I knew. But it created new pressure for me and complicated matters with the counselor. The purpose of my session with him was to prove I was of a reasonable mind to fully grasp the implications of transitioning. But explaining myself in his office during that first meeting, I could hear how questionable my sanity must have sounded.
“Look,” I started, “I’m married, I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. I’m a musician, and I play in a band for a living. I’m going to publicly come out as transgender soon in Rolling Stone magazine. In May, we’re leaving on a month-long tour of the U.S., followed by a month and a half of international touring. If this was the way I felt when I was 8, and the way I felt when I was 13, and the way I felt when I was 15, and the way I felt when I was 20, 25, 28, and still now at 31, then this is going to be the way I’m going to feel forever. I want to transition into living my life as a woman, and I need access to hormone replacement therapy.”
The doctor looked at me curiously and wrote something down on his clipboard. I could tell he thought I was crazy. I had read online that doctors are often reluctant to prescribe hormones and might even try to talk me out of it. You had to be direct and insistent from the start that this was what you were sure you wanted; not what you thought you may want. It took a while just to convince him of the reality of the situation—that I had a small level of celebrity fronting a popular band, and that an interview about my dysphoria with the biggest music publication in the world was in the works. “So I need you to write me a prescription for HRT,” I repeated firmly, trying to demonstrate that I had done my homework. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I would need to come in for regular appointments.
As I continued to wait for the doctor to declare me sane enough to start HRT, I jumped on the Revival Tour, a traveling folk-punk show led by Hot Water Music frontman Chuck Ragan. The show included a rotating ensemble of musicians playing and collaborating on acoustic sets, all traveling from city to city in the same bus. In addition to Chuck and myself, this iteration also featured Dan Andriano from Alkaline Trio, Cory Branan, and Nathaniel Rateliff.
The Revival Tour has a reputation for being something of a manly event, due in part to its flannel-clad ringleader. Chuck is legendary in the punk scene not only for his time in Hot Water Music, but for his famously thick beard, gravelly voice, and rugged outdoorsmanship. As we traveled the country, Chuck would go fishing during the morning, and after the show he’d scale whatever he caught right there in the bus’s sink. Sometimes he would kick off his boots and keep his fish in his bunk with him while he slept. Meanwhile, I’d be two bunks over, reading The Whipping Girl, a trans rights manifesto and book of reflections on society’s views of trans women by transsexual author Julia Serano. I had never even considered this position: demanding to be respected as a trans person, to have pride in myself, and to stand up and be visible. Self-empowerment through gender identity. This book meant hope for me.
I bonded with Cory Branan on the tour. Also a father, he and I spent our nights talking about the struggles of touring when you’ve got a kid back home. He mentioned that he had a little girl with a woman he met on the road that he tried to see when he could. We showed each other photos of our daughters. I asked what his girl’s name was.
“She’s my little Jane,” he said in his Mississippi accent.
I liked it. I had told Heather and the band I wanted to be called Laura, after my great-grandmother; the name my mother always told me she would’ve named me if I were born a girl. I also had the idea to take my mother’s maiden name, Grace, in place of Gabel. And now I’d found a middle name: Laura Jane Grace.
When the Revival Tour ended, I did a quick run of solo shows in Europe. This limbo phase before my announcement was a liberating time. I knew that nothing I was saying or doing at the moment mattered in comparison to what the world was about to learn about me. The venues we were playing reached out in advan
ce to ask me to do interviews with local press outlets to promote the shows. I turned them all down, telling them I was only doing one interview at the moment, and that they would see it soon enough.
After two months of meetings with the psychotherapist, he asked me to bring Heather in for private questioning about whether or not she was comfortable with her husband transitioning. She was asked repeatedly, both in our couples sessions and in her one-on-one meetings, and she remained adamant that she was supportive of this change. He also had to meet and observe Evelyn to assure that she was a healthy child, and that she and I had a strong relationship. In my one-on-one sessions with him, he would hold up a full-length mirror without explaining why; just letting me talk into my own reflection. Maybe I was supposed to see a new version of myself emerge from our discussion, or maybe it was just to shame me into changing my mind. I went in for half a dozen visits, each one a thoroughly demoralizing experience, all for something as simple as a signature on a piece of paper from a person declaring that I had the right to change my own body. I wondered if he would do research on me and read my lyrics, finding a long history of arrests, lawsuits, and drug use.
This process would not be instantaneous, he told me, and would take two to three more months of evaluation. In that interim, Josh Eells came to Saint Augustine to interview me for the May 24, 2012, issue of Rolling Stone. We first had a chat at my favorite taco truck in town, and then headed out to the studio to continue talking. Josh asked me every question he could think of, starting at the beginning—when I first experienced dysphoria, how it had affected me during adolescence, how it led me to band life.
“Was punk rock used as an armor of sorts?” he asked. Of course it was. I might not have been able to express my gender outwardly in the way I wanted to, but at least spiking out my hair and wearing leather jackets spray-painted with political slogans was some sort of expression. While we talked, I could tell that he was looking for the femininity hidden somewhere in me, perhaps behind my eyes or under my voice.
On the second day, Heather and Josh met for her portion of the interview, during which he asked her questions about things she was still uncertain about—correct pronoun usage, the possibility of surgeries, and the one that would come to plague her in interviews: the implication about her own sexuality.
“I mean, does this mean I’m a lesbian now?” she pondered aloud at one point.
For our next scheduled talk, I told him to meet me at the studio, but this time I planned on surprising him by greeting him in full femme. As I walked through the house to exit through the rear door that evening to meet him, donning a wig, makeup, and breast inserts tucked into the bra underneath my dress, I caught eyes with Evelyn, who was sitting on the couch. I could see the confusion on her face. Something was different. Her daddy was dressed like a woman, and she was trying to understand why.
If Josh experienced any shock about seeing me in a dress, he didn’t let on, but he suddenly had a lot more questions to ask. Echo & the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain was playing in the background as the interview progressed, and it must have looped five times as we went back and forth.
Cass Bird was the photographer assigned to take photos of me at home. She has an impressive resume and has made many high-profile celebrities from Salma Hayek to Claire Danes look sexy on the covers of publications like T: The New York Times Style Magazine. But I didn’t feel very sexy. Cass did a great job and I knew I was in good hands, but overall, the experience was awkward and emasculating, having a photographer trying to capture the femininity in me that I had yet to see. She and her assistant tried shooting in various locations around the house, and then suggested we take photos outside on the marsh. I stepped out of my jeans and long black shirt as she shot me practically naked, rolling around in the sand. The ocean wind blew my chin-length hair back, revealing a receding hairline.
My body was covered in sand by the time we got back in the house, so I jumped in the shower to wash it off. When I emerged from the bathroom, with one towel wrapped around my torso at the chest and another wrapped around my head, Cass stopped me. “That’s it,” she said. I sat on the couch by the window as she captured me like that, fresh out of the shower.
With every flash of the camera, Heather standing there watching, I felt my male ego being cut down to size bit by bit. “OK, now keep your head straight but look out the window,” Cass instructed. While I stared, sensing her lens focusing on my damp body, I thought about all the photo shoots I’d done in my life, and what an arrogant prick I’d been through them. I crossed my smooth-shaven legs on top of each other, and felt the shame. I supposed this was my payback for those times.
A few nights later, I was putting Evelyn to bed. As I pulled the covers over her, she put her hand on my forearm.
“Daddy?” she said.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“I don’t want you to be a girl, OK? I want you to be a boy again.”
“Well,” I said, fighting against the tears welling up in my eyes, “no matter if I’m a boy or a girl, I will always love you, and I will always be your daddy. Nothing will ever change that.”
I waited for her to fall asleep before letting my heart shatter into a million pieces. I sat over her by the glow of her nightlight, crying, and imagining the pain she would experience throughout her life because of my transition. I pictured all the kids who would ridicule her for having a father who picked her up from school in a dress, and how much that would strain her relationship with me. Maybe one day in the future she wouldn’t want to call me “Daddy” anymore, and maybe that would even be a positive change for my dysphoria. But goddammit, she would always be my daughter, and I would always be her father. It made me think of my own father, and how I didn’t plan on telling him about my transition, but would let him find out by reading the article. I wanted to call him, but lacked the courage.
How do you tell a father that you no longer want to wear the name he passed down to you? How could I explain that as a son, I had always felt so desperate for his love and affection, and how much it would mean to be loved and accepted as his daughter? I knew the adrenaline would cloud my focus and the words would come out wrong.
I went to visit my mother in Naples for a weekend, staying in my teenage bedroom, the room where I’d had so many early experiences of dysphoria. It had long since been redecorated, but I still felt at home in it. For two days I avoided coming out to her, instead letting it weigh on me the whole trip. I left without saying anything. Once back in Saint Augustine, I called her and came out with it. We talked for almost two hours, mostly in long, quiet stretches where I could hear it settling in with her, and how much of it explained my teenage years.
“What about you and Heather?” she asked.
“We’re staying together. We’re going to try to make it work.”
“And Evelyn?”
“I think it’s better to do this now, while she’s still young.”
“What about the band?”
“I don’t know. I want to keep playing music. I think this may even be what we need.”
“Are you sure?” she kept asking.
“Yes, Mom.”
She told me she loved me and we hung up. She may not have understood everything I’d said, but just like when I was a teenager and she bailed me out of jail, she continued to have my back, always.
I came out to my brother over the phone as well. I just called him up and told him very matter-of-factly that I was a transsexual, giving him the short version of what I’d just told our mother, and that was about it. I did my best to play it down and make it a casual conversation. I’m not sure he fully understood what I was saying.
“I love you no matter what,” he finally said. “You’ll always be my brother.”
I wanted to tell him that he’d have to start thinking of me as his sister, but instead we ended the call. One step at a time.
Whenever I came out to people, there was a feeling that I was asking for their permission, or their forgivene
ss. This was something that seemed instilled in me from feeling belittled by doctors. I was growing more and more frustrated with the psychotherapist and driving an hour and a half every week between Saint Augustine and Gainesville for our appointments. My gender was constantly on trial. I was being treated like a child, back to being a teenager again, trying to justify myself to an authority figure. He wanted to see “proof.” I’d show up for the session and he would ask, “So when are you going to start dressing like a woman?” My heart would sink.
“These are women’s jeans, this is a woman’s shirt. I can’t make my hair grow any faster!” I wanted to shout back, but couldn’t because I would blow my chances of getting hormones. It was absurd that he thought that just because I wanted to be a woman, that I no longer wanted to wear black clothing and would adopt perfume and frilly dresses.
Then it finally clicked for me. The therapist just wanted to see me in a wig, mascara, and high heels. He needed to see what he thought a woman should look like, and his idea of femininity. So at our next meeting, I did just that. I played his game, showing up wearing an A-line dress from the Gap and high heels. He immediately wrote me my letter and referred me to an endocrinologist. Simple as that.
I started undergoing electrolysis sessions, too, getting the hair lasered off my face. The people who performed the removals were used to catering to affluent Republican housewives who wanted their legs and bikini zones clean and tidy for beach visits, and were clearly not used to removing beards for someone transitioning genders.
I didn’t even bother telling them my name was Laura. The debit cards I paid with and receipts I signed all still said “Thomas Gabel.” I offered no explanation as to why I was using their service, and resigned myself to letting them think whatever they wanted. I’d simply tell them where I wanted to be zapped, and lie back in the chair. After an hour of lasering, my face was left swollen and red. The beard shadow loss was minimal and gradual with each visit.
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