North Florida’s resources for trans people are extremely limited. Like the psychotherapist, there was only one endocrinologist, also in Gainesville, doubling my number of weekly drives.
You go through all these therapy sessions, jumping through hoops to convince a stranger that you’re really female, you beg for access to hormones that they dangle over you like a carrot, and then you finally get your letter of approval and show up at the endocrinologist’s office. There, you are greeted with: “Fill out these forms, sir, and we’ll call your name when the doctor is ready to see you.”
The endocrinologist experience was even further degrading. Not long ago, I was a rock star on stage in front of thousands of people. Fans screamed my name and waited in line for autographs. I thought of the woman in Seattle who flashed me from the crowd, and what she would think if she saw me sitting alone in a cold, sterile room, begging for hormone treatment.
After numerous visits in which I continually affirmed that I wanted to be a woman, the endocrinologist explained the treatment options. She recommended putting me on a patch, like a nicotine patch but with estrogen. I told her that I sweated like crazy on stage, and there was no way the patches would ever stay on. So instead she agreed to start me on a low dosage of three ingestible hormones—estradiol, spironolactone, and progesterone. They would raise my estrogen levels, lower my testosterone, and support breast tissue growth. I’d take one pill of each every day, and in three months I would come back for blood work to see where my levels were.
I drove away excited, high on adrenaline and fear. I’d finally earned the right. I walked into the local drugstore, heading straight to the pharmacy counter, gave my soon-to-be former name to the pharmacist, and asked for my scripts. He turned around, searched, and found them. While typing the information into his computer, he did a double-take, looking at me, then at the bags in his hand, and holding them behind the counter, out of my reach.
“Now, you realize the side effects of these drugs and that they are usually for women, right?” he asked. “You know that they could potentially…”
“Give me the fucking hormones now, you fucking asshole!” I shouted, and pounded my fist on the counter. Nearby shoppers stopped to look at this hysterical person shaking with anger, tears running down my face. “I’ve seen all of the fucking doctors that I was supposed to, I passed all the damn tests, here’s my fucking driver’s license, now can I please have the fucking pills?”
I snatched the bag out of his hands and left the cash on the counter. I walked out, completely dead inside but also so alive.
I waited until the next morning to take my first round of pills. I stood in the kitchen, holding them in my hand, observing them for a while before the big swallow. Two white ones and a blue one. The psychotherapist, the endocrinologist, the asshole pharmacist, myself, too—they’d all placed so much weight on these three little pills, like I was about to do something that could potentially ruin my life; that there was no turning back to who I once was. I gave the pills one final look, and then down the hatch.
I swallowed hard.
EPILOGUE
(or MANDATORY HAPPINESS with LAURA JANE GRACE)
There’s a saying on the road that goes: “If your band can’t draw a crowd, draw a dick on the wall.” After all these years, I can say without hesitation that I feel thankful to be sitting here among the crudely drawn penises in this dingy backstage dressing room, about to play a sold-out show.
There’s a lot of downtime on tour; it’s a constant game of hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. Hurry up and get to the airport, wait in a security line. Hurry up and get to the venue, wait to sound-check. As I flipped through the pages of this journal, I realized just how much of my life had been lost to waiting. Days, maybe even weeks or months in total.
Much of my downtime these days is spent doing interviews, which all go the same way. The journalists are polite, but often misinformed. If they compliment my hair or makeup, I’ll cringe, because I know it will soon be followed by a question such as “Did you do it yourself?”
Then they turn their recorder on and ask about how happy I am now that my transition is “complete.” As if the fact that a magazine printed the truth about me allowed me to wake up the next morning, entirely transformed; as if coming out solved everything. But just because I accepted myself as transgender didn’t mean I knew how to transition, or where that road would take me.
So I keep my answers simple by saying something positive about how much more liberating it is to be on stage now. That much is true. For an hour per night, while the crowd is shouting my lyrics back at me, I feel confident. When I sing the words to my chorus, “Does God bless your transsexual heart?” and they call back, “True trans soul rebel!,” it’s empowering. If someone had told me about all this when I was 15, I never would have believed it.
But what I don’t talk about are the other 23 hours, when I am still paralyzed with self-doubt. And I don’t mention the last two years, and everything my transition cost me.
By coming out, I indirectly triggered changes around me. It wasn’t just my body that was in transition, but my life, too. People I’d known for years and saw every day cycled out of my world. It wasn’t that they were transphobic or unsupportive, it was just that things were different.
Jay was the first to go, quitting the band very abruptly and unceremoniously, but entirely appropriately for him. It was more a relief than anything, but it left us without a drummer two weeks before a scheduled Australian festival.
After Jay, it was Andrew. Neither of us was sure we wanted to be in a band together anymore, both chasing separate visions. Andrew was fed up with everything I’d put him through over the years and resented the control I asserted over the band. It all blew up in my face in the airport coming home from tour when he laid into me for what felt like the last time. It was another argument over the direction of the band, but really an argument about nothing at all; just the two of us in a pissing match over who was more frustrated about the rut we were still in. We had traveled so far and fought so hard, and all for what? A band that was still struggling to scrape by.
We boarded our flight home with feelings unresolved, and I didn’t hear from him for weeks after that. Eventually he called to tell me he was done with Against Me!. We had been through a lot of hell together over the years—breakups, arrests, fistfights, overturned buses, lawsuits, deaths. Publicly coming out and announcing my transition was part of my healing process. I think that for Andrew, quitting the band was the transition he needed. I respect that. I’m sure he recognized that while we could make it through one particular trial, there would always be another waiting not too far down the road. That’s the way it always went for Against Me!. One step forward, two steps back. A pat on the back followed by a swift punch in the gut.
When Andrew left, a sad realization hit me: just how much I was going to miss him. Even though he had been a constant in my life for 10 years, he was a stranger before joining the band. Once our working relationship was over, I knew I wouldn’t see much more of him. Andrew chose happiness—his wife and daughter—instead of the endless struggles of the band, and I can’t say I blamed him. I thought about throwing in the towel with him, but I was contractually obligated to hand in one last record.
Jordan was burned out, run into the ground. Always the unspoken fifth member of the band, he had gone from putting out our first records, to being our merch guy, to tour managing, to finally being our manager. It was all just too much. He told me he was quitting over the phone, and I didn’t need an explanation. I understood. He stepped back from any relationship, business or friendship, got married, bought a house, and started a new life. He’s still putting out records through Sabot and picking up occasional tour managing gigs for other bands.
This is life on the road. For years, your entire existence is intertwined with someone else’s, to the point where you can’t commit to anything without consulting their schedule, and the next day you wake up and ne
ver talk again. This was how it had been since I was kid, when the people I loved just one day just disappeared. I started wondering if I was driving them all away.
Even my studio seemed to give up on me. After a weekend of heavy Florida storms, I drove out to the studio to find that a huge tree had blown over and crashed through the roof of the building. The place was a mess of branches and pools of water. The floor where I once stood and came out to the band had buckled and warped under the dampness. All the repairs my father and brother spent hours making while rebuilding our relationship were destroyed. As I surveyed the ruins of the room, it felt like the universe was trying to send me a message; like God himself had sent the floods to wash the band from the earth. I hadn’t had a drink in over a year and a half, but Heather and James told me they liked me better drunk, that I needed to loosen my grip and relax. This seemed like as good a time as any to take a stiff shot of whiskey. And just like that, I was back to drinking.
I wrote my father after the Rolling Stone article ran, telling him that while as part of my transition I would be shedding the name he had given me, there were so many other things I had to be thankful for; specifically, the life of travel that his job opened me to. For all its instability, I always appreciated my upbringing. I ended by sharing a memory that had come to mind recently about the last months we spent in Italy, and asked a question that I had always wondered about: What was it that he spent late nights writing about in his office all those years ago? The only response I got back was:
Your presentation left much to be desired. For now the door is open but we’ll see.
—Dad
I reread his message over and over, trying to decipher what it meant. Even looking at it now, I’m still not sure. It made me angry to feel like I even had to ask for acceptance and understanding when a father’s love is supposed to be unconditional. I wrote out 30 frustrated replies, but couldn’t bring myself to send any. We haven’t spoken since.
And then there was Heather. Publicly, I did my best to pretend life was still good between us. Only two weeks after I started HRT, Against Me! left for a month-long U.S. tour to support the Cult. Heather came along to sell our merch and brought Evelyn. This was my dream—the three of us touring as a family.
Realistically, I should have taken a break from the road to give myself and my family time to adjust to these changes. I certainly wasn’t ready. I wanted more time to grow my hair longer and get a few more laser sessions in, so that I could feel more comfortable in my femininity. But I felt a responsibility to the rest of the band. We had worked so hard to get back on our feet, and if I slowed up now, even briefly, it would have killed our momentum.
Fortunately, punks don’t care about the Cult. Since the tickets were out of our fans’ price range, I largely got to fly under the radar the whole time. Joan Jett came out to one of the shows in New York, and sang a cover of the Replacements’ “Androgynous” with me. After the show, we stayed up smoking weed and talking. Joan could tell that despite whatever positive face I was putting on for fans, I was stressed and needed a friend.
“Gender is a spectrum,” she told me. “Don’t worry about trying to fit into someone else’s box they made for you.” Just hearing her say those words was assuring. We even made plans to write a song together, which would end up on her next album.
When we got back on the bus, Evelyn, who was supposed to be asleep, popped her head out from her bunk curtain to greet us.
“Hi, Joan Jett!”
“Hi, little Evelyn.”
I watched Joan tuck my daughter back into bed and hoped that one day Evelyn would remember this moment of a stoned Joan Jett putting her to sleep and asking, “Are you going to dream of doggies and kitties?”
Heather led the charge in the day-to-day details of my transition on tour, making sure the bands and crew addressed me by female pronouns and correcting them when they didn’t. Whenever a situation arose that posed an uncertainty in etiquette or procedure, everyone looked to her and followed suit.
It felt supportive, though sometimes the support was misplaced and became overbearing. It was infantilizing at times, having my wife coddle me through this readjustment. But I had told Heather that I was transitioning, and now she was holding me to it, making sure I followed through, almost annoyed sometimes when I wasn’t moving fast enough. The idea that I was supposed to be moving along at any pace only made my anxiety grow.
My transition put Heather in a difficult position. The media, in their articles about me, always portrayed her as the supportive wife, standing by her spouse, unflinching in the face of this major life change, but of course it wasn’t that simple for her. She wasn’t given a chance to fully process the changes and how she felt in relation to them. I almost took for granted that she had to make the same phone calls I had made, informing her parents and siblings that her husband would be living as a woman. Friends and family raised questions about her own sexuality. Was she now a lesbian? Would she still call me her husband? She didn’t yet know the answers, and she didn’t ask to be in this situation.
The normal marital quibbles we’d always had over trivial things like me buying the wrong kind of almond milk or her leaving behind garbage in the car intensified. There was a deeper frustration growing underneath everything, manifesting itself in this daily bickering.
Heather and I had always been able to mend our fights with makeup sex, but the deeper I got into my hormone treatment, the more difficult that became. The hormones had depleted my sex drive, and even when sexual desire hit me, my erections were less firm. I couldn’t tell if it was from a lack of testosterone or a lack of confidence. I internalized it all as shame. Our intimacy quickly lost the passion we once had between us. The times when we did have sex felt forced; like we were going through the motions.
In the mornings, before I headed to the studio to work on the new album, we would drop Evelyn off at school and then come back home and get stoned in our bathroom near the air vent, pulling rips out of her Grim Reaper bong. We lit each bowl up with the leftover personalized matches from our wedding, striking them against the cardstock with our initials embossed on it. One by one, I watched the box of matchsticks dwindle down. It felt like our marriage was burning up with them, like we were smoking it down to the last match.
I felt us growing apart. It was the same feeling I had in my early 20s, when my first marriage was failing. It was the same coldness that echoed through my parents’ house in Italy during the disintegration of their marriage. Heather started taking week-long trips to Chicago, where she had family, and wanted to spend time with a new group of friends she made. She was excited about collaborating on art projects with some guy she met there, planning future showings of their work in town. Under our bed, I found a box of mixtapes and letters from him, addressed to Heather in her maiden name. I wasn’t certain she was having an affair, but this emotional connection was replacing ours. I realized she was building a new life, a support structure to fall back on. I didn’t tell her what I’d found, but I gave her an out. I told her that if she wanted to get her own place in Chicago, I’d understand.
I declined most interviews in the year following the Rolling Stone article, except for an appearance on MTV’s revived House of Style, where I showed off my new wardrobe. I also agreed to write an article for Cosmopolitan meant to catch the world up on the progress of my transition a year after coming out and its effect on my marriage. We were still trying to maintain a public image of the happy couple.
In the article, I referred to Heather as my soul mate while ignoring the problems at home and trying to put an optimistic spin on our collapsing sex life. I showed her what I’d written before it was published, hoping my expression of eternal commitment would keep the last embers in the fire between us burning. She didn’t have much of a reaction, though, and just sort of shrugged it off.
Heather suggested that we seek marriage counseling. I scoffed at the idea that any therapists in Florida would be able to handle the unique n
uances of our marriage. Plus, I had no time. The due date for Transgender Dysphoria Blues was rapidly approaching, and there was still work to be done.
With no band left to speak of after the departures of Andrew, Jay, and Jordan, I finished work on the album with James, who stuck with me until the bitter end. The last dollars of our budget were spent booking time at a studio in Valdosta, Georgia, that we chose because it was reputable but cheap. The place was a converted auto garage where the walls and ceiling were painted black, and the carpets covered huge oil stains on the concrete floor. From my days spent repairing engines, I recognized the lingering smell of fumes and rusty metal. Our engineer and the studio owner was a man named Lee, who had a shaved head and a .45 holstered on his hip at all times. It felt like the end of the line for Against Me!. This bleak, dark room was the place we would be shot and left for dead.
I had faith in the songs, though. They were more personal and honest than anything I’d ever written. No longer confined by the burden of having to mince words and mask emotions behind metaphor, I was free to be as direct and aggressive as I wanted. In a way, it was the record I’d been working on my whole life—lyrics about fear and frustration, confusion and identity. There was no filter, and I fired away with everything I’d been holding in for three decades. I traded everything I had for these 10 songs. They were all I had to show for a dwindling career, a failing marriage, and a decaying life.
I wrote an existential love song for Evelyn called “Two Coffins,” and one for Pope called “Dead Friend.” I felt Pope’s ghost watching everything falling apart for me, still trying to keep my spirits up, so when I needed a title for the song I wrote about Heather, it seemed obvious to call it “Fuckmylife666.” I imagined Pope calling back, “Mandatory happiness!”
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