James and I stayed in a nearby $50-a-night Days Inn right off the exit from I-75. Heather tried calling me, but blind drunk, I deliberately didn’t pick up. I woke up at 4 AM. My T-shirt was completely soaked, and my arms were stiff and trembling. I took a cold shower and came out of the bathroom to realize that the thermostat was set to 68 degrees. My body was reacting violently to the mixture of alcohol, anxiety, and hormones. I didn’t sleep that night and was a wreck in the morning. I got through the day in the studio by letting James finish up his guitar parts while I rested on the couch. For the first time in over a year, I didn’t take my hormones.
I skipped them the next morning, too, after another sleepless night, and was feeling even worse. I couldn’t hold my hands steady to finish a guitar take. My fingers wouldn’t clench a chord or strum properly. My voice was shot, and I was convinced a polyp had developed on my vocal cords. The only way I got through the day was on a couple of Valium. Even with them, I was manic; I felt possessed. Over and over I failed to play the intro riff for “Fuckmylife666.” After I was finally able to perform it to Lee’s satisfaction, I put my guitar down, walked to the van parked in front of the studio, and broke down.
I don’t cry often, but at that moment, I was an uncontrollable, sobbing mess. I couldn’t think straight. My only clear thought was how badly I’d fucked up my life. I wasn’t even able to recall a time before my transition. Memories of time spent locked behind bathroom doors in dresses, or sneaking down hotel hallways in heels, were fading from my mind. I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted so badly to put myself through this. I didn’t want to go through with it anymore; I just wanted my family. I wanted to be the person Heather fell in love with. I hoped that maybe there was still a chance to take back everything I had said and done, and go back to being her husband and Evelyn’s daddy. I had let my dedication to the fantasy override my responsibilities. I thought back to that night when I was 13 and made a deal with the devil. Twenty years later, he had come to collect his due.
I called my mother.
“Mom, can you do something for me?” I asked, though I was slurring so much, I wasn’t sure she could understand me.
“Of course,” she said in the calm, motherly voice I needed to hear. “What is it?”
“Can you pray for me? Pray for my soul. Pray, because I don’t know what else to do.” I couldn’t even process what she said in response.
When we hung up, I had a flash of realization: I had been heading for this crash the whole time, but no one had warned me. I was convinced that it was a conspiracy, that my doctors had all seen this coming and set me up to fail. I called my psychotherapist in Gainesville, sure that when he had written his letter of approval, he was secretly laughing about the nervous breakdown I was in for at the one-year mark, once my male ego completely shattered.
“You can probably set your fucking watch to this, can’t you?” I cried at him. “You know exactly how many months it takes for someone on hormones to have their mental fucking breakdown, don’t you? This is a great moment of satisfaction for you, isn’t it?”
I called my endocrinologist’s office next, demanding to speak to the doctor, but was told she wasn’t available. I tried to schedule an appointment, but the soonest the receptionist said she could book me was in three months.
James drove me to an emergency care clinic where a doctor, who at first presumed me to be a junkie looking for a fix, wrote me a prescription for Ambien. Even with the sleep aid, I couldn’t sleep at night. I kept getting worse and worse, a rapid unraveling in the last days in Valdosta. As my health worsened and I lost the motivation to soldier on, I doubted the songs on this album would ever be performed publicly. I started to think of the album as my suicide note that would be left behind for the world to find—the last will and testament of Laura Jane Grace.
I made the decision to quit hormones cold turkey. Cutting yourself off from hormones after your body has built up a dependency to them fucks you up in ways you can’t prepare for. Without a constant flow of estrogen coming in and androgen being blocked, the testosterone came raging back into my system, making me feel like I was going through puberty all over again. The man in me wasn’t ready to die, not without a fight. My face broke out with acne and my skin became oily; I noticed that my body’s odor changed; I gained weight. Between flashes of depression and a rebounded, out-of-control sex drive, my mood fluctuated suddenly and wildly between sadness and anger. My body could no longer naturally produce dopamine, and the chemical imbalance left me physically incapable of feeling happy.
After two weeks of powering through, clinging to my sanity by a thread, the album was done. The minute I finished recording the last note, it was out of my hands. For all I knew, it was the last I’d ever hear it.
I headed home to Saint Augustine, and walked into an empty house. Heather was still in Chicago with Evelyn. I sat on the bed where I had once worn Heather’s dress while fantasizing about life as a woman, but now I had a new fantasy in mind. I thought about driving to a nearby motel where I’d draw a warm bath and down a cocktail of Ambien, Xanax, and wine. I could take a razor blade to my wrists and be gone before they returned home. I thought about the blood that would fill the cracks between the tiles of the bathroom floor. All anyone would find would be my cold, lifeless body and a note on the nightstand. They would be better off without me.
In the 24 hours I had to myself at home, I picked up smoking cigarettes again. Maybe it was to cope with the stress, or maybe it reminded me of the last time I’d smoked—our honeymoon in Rome. I sat on the back porch, chain-smoking, and listening for Heather’s car to pull into the driveway so I could kiss her and try to feel that it wasn’t really over between us.
“Take a shower. You smell like cigarettes,” she told me when she came back.
Heather was at her breaking point. Not only was she still suffocated by Florida living, but she was now what the neighbors referred to as the wife of “that tranny.” As we sat on our back porch watching the sun go down, I asked what I could do to make her happy again.
“I cannot spend another fucking day here,” she said, before dropping the ultimatum. “If you want to save our marriage, we have to move to Chicago tomorrow.”
It was an optimistic lie. There was nothing left to save. Chicago was where her priorities had shifted. She had a new life waiting for her there—friends, family, a love interest. Left without much choice, I agreed to get a place there sight unseen. We had a yard sale in Florida to prepare for the move, selling our belongings for pennies on the dollar or just giving them away. Paintings, records, wedding gifts, all the possessions that comprised our life together, sold off or discarded. Years of screen-printed Against Me! tour posters, T-shirts, and stacks of magazines with articles about us went, too; the band’s history left at the curb with the trash. Two hundred and sixty dollars was the total value of our shared existence. She hired a moving company to transport what was left, though something about the movers seemed sketchy—maybe it was that their logo was stuck on the side of their truck with masking tape. Much of my equipment and guitars never made it to Chicago, having been “lost along the way.”
We drove separate cars out of Florida, with Evelyn riding with Heather, and me alone. I arrived first to find an old house that was falling apart. There were broken windows, stained carpets, questionable electrical outlets. It was just like the 911 House, but lonely without the other punks. I waited for Heather but she didn’t show up. When I called her to ask where she was, she told me she had gone straight to her guy friend’s house.
Heather fell out of love with me over that summer. It wasn’t her fault. I had taken her for granted. It was always about me—my career, my band, my transition. The effort I was putting in now by moving to Chicago was too little, too late. I realized that the marriage was unsalvageable, but couldn’t accept it. I spent my nights wallowing on our couch, plucking at my guitar, while Heather stayed out later and later, partying with her new friends, coming home wasted as
the sun was rising, or just not coming home at all.
“I am attracted to men, not women.” Heather said she had realized this. She told me I’d lost my swagger, and that I was a shell of the person I used to be. I was no longer the cocky, loudmouth punk she met on that Alkaline Trio tour. I looked in the mirror hoping to see the woman she claimed to see staring back, but only saw the disgusting tranny I’d always seen before. How could anyone love someone so full of self-hate? How could anyone else see me as a woman if I couldn’t see myself as one?
The East Coast solo tour I had booked before my breakdown was the last thing I wanted to do that August. For most in attendance, it was the first time seeing me since my coming out. It was nerve-wracking to stand on stage alone, with nothing but a microphone and an acoustic guitar, all eyes on me. Without the volume of a band behind me, I could distinctly hear people in the crowd shouting words of support. But every compliment I heard—“You look beautiful!” or “I love you!”—just made me feel like more of a fraud. After a show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, a fan found me outside smoking a cigarette. They told me that I was their hero, and that I gave them the courage to come out and start HRT. But I didn’t feel like anyone’s hero. I still wasn’t taking the hormones. I wanted to scream some sense into them and beg them not to do it. “Look at me! Hormones ruined my fucking life and will ruin yours, too! Are you really willing to risk everything and everyone you love for this?” But instead, I just smiled and posed for a picture.
I was a wreck through the whole week. After blurring my way through each show, I went back to my room and weighed the positives and negatives of stopping my transition, stuck in limbo between wanting to continue as a woman and wanting to go back to being a man. Backing away from my transition meant career death; that I knew. I’d already made this grand announcement that evoked my fans’ support. I couldn’t just ask them all to forget about it. The trans community would full-on excommunicate me as well. I’d seen it happen to other trans people who decided to de-transition. It was a crime akin to a punk band selling out to a major label. I fantasized about running away and starting a new life somewhere. I could shave my head and have surgery to remove my breasts, get a job as an auto mechanic, and no one would even know who I was. That wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. When this indecision kept me awake, I took as many Ambien as I could, washing them down with a bottle of vodka. But try as I might, I kept waking up.
When the tour ended, I returned home to Chicago, where I was a stranger in a strange city. Establishing yourself in a new area when you’re transitioning is difficult. Although I wasn’t taking HRT at the moment, I needed to find a new psychotherapist, a new endocrinologist, a new laser hair removal place, a new everything.
Eventually I found a therapist specializing in gender who was more helpful than anyone I’d talked to in Florida. She told me that it was good that I’d hit rock bottom, that I’d walked right up to the edge and turned back around. It was okay to have thoughts of suicide, she said, as long as it gave me the proper perspective—that while I was living in the present, I should be living to the fullest. She tried to prescribe heavy antidepressants, but I refused to subject my body to more chemicals.
I wish I could say that Heather and I ultimately turned things around, that we fell back in love and started fresh in Chicago. But with transitioning, nothing is guaranteed. On November 8—my birthday—we both conceded that it was better for us to live apart. We sat Evelyn down and told her that we were going to try being a family in a new way. Heather did all the talking; I was so heartbroken that I could barely speak or look at her while she explained it. Evelyn protested, but we assured her that we both still loved her, and always would. I got an apartment nearby, and Heather and I agreed that Evelyn would split her time between us.
I knew from experience what the sting of a divorce felt like, but this was different. When a relationship ends, both people go back to their own lives, the ones they lived before they fell in love. Heather could return to being herself again, but who would I be?
Once it was over between us, my therapist encouraged me to get back on hormones, promising—guaranteeing, even—that one day I would look in the mirror and find the woman I had always wanted to see. She suggested that I start taking hormones in the form of injectables. On December 13, I shot them up for the first time, and the process was terrifying. In a way, though, it made the commitment to hormones feel more real than it ever had, like I was going on HRT for the first time. The responsibility of properly shooting a two-inch-long needle into my own thigh muscle carried a lot more weight than just popping three little pills.
Starting back on hormones immediately ushered in a change within me. My mood picked up, my thought process became more clear, I was able to process emotions more reasonably. It felt right; like I’d gained something that had been missing my whole life.
For Christmas, I got Heather one final gift and told her not to open it around her parents. It was a human skull I’d bought from an antique dealer. I could think of no gift with more finality. I hoped whenever she saw it, it would remind her of the eternal love I felt for her, that underneath gender constructs—the skin and thread, stitches and ligaments—we are all just bones in a box. She loved it.
By the end of 2013, I’d fully built the band back up, recruiting Atom Willard to drum for us. Atom had saved us at the last minute earlier in the year, filling in on our Australia tour after Jay quit. Atom is a professional, one of the drummers you call when you need someone who can learn a 25-song set in a week. He heard we needed the help and volunteered to come along. Given that we were working with a fill-in player, we went into the tour hoping we could just get through the shows without any colossal failures, but the shows went better than expected. They went so well, in fact, that I asked him to record drum tracks that we’d use on Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Atom fit in so smoothly during our recording sessions and live shows that I offered him the spot full-time, and he accepted.
Inge Johansson replaced Andrew the same way Andrew had replaced Dustin—he just reached out and asked if we needed a new bassist at the right time. Inge is a Swedish vegan who played in the band the (International) Noise Conspiracy, a group whose music and politics I had long admired. Not only was he a good fit for Against Me! musically, but the more he and I talked, the more we connected over our similar anarchist philosophies. He was genuinely invested in his ideals. This was an element that had been lost in the band over the years, and something I welcomed back.
On the last day of the year, as the snow fell hard in Chicago, Inge, Atom, James, and I packed our equipment onto our bus for our first month-long tour together. As the guitars and amps were loaded on, I felt a sense of security. After months of drifting through this unfamiliar new city where I’d lost sight of my own identity, I was glad to be back on the road with my band where I knew how to exist, where I understood who I was. As the bus pulled out, leaving behind a snow-covered Chicago, I crawled into my bunk that would be my home for the next four weeks, stared at the ceiling in front of me, and exhaled in relief.
One of the first things I noticed at our shows was that our audience was different. Our crowd was the most diverse it had ever been. There were punks from our No Idea Records days, metalheads who saw me at my drunkest on the Mastodon tour, kids who stood in line for autographs in the heat of Warped Tour, and Foo Fighters fans who gave that opening band dressed in black a chance. Even the angry punks who still popped up every album cycle to call me a sellout gave me a pass this time around. Maybe they understood me now, and forgave my past career choices in this new context, or maybe I’d just finally worn them down. It felt like the band was starting with a clean slate. Against Me! could be anything I wanted it to be now.
There was also a new community of trans and gender-queer fans that I’d picked up in the year and a half since I came out. Some of them weren’t even interested in punk; they just came out to support me. I appreciated their presence and tried to make myself as accessibl
e as possible, sticking around after the shows to talk to these people and learn from them. Many told me that my visibility helped them understand their own gender identity, and meeting them often did the same for me. I even lost the urge to scare them away from starting hormones.
With Inge and Atom joining me and James, Against Me! rebalanced itself. Touring felt like it was supposed to. Even though the roads and venues were familiar, everything felt new again. The predictability of touring that had worn me down over the years was gone. I was pushed outside my comfort zone, open to new adventures and new romances—meeting people, gaining fans, and bonding with my bandmates. It felt the same way it did back when I loaded up the Buick LeSabre, and it reminded me of why I started touring in the first place.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues hit stores while we were three weeks into the tour, the first album of our last three not to leak online prior to its release date. The critical response was immediate and positive. It hit number 23 on the Billboard chart, our highest-ranking album ever. Mainstream press outlets—even ones I was sure had given up on us—almost unanimously heaped praise on it and commended me for my songwriting. Though it was all very humbling, and I was grateful for the support, I took it with a grain of salt. It took six albums, but I was finally smart enough to recognize that while acclaim is nice, it’s also fleeting. One album, you’re a critical darling, and the next they say you’re washed up, so it’s best not to get too comfortable with the flattery.
At the end of tour, we returned to The Late Show with David Letterman for my first televised performance as a woman. I was nervous about being in the spotlight—doing press and photo shoots. I’d only been back on hormones for a month, and was still figuring out how to exist as a trans person, let alone a public figure. But oddly, being in front of the cameras felt soothing in its familiarity. I wasn’t fazed or awestruck to be on TV anymore. I’m a musician, this is what I do, I thought. I was more concerned about what shoes to wear or how to do my makeup than I was about performing. I settled on a simple black T-shirt and a black pair of jeans instead of a dress. It was more important to feel the internal changes than to exhibit them outwardly. We played “Fuckmylife666,” and my fingers were far more steady on guitar than they were when the song was recorded in Georgia.
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