Grace Shemale

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The frontman of the aggro-political punk crew Against Me! has always known he was really a woman. Now he’s becoming one.

Laura Jane Grace in a St. Augustine, Florida recording studio.
On a warm Friday evening at the end of March, the artist soon to be formerly known as Tommy Gabel is walking through Manhattan on his way to meet one of his biggest fans, a 23-year-old woman named January Hunt. When Hunt was 16, she saw Gabel play a show and wrote him a long, impassioned fan letter about how he’d changed her life.
Right now, Gabel is feeling a little nervous. “It’s probably stupid to talk to a fan like this,” he says. “I don’t really know her – I just sent her a cryptic message on Twitter asking if she could meet up. I just don’t have anyone else to talk to.”
Gabel, 31, is the lead singer for Against Me !, a 15-year-old punk band from Gainesville, Florida, most famous for their radical politics and Gabel’s throat-shredding growl. They’ve sung about economic injustice, dismantling the system and generally fucking shit up on stages from tiny suburban clubs to Giants Stadium, and been praised by Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters while shouting about things like “The Politics of Starving” and “Cliché Guevara.”
The song that helped change January’s life is called “Searching for a Former Clarity,” a ballad tucked at the end of the band’s 2005 record. The lyrics are about a man who’s dying of what sounds like AIDS; midway through, Gabel sings:
And in the journal you kept by the side of your bed… Confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women’s clothes / Compulsions you never knew the reasons to
The song resonated with January so intensely because it was her story, too. As a transgender teenager in suburban New York, Hunt put on dresses and high heels and painted her nails pink, never daring to tell her friends in the hardcore scene. When she heard Gabel’s song that night, it was the first time a punk band’s lyrics spoke directly to her experience. And when she showed up six years later to another Against Me! show, crowd-surfing like a champ in her red pencil skirt and shoulder-length blond hair, she had Gabel, in whatever small way, to thank.
Gabel remembered her, too. “When I saw her at that show, I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah,'” he says. “I just found it so awesome and empowering. In a way, it showed me what a coward I was being. Because if she had the courage to come out as trans – then why the fuck didn’t I?”
For as long as he can remember, Gabel has lived with a condition known as gender dysphoria. As the textbooks explain it, it’s a feeling of intense dissatisfaction and disconnect from the gender you were assigned at birth. As Gabel explains it, “The cliché is that you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body, but it’s not that simple. It’s a feeling of detachment from your body and from yourself. And it’s shitty, man. It’s really fucking shitty.”
Over the past few months, Gabel has begun the public part of a process that’s been going on privately for years: leaving his male identity behind and living the rest of his life as a woman. He’s been doing research – reading books like Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl , watching transition videos on YouTube. Soon, he’ll start taking hormones and undergoing electrolysis. And down the road – in the next couple of years – he intends to have surgery. “Right now, I’m in this awkward transition period,” he says. “I look like a dude and feel like a dude, and it sucks. But eventually I’ll flip, and I’ll present as female.”
Walking through the streets tonight in a T-shirt and hoodie, Gabel doesn’t look especially feminine. He’s point-guard tall and rock-star skinny, with tattoos covering his arms and chest. But if you look just right at his blue eyes or alreadylasered cheeks, or the way he brushes his brown curls out of his face, you can almost catch a glimpse of the woman he’s becoming.
According to Brandon Hill, research associate and resident transgender expert at the Kinsey Institute, about one in 30,000 men is clinically diagnosed as being transgender. Gabel isn’t the first musician to identify that way – the list includes proto-punk singer Jayne County, electronic composer Wendy Carlos and cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond. But this is definitely the first time someone from such a high-profile band has come out in such a high-profile way. “I’m going to have embarrassing moments,” Gabel says, “and that won’t be fun. But that’s part of what talking to you is about – is hoping people understand, and hoping they’ll be fairly kind.”
As of this night in New York, he’s only shared his news with a handful of people. Even his parents and little brother don’t know. “Even now,” he says, “there’s a part of me that’s not convinced I know what the fuck I’m doing. But there’s another part of me that’s completely, 100 percent sure.”
Soon, Gabel arrives at the cafe where he and January are planning to meet. She’s waiting for him out front. And for a second, he just stands across the street, working up the nerve. “She seems really cool,” he says. “And I don’t have any trans friends, and I feel like I need one. Basically,” he says, “I’m just going to ask her to be my friend.”
O ne week later, Ggabel is at home in St. Augustine, Florida, in his cozy bungalow on a well-manicured block in one of the unpunkest neighborhoods imaginable. There’s a Prius in the driveway and a purple tricycle on the lawn. The only hint of anything rock & roll is the big white Chevy tour van parked out front.
“Hey!” Gabel says when he answers the door, “come in. We’re just finishing lunch.” He leads the way down the hall and into the kitchen, where, sitting at the table, are a pretty, dark-haired woman in a black tank top and an impossibly cute two-year-old in a blue dress and braids – Gabel’s wife, Heather, 35, and their daughter, Evelyn. “Evelyn’s about to take a nap,” Heather says, smiling. She stands to clear the table, and Gabel grabs his keys. “Should we go talk?”
Gabel says he and Heather are staying together. “For me, the most terrifying thing about this was how she would accept the news,” he says. “But she’s been superamazing and understanding.” According to Hill, this is rare but not unheard of. Roughly a third of transgender women are attracted to women, and some of them try to maintain the relationships they’re in pre-transition. “There are people who start off staying together and, after the full transition, start to trickle out,” Hill says. “But just by being willing, they stand a much higher chance.”
Gabel gets in their 1964 Mercury Comet and we drive to his favorite fish-taco stand, where, at a picnic table under a palm tree, he starts telling his story. “Growing up, my experience with transsexualism was nothing but shame,” he says. “It was something very hidden, and dealt with very privately.” The first time he remembers feeling that way was when he was four or five, and he saw Madonna on TV and fantasized about being her. He also remembers playing with Barbies – his mom says he was really into the hot-pink Corvette – as well as his father not being happy about it. “For me, that was a moment when I remember, ‘OK, I’m obviously doing something that’s not OK in my dad’s eyes,'” he says. “But even when I would play G.I. Joes, I wouldn’t play war – I would make up stories.”
Gabel’s dad, Major Thomas Gabel, is a West Point grad who served 20 years in the Army, and Tommy grew up hopping from base to base: Fort Benning, Fort Hood, an Italian NATO post during the first Iraq War. Then when Tommy was 11, his parents got divorced, and he and his mom moved to Florida to live with his grandmother.
“It was a bad divorce,” Gabel says. “A nasty divorce. I don’t know what the failure of the marriage was – I never asked.” But whatever it was, it was bad enough for his mom to never speak to his dad again. Sometimes Gabel would go stay with him during the summer, but it was never fun. His mom says, “I think Tommy became the catchall for the anger of the split.”
Florida is the first time Gabel remembers being severely depressed. “It probably had a lot to do with where I was pubertywise, and hormones,” he says, “but that was a period of extreme dysphoria – of just not wanting to be male.” Some days, he would pray to God: “Dear God, please, when I wake up, I want a female body.” Other times he’d try the devil: “I promise to spend the rest of my life as a serial killer if you turn me into a woman.” He thought he was a pervert, or had some kind of fetish. There was no Internet back then, so all he knew was what he’d seen in movies, which basically meant The Crying Game and The Silence of the Lambs – or, as Gabel puts it, “the sad tranny and the fucking scary tranny.”
For most of his teenage years, Gabel was “miserable.” Because he’d moved around so much, he’d never had many friends. He got picked on at school, called a “faggot” because of the way he dressed. By 13, he’d started experimenting pretty seriously with hard drugs, graduating from alcohol and pot to acid and cocaine. He’d go on to struggle with addiction well into his twenties; in retrospect, he thinks, he was doing whatever he could to numb the pain.
Even today, Gabel can’t look at his reflection in the mirror without being disgusted by the parts that look male: his Adam’s apple, his square jaw, his shoulders, his hips. Back then, the only way he knew how to cope was to cross-dress: “Just the act of looking in the mirror while presenting femme is immediately calming,” he says. Sometimes he’d skip school and watch TV all day, dressed in his mom’s clothes. (He tried to be sneaky about it, but suspects she may have known; “I had no idea,” she says.) Other times he’d shoplift from stores or swipe clothes from his female friends. “Anytime you thought you could get away with taking something,” he says, “you’d take it.”
For a while, Gabel wondered if he might be gay. “I definitely asked myself, ‘Am I attracted to men?'” He says he made out with a couple of guys when he was younger, but never anything more than that. He just always found it easier to be with women – both in a physical sense and an emotional one. “I’ve never had trouble talking and expressing my feelings,” he says. Adds his mom, “He was always just so gentle.”
Well, maybe not always. When he was in junior high, Gabel fell in love with punk rock. He was attracted to the nihilism, and the idea of fighting back. Against Me!’s guitarist, James Bowman, has been Gabel’s best friend since they met on their first day of high school; he gave Gabel his first tattoo, they raided Gabel’s mom’s liquor cabinet together and played “machete avocado baseball” in the backyard. “I don’t think Tom gives a fuck about much,” Bowman says. “I’ve known him for a long time, and that seems to be his general attitude about life.”
Against Me! started as a bedroom project, Gabel playing alone and acoustically. (In hindsight, the name seems like a nod to his conflicted identity.) When he was 18, he moved to Gainesville and turned Against Me! into a full band, playing dive bars and laundromats, sometimes to an audience of zero. For a few years, Gabel lived a life of unimpeachable punk cred: volunteering for socialist groups like Food Not Bombs; paying 100 bucks to live in a house with 12 roommates across the street from an experimental waste dump; and making ends meet by dumpster-diving and selling his plasma. (“They didn’t give you a snack – but it cost less to get drunk that night.”) Meanwhile, Against Me! began touring the world, playing some epically grungy shit holes, like an anarchist squat in Poland where the tenants kept rotten eggs on the roof to fight off the junkies, and Nazi skinheads robbed people at gunpoint. (“Touring Eastern Europe is fucking hardcore, man.”)
Being in such a male-centric scene forced Gabel to confront his own masculinity. “With the band especially,” he says, “I felt more and more like I was putting on an act – like I was being shoved into this role of ‘angry white man in a punk band.'” He started realizing punk was just a glorified boys’ club, one that he felt increasingly alienated from. Recently, he’s been going through old journal entries from that time, looking for hints of who he’d become: He found one entry where he described stealing his roommate’s birth-control pills to see what they would do to him (“Word to the wise: Don’t do that”), and a lot of days where he just wandered the streets of Gainesville, gazing at dresses in shop windows and imagining how he’d look in them.
It was around this time that Gabel started sprinkling his lyrics with oblique confessions. There was the song “Violence” (“Oh, you’ve been keeping secrets… nothing but shame and paranoia”) and “The Disco Before the Breakdown” (“I know they’re going to laugh at us/When they see us out together holding hands like this”). For Against Me!’s biggest hit, the song “Thrash Unreal,” he even tried to convince their A&R guy to let him cross-dress in the video. (“They shot me down.”) But the most blatant reference came in a song called “The Ocean,” off their 2007 album, New Wave .
In retrospect, the lines are almost shockingly direct: If I could have chosen I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura / I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her / One day I’d find an honest man to make my husband
Gabel says he thought he was “completely outing himself” with a lyric like that. He expected to be confronted – a part of him even craved it. But if anyone suspected anything, no one brought it up. “When we did that song, I was like, ‘What is that about?'” says Butch Vig, who produced Against Me!’s last two albums. “He just kind of laughed it off. He said, ‘I was stoned and dreaming about what life can be.'”
“I must have listened to him sing that song 500 times,” adds the band’s manager, Jordan Kleeman. “And I never thought twice.”
Then in 2006, after the band signed to Warner Bros. and its career took off, Gabel swore off cross-dressing for good. “You go through periods of binging and purging,” he explains. “I was 25, we were about to go on a long period of touring, and I was like, ‘That’s it. I’m getting rid of all this. I’m male, and that’s it.'” He says it wasn’t that hard: “You’re living with four or five other guys constantly, on a bus or in hotels. You don’t have any personal time. You’re just distracted.”
It was on that tour that he met Heather Hannoura, a punk-rock chick from Detroit who designed merch for bands like My Chemical Romance and Green Day, as well as making art of her own. She and Tommy first met in Nevada in 2006 – fittingly, in a town called Sparks – when Heather was on tour with the band Alkaline Trio and A
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