Laura Jane Grace: A Trans Punk Rocker's Fight To Rebuild Her Life

Laura Jane Grace is lying on a plastic-covered bed in the back room of Mohan’s tattoo parlor in Queens. Outside, the No. 7 train rumbles overhead and tipsy drag queens in perilous heels totter past all-night taco stands. Inside, an artist named Kenji bends over Grace’s calf with the focus of a surgeon, inking an intricate geometric pattern around both legs. It’s well past one in the morning. They’ve been at this for more than 13 hours.

Grace keeps dozing off despite the pain. She was up at 6 a.m. with a panic attack, which has not been uncommon since she came out as a trans woman – first drunkenly to a friend, then to her wife, Heather, then publicly in an article in this magazine four years ago – and began the process of physically transforming herself from a guy named Tom Gabel into the woman she knows herself to be. Today, her panic has something to do with the stress of being in New York to plug two projects – a new album from her punk band, Against Me!, and a memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout – and all the talking and explaining and answering she’ll have to do over the next few days. But it’s mainly that now, all of a sudden, Grace thinks she might, just might, be able to rekindle her relationship with Heather, someone she thought transitioning had cost her.