{"id":12402,"date":"2016-09-07T09:00:32","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T16:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=12402"},"modified":"2016-09-12T12:06:38","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T19:06:38","slug":"laura-jane-grace-brings-trans-awareness-to-thinklandia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2016\/09\/07\/laura-jane-grace-brings-trans-awareness-to-thinklandia\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Jane Grace brings trans awareness to Thinklandia"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s an eventful year for Against Me! vocalist\/guitarist and international trans-rights activist Laura Jane Grace, with the September release of Shape Shift with Me\u2014<\/i>Against Me!\u2019s <\/i>seventh studio album\u2014and the November publication of her autobiography, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock\u2019s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Grace is also slated to appear at this year\u2019s Thinklandia, where she will be speaking about gender issues. Grace is no stranger to speaking about social and political issues and working in the activist community; having cut her teeth in the political punk rock scene, she\u2019s most recently been working with New York-based Gender is Over.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this saying, I forget who said it, \u2018Passion before practice.\u2019 I definitely started out with a lot of passion, and then kind of learned how to do what I wanted to do along the way,\u201d says Grace. \u201cOftentimes people will remark, \u2018Oh, your voice has changed so much over the years,\u2019 and it\u2019s like, yeah, when I started doing this I didn\u2019t know how to sing or anything, I was just going up to a microphone and screaming my head off, which isn\u2019t a realistic thing to do night after night after night for 20 years; you\u2019ll have no throat left.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Against<\/a>
Against Me! vocalist\/guitarist Laura Jane Grace is no stranger to speaking her mind on issues that matter to her (photo by Ryan Russell).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Grace says that about four years ago she decided to go back through all her old journals and start working on putting them together to create Tranny<\/i>, co-written with Dan Ozzi.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been an avid journal collector since I was about eight years old. About a year and a half ago, I started having my friend Dan help me out with that; it\u2019s kind of an insurmountable task. When I went through and fully transcribed my journals, I had about a million and a half words. I had the problem of having too much stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grace\u2019s autobiography is unique among memoirs in that it\u2019s a near-perfect recollection of her life, due to her constant journal-keeping since she was a young child.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I had some people kind of joke about it with me, that it\u2019s kind of a clich\u00e9,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen most musicians decide they want to write something they have to struggle to remember things, whereas I just have perfectly kept records. If I was flying on a plane I wrote down what seat I was in; staying at a hotel, I\u2019d write down the room number, what the room looked like, you know? I didn\u2019t have to lean on memory too much; that was really important with the book, to represent how I felt at the time, and to not go back and qualify it with present-day reflections. My band has a long history and that\u2019s all in the book, as well as a lot of my personal life, and the experience of what it was like being positive as a transgender person while playing in a punk rock band for 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grace\u2019s work raising trans awareness helps to sheds light on a demographic which is so often misunderstood or the target of oppression. For anyone out there who feels like they are living a double life, is frightened, or is nervous about societal pressures, Grace says that it\u2019s time to stand up for who you are.<\/p>\n

\u201cFuck feeling like you\u2019re asking for permission to be who you are or feeling like you\u2019re apologizing for who you are,\u201d she says. \u201cComing out to people can sometimes start to feel like that, and it\u2019s important to not carry that weight. It\u2019s all on the person you\u2019re coming out with to be cool; it\u2019s not about you. There is nothing wrong with you; if someone has a negative reaction, then there is something wrong with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinklandia
\nFriday, September 9\u00a0to Tuesday, September 13
\nVarious prices, Dockside Green
\nthinklandia.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s an eventful year for Against Me! vocalist\/guitarist and international trans-rights activist Laura Jane Grace, with the September release of Shape Shift with Me\u2014Against Me!\u2019s seventh studio album\u2014and the November publication of her autobiography, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock\u2019s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. Grace is also slated to appear at this year\u2019s Thinklandia, where she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-september-7-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12402"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12405,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12402\/revisions\/12405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}