Watch Laura Jane Grace Talk Hating the Word ‘Tranny’ on ‘Seth Meyers’
Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace spoke about her dislike of the word “tranny,” but also why she chose to use the slur as the title to her new memoir on Late Night With Seth Meyers.
“I hate that word, I definitely don’t identify with that word, I don’t like hearing it used for other people,” said Grace, who came out as transgender in 2012. “It’s almost mentally taxing to look at my book in ways, but it captures a lot of what the book is about. And a lot of what the book is about is internalized transphobia and self-hate and that’s an experience that I had and I went through.”
Grace added that naming her book Tranny was also partly an act of reclaiming the word, as was giving it the subtitle: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. “There’s a certain amount of reclamation … of saying the thing about yourself that you fear the most, or you hate the most before anyone else can say it,” she said.
Grace also spoke with Meyers about her daughter, who at age seven is already completely jaded by the her mother’s punk rock world. “She likes it enough, but she’s definitely over the show experience,” Grace said, joking, “She can say like, ‘Oh yeah the first tour I did, it was with the Cult.'”
Against Me! also performed its new song, “333,” which appears on the group’s seventh album, Shape Shift With Me.