Tom Gabel, lead singer of the punk band Against Me!, has publicly announced plans to live as a woman and to take on the name Laura Jane Grace.
Gabel’s cbig news hit newsstands today in Rolling Stone magazine, where she publicly shares her very private battle with gender dysphoria, an issue that she says she has dealt with for years. In opening up, Gabel says she will soon be transitioning into becoming a woman by taking hormones and by undergoing electrolysis treatments.
Public allusions to Gabel’s battles with gender identity emerged in Against Me!’s song The Ocean, released in 2007, where Gabel gives hint to the source of her name change.
“And if I could have chosen,/ I would have been born a woman,/ My mother once told me she would have named me Laura,/ I’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her.”
LGBT groups, Twitter fans, and even fellow musicians praised Gabel with an onslaught of support for her courage to step forward. Though Gabel said very few people knew of her decision prior to the article’s publication, Rolling Stone contributing editor Josh Eells speculated on what prompted the very public coming out.
I’m not sure why she wanted to do it in exactly this way, but I think she wanted to not have a thousand conversations with people. This was a way to push herself a little. She said that so many times she’d make a goal to tell her wife Heather or the band, and she’d make excuses and put it off. This was setting up a deadline for herself.
Gabel, 31, told Rolling Stone that she plans to remain with her wife Heather as they continue to raise their 2-year-old daughter. “For me, the most terrifying thing about this was how she would accept the news,” Gabel says of her wife. “But she’s been super-amazing and understanding.”









