HitFix

Watch: Against Me! singer plays first show as a woman, featuring ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’

by: Uproxx authors

Over the weekend, Against Me! performed their first show since Tom Gabel announced she was transgender and now goes by the name Laura Jane Grace. There was apparently little stage banter from the band at the May 25 show, though Grace led the new song “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” which will be the title track to the rock act’s new album.

Humphreys Concerts by the Bay in San Diego hosted the outdoor concert, which also featured the Cult on the bill. Grace performed wearing fairly standard rock wear, in a tank top and long pants.

“I was worried that some people expected me to come out looking like Little Bo Peep or something,” Grace told Rolling Stone after the show. Her wife Heather and young daughter were also at the set.

Fans cheered during the group’s performance of the song “The Ocean,” during which Grace sings the lyrics “If I could have chosen / I would have been born a woman.”

Grace is a little more than two weeks into hormone replacement therapy, and may possibly opt for medical measures in the future to alter her body that could affect her singing voice. As apparent by the footage below — taken of the singer performing “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” solo from just a few days prior — Grace sounds just like Gabel.
 
She detailed her “coming out” in the pages of Rolling Stone* this month, speaking of how she told her bandmates and what fans can expect: “However fierce our band was in the past, imagine me, six-foot-two, in heels, f*cking screaming into someone’s face.”
 
Against Me! began recording their “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” in February.
 
 
 

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