‘Goodbye, gender!’ Transgender punk rocker burns birth certificate

When Laura Jane Grace set her birth certificate on fire Sunday night, she was channelling her life into performance, just as she’s done for the last two decades.

The lead singer and guitarist has been a voice for transgender issues since she came out in 2012, and she and her band Against Me! released the album Transgender Dysphoria Blues in 2014, drawn in part from her own experience growing up.

At their band’s concert Sunday night in Durham, North Carolina, Grace’s quite literal firestarting met a familiar reaction: cheers.

While on stage during their performance, Grace, 35, held up her birth certificate and set it alight as the crowd clapped and whooped. As yellow flames licked at the paper, she waved: “Goodbye, gender!”

It was the cap on a concert meant to protest the controversial North Carolina bill that forces people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their birth sex. But the performance — and Grace’s gesture — was also meant as a celebration, she said.

“It was more a celebration of defiance than anything negative,” Grace told CBC Radio Monday morning. Burning her birth certificate “felt liberating,” she added.

Plus, she said: “I thought, what better way to get a fire going?”

Grace is the latest musician to employ her music as a protest vehicle against the North Carolina law. Several artists and musicians — Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Ringo Starr among them — have done so by boycotting the state. But after the bill was signed into law in March, Grace and her band decided to perform anyway.

“What something like HB 2 does is it makes trans people fearful, and when you’re being made a target, the natural inclination is to go into hiding,” Grace told the Washington Post before the performance. “That’s why going there now and being visible is all the more important.”

On Monday, Grace praised the boycott efforts of musicians like Springsteen, noting the attention the boycott drew to the legislation and calling it “an act of an ally.” But she acknowledged that those who live and work in the state can’t opt out so easily.

“They still have to live here, they still have to operate,” she told CBC Radio. “I want to come here and I want to bring visibility to that.”

As part of their awareness-building, Against Me! transformed their concert into a benefit show for Time Out Youth, a LGBTQ youth center in Charlotte, which tabled the event and received all proceeds from the performance.

The band, which Grace told CBC Radio has traveled through North Carolina at least yearly since its creation, has no intention of avoiding the state in the future. The performance is one way of “empowering the grassroots organizations that already come out here,” she told the radio station.

Quitting would also send the wrong message to her fans and transgender individuals who live in the state, she said.

“Despite whatever stupid laws they enact, trans people are not going to be scared," she told Buzzfeed News. "They are not going to go away.”

This story was originally published May 16, 2016 at 9:32 AM with the headline "‘Goodbye, gender!’ Transgender punk rocker burns birth certificate."