W hen Rolling Stone profiled transgender Against Me! singer­songwriter Laura Jane Grace in September the piece included a photo of the musician, topless and reclined in a half-full bathtub, her face and breasts emerging from beneath the water. Grace’s ex-wife, Chicago visual artist and Hide front woman Heather Gabel, had a number of issues with the article—among them the narrow approach to gender it took, the flawed portrayal of her separation from Grace in 2013, and the aforementioned image of her ex, which was uncensored despite the magazine’s long history of obscuring women’s nipples in salacious pictures. Gabel edited the Rolling Stone photo by covering Grace’s areolas with stars and posted it on Facebook with a thoughtful retort. “The entire LGBTQ+ experience is constantly fetishized; sensationalized to absolutely no one’s benefit,” Gabel wrote. “I hope that someone eventually gets it right.”

Chunks of Grace’s story are missing: one part of the book’s title that’s not properly reflected in the narrative is her history with anarchism. Against Me!’s catalog from the early years is chockablock full of lyrics extolling leftist extremism. Take the chorus for 2002’s “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!,” which references the 1999 Seattle protests during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference: “ ’Cause baby, I’m an anarchist / You’re a spineless liberal / We marched together for the eight-hour day / And held hands in the streets of Seattle / But when it came time to throw bricks / Through that Starbucks window / You left me all alone.” But the few instances of capital-P politics in Tranny are merely references to anarcho-punk bands and nonprofit organizations; listening to Crass and volunteering with Food Not Bombs won’t make you an anarchist. Readers with no grasp of the subterranean anarcho-punk scene will likely struggle to understand why Against Me!’s jump to indie label Fat Wreck Chords in the early 2000s was met with such scorn. Grace recounts how punks poured bleach on the band’s merch and tagged their van—punk zine Maximum Rocknroll encouraged readers to attack Against Me! for “selling out”—but she doesn’t elaborate on why former fans would turn on the band so violently.

By Laura Jane Grace with Dan Ozzi (Hachette) Grace appears for a reading, Q&A, and book signing presented by Women & Children First Fri 12/2, 7 PM Wilson Abbey 935 W. Wilson 773-273-6865womenandchildrenfirst.com $35