The Florida punk band Against Me! has been around since 1997, has released 5 studio albums, and lead vocalist and songwriter Tom Gabel has just made a big announcement to Rolling Stone: He has suffered from gender dysphoria for years and wants to now live as a woman! He (or should I say she?) will soon take hormones and undergo electrolysis treatments, you know, to remove all this extra facial hair which does not look good on women. Wow, that is rather radical, will he do the rest? The surgery?

He said he will take the new name Laura Jane Grace, but will stay married to his wife, who has accepted the news as Tom/Laura explained: ‘For me, the most terrifying thing about this was how she would accept the news. But she's been super-amazing and understanding.’

He is lucky, because I don’t know how I would have taken the news, but on the other hand, how can you live with a potential transgender and not realize something unusual is going on? Don’t tell me she wasn’t feeling it coming!

Gabel wanted to go public, that’s why he chose to speak to Rolling Stone, and that’s very courageous,… but how could he possibly hide it? And what does it mean for the future of the band? He doesn't know yet.

‘I'm going to have embarrassing moments’, he declared to Rolling Stone, ‘and that won't be fun. But that's part of what talking to you is about – is hoping people will understand, and hoping they'll be fairly kind.’

Amusingly, Tom Gabel’s Wikipedia page has already been updated, and all the ‘he’ has been replaced by ‘she’. I still can’t do it, because technically, he is still a guy,… but he chose the name Laura, because of his mother, as he explained it in the song ‘The Ocean’, which contains the line:

‘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’

We wish him,… sorry, her, lots of luck!