The death threats were the first clue. On Friday, March 7th, Laura Jane Grace played her new song, “Your God (God’s Dick),” at a Bernie Sanders “Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here” event in Wisconsin. A bawdy, and, yes, profane, sing-along, the track was meant to be a protest against the religious right’s censoring and discriminating against trans people. But to right-wing influencers and politicians, it was just blasphemy.
“I’m not being profane to be profane,” Grace says. “I’m not just saying ‘dick’ to say ‘dick.’ I’m asking a genuine question. If you refer to your God as he and him, but you will not refer to a transgender person with the pronouns that are theirs… that’s just insane. It’s such blatant hypocrisy. You can’t prove God exists with biology or chromosomes. So if you’re gonna throw science continually in my face, let’s stick to that: Your god doesn’t exist.”
All subtext and messaging was lost on right-wing figures like Robby Starbuck, though, a former music video director (Asking Alexandria, Smashing Pumpkins, Yellowcard) turned conservative activist. He tweeted earlier this week: “Bernie Sanders just had the transgender singer of Against Me sing a song that says: ‘Does your God have a big fat d*ck? Cause it feels like he’s fucking me’ and ‘Does he shoot wads of honey and c*m twice on Easter Sunday?’ This is who the Democrats are now. Pure evil.” Meanwhile, Libs of TikTok misgendered Grace, posting: “Bernie Sanders THANKED transgender singer Laura Jane Grace for his music after he performed a degenerate, disgusting, anti-Christian song about ‘Gods big fat d***.’” Newly minted Christian conservative Russell Brand — who has been accused of various acts of sexual impropriety in the past — also posted to X about the performance, consistently misgendering Grace and calling the track “blasphemous.”
Grace says the song was well-received at the event, though, which was, essentially, a protest against the current state of America, which, under the Trump administration is apparently trying to erase trans people. “That song is the most relevant song I have right now to everything that’s going on,” Grace says, stressing that she ran the track by Sanders’ team first. “It’s a little profane, but out of all the songs I played, that was the one everyone connected with immediately. It’s a straight-up protest song. I don’t know what else that event was supposed to be other than a protest rally.”
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Grace only learned about the backlash when Sanders’ team called to make sure she was OK, since they were receiving threats. “And then I saw Tim Pool did an episode devoted entirely to me, I was like, ‘Oh shit. This really took off.’” Pool, a political commentator and podcast host, is a self-professed “OG” fan of Grace and her band Against Me!, who says his fandom ended when Grace came out as trans in 2012. “I believe Laura Jane Grace largely weaponized being trans for money, and this is coming from somebody who was deeply influenced and was a fan before… the transition,” he said on his podcast, going on to deadname Grace.
Pool also claimed that friends of his witnessed Grace copping to coming out for money at a 2012 Chicago show. “I have no idea what the fuck he was talking about,” Grace says. “He made up some moment about me being onstage in Chicago and confessing or something like that. I can produce a doctors’ note saying ‘this person is transgender,’ which is essentially what you have to get to give to a doctor when you get FFS like I’ve had, or the letter the psychologist had to write for me so that an endocrinologist would prescribe me HRT. I’ve jumped through all the hoops they put in front of me, it’s never enough, that’s what shows you these people are full of shit.”
Grace also showed Rolling Stone a screenshot of a message Pool sent to her in 2016: “Your music was a huge influence on me in my skateboarding anarcho youth phase. I used to cover Against Me! busking in the Chicago subway. I’d love to help in any way! Stoked to read your book.” That book was Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, which deals largely with Grace’s gender identity. When asked for comment on this message, Pool wrote in an email: “I’m a huge fan of Laura’s earlier work. My disappointment with Grace is the ‘shock’ attempt at getting attention by being vulgar. Regardless, I will still play and sing Grace’s work though as I get older I can see sometimes the younger Grace’s lyrics were naive. I do find it beautifully ironic to see Grace perform at a rally for a prominent Democrat.”
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Grace says she wrote the track last summer when she was awarded a grant from the Onassis Foundation to work on a record in Athens, Greece. “Part of the experience was I had to check in every once in a while and give progress reports,” she says, adding that she played a stringed instrument called the baglamas on the track, which is used in Greek protest music. “And I was like, ‘Well, I wrote this song,’ and had to really sit there and break it down, where it was coming from, the thoughts behind it, the meaning to the lyrics.”
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“As a trans person, you continually have chromosomes and DNA thrown in your face,” she adds. “So it’s a genuine question. Do you literally believe that there’s a guy in the sky with a beard and robes? And where does that end? What’s under the robes? Does he have nipples? Does he have a cock? Is that the limit of your imagination? Plus,” she continues, “It gives that kind of good energy that I think for sure the fucking right wing is lacking because all their music is shit, and all they got is motherfuckers like Russell Brand up there — and he’s boring as fuck.”
“Your God” dropped in February via Laura Jane Grace In the Trauma Tropes, one of Grace’s many side project bands. It’s the first track off a full-length album that she wrote during her time in Greece. “That was the song that I presented at the end as my thesis statement of the whole record. I’m really, really proud of it,” she says.
