Jenni Rose, the front woman and co-founder of country-punk band Vandoliers, has spoken about coming out as trans, including how one therapist helped affirm her gender identity.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Rose, who is married with a daughter, revealed that she came out as trans to her family about a year ago, and to fellow band mates Cory Graves, Mark Moncrieff, Travis Curry, Dustin Fleming and co-founder Trey Alfaro, soon after.
She admitted she’d “always been very arm’s length with people because of [being trans], I didn’t want anybody to find out”, adding: “For 36 years, I’ve tried to be anything but a trans person, and it never went away. Now, it’s going crazy.
“I know there are all these people who are kind of going back in the closet but I’m going to come out and see what happens.”
Keyboard and trumpet-player Graves, who was with Rose during the interview, said: “[You’re] yourself again… “we got a friend back that we didn’t have before.”
(@vandoliers)Rose discussed a gig the band did in drag to protest against a law in Tennessee that restricts public drag performances. The attention they got afterwards forced her to finally confront her own identity.
“I got really, really scared,” when people asked about whether anyone in the band was queer, she said. “I’d go: ‘No, we’re just a bunch of hairy dudes’, but that wasn’t true.”
Re-reading Laura Jane Grace’s Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, Rose found a sense of “familiarity,” and later realised: “I have gender dysphoria.”
This led her to seek therapy. After getting “the wrong therapist”, she found a gender therapist. “Within two sessions, she goes: ‘You are very trans’,” Rose told the music magazine.
Between that and being encouraged to go deeper while working on Vandoliers’ upcoming album, Life Behind Bars, Rose found herself touching on her gender dysphoria more and more which led to her coming out.
But now, when it comes to being Jenni, Rose said: “I’m going to try to stay in the moment. In the [past] few years, I have always thought about this light emitting from my chest. I’ve been behind a mask, and I could still feel that light, and I could still share it with people, but now it is going to be really f*cking bright.”
Rose’s coming out is set against president Donald Trump’s attack on trans rights in the US, with a ban on transgender men and women serving in the armed forces, the removal of gender markers from passports and restrictions on accessing to gender-affirming care.
Life Behind Bars is due to stream from 27 June.
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