'And if I could have chosen': Trans singer confronts bigotry
Monday, June 18, 2012
By Alexander Billet
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51356News that a popular front-man is about to become a front-woman might not stir such intense buzz if we lived in a world that was truly sexually liberated.
Hell, it might not even be "news," just another instance of an individual becoming more like the person they envision themselves to be; end of story.
We don't live in that world, though. The furor over Tom Gabel amply reveals that.
[...]
HitFix's Katie Hasty said: "A man who sings in a hard rock band becoming a woman is a jolt to the system, in part, because it's a hard rock band. Speaking purely in generalizations, it's a genre and an entertainment space dominated by men, perceivably for men... [and] has some codes of machismo.
"While certain spaces generally embrace icons of androgyny or ambiguities of sexual preference (just read any sufficient history of punk), rock 'n' roll as originally a counter-culture has been lab-manufactured in years past into a norm, with 'normal' expectations.
"When a singer is gay, or cross-dresses, there's still that initial shock. When a singer of a well-known band becomes a different gender altogether ... it's an exclamation."
