David Bowie, Steven Tyler, Marilyn Manson, the New York Dolls, glam rock, hair bands — in the annals of rock and roll, androgyny goes with the territory.
But if it’s commonplace to blur gender roles in performance, it’s another matter when a male rocker decides to live as a woman.
Earlier this month Rolling Stone broke the story of Tommy Gabel, the lead singer for the acclaimed Gainesville punk band Against Me! He announced that he’s about to transition to becoming a female, the most prominent rock performer ever to make such an announcement.
But before that news came out, a similar odyssey had already begun to unfold in Tampa. That’s when Matt Turner, 24, of the ska/punk/hardcore band Paranoia Dance Party! took the first steps toward becoming Madison “Maddie” Turner.
Maddie’s not the first local musician to undergo a change of gender. But given the hard-edged macho vibe of the punk fan base, you might have thought there’d be a huge backlash against a male performer in that genre becoming a female. And it’s true that PDP!, which released several records and toured nationally during its four-year career, disbanded right around the same time as the emergence of Maddie.
But band members insist the breakup had nothing to do with that. Maddie Turner agrees, saying that the reaction to her coming out as a transgender woman (except for her father, who doesn’t quite understand it all) has been almost universally positive.
Part of the reason may be the way Matt/Maddie has gone about telling world.
A week after Matt informed the band of his decision, he announced on Facebook, not that he was transgendering, but that he would be cross-dressing. At that point, he wasn’t sure just how much to reveal. But since then, Maddie has blogged about her transition step by step — controlling her own narrative on Facebook and YouTube in a way that reflects changes taking place, not just in rock, but in society as a whole.
Matt Turner grew up in the Carrollwood area, attending Sickles High School. It was there that he discovered punk and ska and hardcore, going to the State Theatre and Skatepark to see bands like Reel Big Fish and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
While at Sickles, he began promoting shows (something he did up to last year) before creating Paranoia Dance Party! in 2008. Guitarist Tyler Rosenberg recalls that one of the band’s ambitions was to become a touring outfit, and tour they did — throughout the Northeast and deep into the Midwest.
The band’s sound, as described in 2009 in tbt by Julie Garisto (now CL’s A&E Editor), was “dance music gone berserk.” In concert, Turner belted out his lyrics aggressively; “screamy,” Maddie calls it now. She says there’s not that much of a contradiction between that public persona and her current delivery, adding that there are plenty of female-fronted bands that sound similar.
Rosenberg remembers the day Turner pulled the band aside after practice to inform them that he was going to begin dressing as a girl. “We were all kind of shocked,” he says, then quickly adds, “Nobody was obviously against that or anything like that.”
The band’s split followed a stressful tour that didn’t turn out as successfully as they’d hoped. Meanwhile, Matt had begun feeling like a hypocrite for singing songs that emphasized, “Just be who you are.”
The urge to change gender was becoming overwhelming.
“I remember being in the back of the tour van wearing gym shorts. They were baggy and I was looking at my hairy legs and just being disgusted. I would close my eyes, and I knew this girl Christina that would tour with other bands, and I would pretend that I looked the exact same as her — it would comfort me.” The masculine body Maddie occupied “wasn’t who I was. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong,” she remembers saying to herself.
At the beginning of February Maddie began taking hormones: estradiol (estrogen), medroxyprogesterone (which helps breast growth), other anti-testosterones. She’s also doing laser hair removal.
But Maddie’s not sure she wants to undergo sex reassignment surgery (which costs an estimated $40,000) or some of the other operations that a male transitioning to a female might undergo, such as tracheal shaves (removing the Adam’s apple) to reduce the cartilage in the throat and make the shape more feminine. Nor is she of the mindset to get breast implants; Gwen Stefani, she points out, is an example of a woman who’s beautiful without being particularly well-endowed.
Maddie says this is how the whole process has worked for her. “I’m just seeing where I’m comfortable about myself.”
Sara Crawley, an associate professor of sociology at USF, understands that sentiment. She says that for transgender people, the primary focus is not so much about “medicalizing” their bodies as it is about how they’re seen in the world. “Once one becomes comfortable with the way one gets to interact in the social world, perhaps one wants to have all kinds of surgeries, and perhaps not.”
The desire to feel comfortable with oneself is a driving factor for many making the transition.
Michael Keefe is executive director of Trans*Action Florida (formerly known as FORGE), a statewide advocacy group for the transgendered community. He believes there are around 3,500 transgendered people in the Tampa Bay area (an estimate by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute puts the U.S. population at 700,000). He says that transitioning was the best thing he could have done for himself on an emotional and spiritual level. But financially? He was laid off over three years ago, and life’s been hard.
The recession has been tough on most people, of course, but the unemployment numbers for the transgender community are pretty miserable.
According to a study released last year by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality, the 6,450 people who responded had experienced unemployment at twice the rate of the general population at the time of the study.
Mark Davis is communications manager for the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. He says unemployment is the number one issue facing the transgender community.
“Without that foundation, it puts you and your family at a higher risk for experiencing challenges in accessing health care and accessing a safe place to call home.”
Maddie Turner is still making music (she’s doing a “solo folk/punk” gig at SkatePark of Tampa’s Transitions Gallery later this summer), but to pay the bills she has a job at a business that specializes in delivering food. That’s working out well, but a year ago she was fired from a nationally known steakhouse franchise. It’s the only time she’s faced outright discrimination since her transition began.
The manager at the time told Maddie that she couldn’t wear makeup or wear her hair long, and that she could only be called Matt or Matthew “or else we can’t have you working here.” She asked to speak with Human Resources, but was told there was no such office on the premises. When she told the manager she was transitioning, he requested a doctor’s diagnosis, which she didn’t have at the time.
Maddie contacted Lambda Legal, but they told her that without a paper trail there was little they could do. “I just needed to move on. It was just a serving job. If it was a salaried office job I would have pursued it, but I was like, ‘Well, he’s a bigot. See you later.’”
But there was good news recently in this department. In April the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that trans people are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a ruling that Mark Davis with the Trangender Law Center calls a “game-changer.” The ruling means that transgender people fired or not hired because of who they are can file a discrimination complaint in the 34 states in the U.S. that don’t have laws protecting trans people (Tampa, Dunedin and Gulfport are the only Bay area cities that offer such protection).
At a recent support group meeting for transgender people at the Metro Wellness and Community Center in Ybor City, three people in various levels of transitioning from men to women discussed their situations in a session led by Jasmine Chayse, who works with Trans*Action Florida.
With the Memorial Day weekend approaching, Tara talked of her apprehensions about a family gathering in North Carolina, where she was determined that everybody call her by her new female name. She declared that the only time she considers not identifying herself as Tara “is when I’m collecting a paycheck.”
A transgender person named Sara said she let one of her friends spread the news about her transition. “They either accept me as I am or they just stick the fuck out of my life. Go away. I don’t need the hassles,” she said.
Like a therapist, Jasmine took it all in before telling the group, “You’re not going to change some people. Is it worth the effort? You’re fighting an idea.”
Tara then discussed a Facebook invite she’d recently received from her sister, addressed to her new female persona. “It’s kinda cool.” Some family members have been extremely understanding about her situation; others, not so much.
Jasmine chimed in again. “You’re going to get a certain amount of family — the original presentation as a male is there. They don’t lose it,” she said, explaining why family members shouldn’t be faulted for referring to one’s previous name.
The conversation turned to shopping for women’s clothes and salespeople’s reactions. Jasmine, who’s considerably older than the rest of the group (when asked how old, she gives the Jack Benny line of being 39, but does admit to having a son nearing 50), pointed out that attitudes are dramatically more friendly now than when she used to shop for bras, when she’d get dirty looks or admonitions of “Why would you need one?”
A Native American, she says growing up in her culture you “didn’t dare let anybody know you were gay.” Now, though, “Young people are more adaptable because of growing up with LGBT ideology.”
Certainly Madison Turner is a product of her generation, a generation that isn’t about to keep a major life change a secret.
Via her YouTube channel, she’s let every one of her friends in on every part of the process of becoming female, and she’s allowing others to comment on her situation.
USF sociology professor Crawley — a transgender-identified person herself — says this openness is a relatively new phenomenon, suggesting there’s less risk involved in coming out as transgender. “Because people are able to live without serious threat of violence — not that everybody does — but if you feel you can live openly about not only who you want to be but about your past, I think it’s a signal that some of the stigma about transitioning is reducing.”
Not that she or anyone is naïve enough to think the stigma has gone away entirely.
Until recently, Madison’s job included making food deliveries sometimes late at night in sketchy neighborhoods, and when she did she’d wear male clothing to be safe.
But even that precaution may not be necessary anymore; when a rush of orders compelled her to leave her desk job one day and make a delivery as a woman, she said there were no problems.
So what’s next for her?
A self-described “nerd” who enjoys computer games, she’d like to broadcast such games, perhaps working with EA Sports.
She has a new girlfriend, a local schoolteacher whom she met online and has been dating since early March. Maddie says she was open and up front on her profile about being transgender — her new mate is cisgender (defined as a person who identifies as the gender he or she was assigned at birth). She says things are going well and they’re currently looking to rent and apartment and move in together.
“I just have to be myself, keep moving on,” she says. “I have a positive attitude. And I encourage everyone to tell the truth. I encourage you all to be who you are, because a weight will be lifted off your shoulders, no matter what it is, you don’t have to be transgender. Just be honest.”
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2012.