On being a trans rocker

Glam-punk rocker Venus de Mars has always blended activism with her art, and so it was when she performed at the No Kings rally at the Minnesota Capitol in March. As a transgender woman, the actions and rhetoric of the Trump administration are deeply personal.

She chose to play “Take My Shoulder,” a song that advocates unity over violence. Just her and her guitar, she sang – “I could be you/ You could be me/ We struggle onwards/ And desperately” – eliciting a roar of support from the massive crowd.

“[The song is] basically trying to counter violence and encourage people to see the connections of each other and take the time to come together rather than push each other away,” de Mars said over coffee at Sisters' Sludge in South Minneapolis.

De Mars performed the same song at No Kings in June 2025, which was held just hours after the assassination of Representative and Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the shooting of Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.

The rally was under heightened security, with some performers canceling altogether. Here, de Mars played a second piece, “Even With Scars.” Released as a celebratory single, it had taken on a more somber meaning when it was stripped down to an acoustic version that de Mars played at two separate memorials for trans men who had lost their lives.

“It became more survival [oriented], getting through hardship,” she said.

Performing these solo pieces is different from playing with All The Pretty Horses, the glam-punk band de Mars formed in 1993. While the Horses are what de Mars calls an “atmospheric band” – showy, boisterous, full of swagger – her acoustic work is “almost surgical.”

She said, “It’s very raw. It’s very sharp. It’s pretty brutal sometimes. It’s a different energy. It’s like a grief and thankfulness and hopefulness.”

Being underground
Being on stage in front of 200,000 people would have been unimaginable a few years ago, her music career having been steeped in the underground. As a kid, she drew inspiration from the early punk days of the Plasmatics’ Wendy O. Williams and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust.

“Ultimately it was [Bowie’s] willingness to be visually experimental, with gender, sexuality, which really spoke to me, although I didn’t know what to do with it at the time,” she said. When she later came out as trans and formed a band, she ran with that energy.

Already pushing boundaries in performance art, de Mars wanted to bring being trans to the broader audience of the rock and roll world – to make herself comfortable as well as anyone else who might be trans.

She saw other artists out there who she senses were at least gender fluid. But they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – fully express it. Prince, for example.

“He fell into a very heterosexual, edgy sexuality that was safe but still real edgy… he [pushed the envelope by] bringing in femininity in his own presentation. But he wouldn’t cross that line,” said de Mars. “We’ll never know what was going on with him, but I suspect that he may have had a deeper understanding of the trans community than he wanted to reveal.”

Seeing where other prominent performers weren’t seizing the opportunity to make a difference made de Mars determined to be the person who did.

Being out and visible
Right out of the gate, de Mars determined that she would be visible. She learned early on that the stage was her safest space, where she could be her full self even as she was trying to understand what that was. Wearing pasties was a deliberate choice to show people she wasn’t pretending, putting on an act; this was her.

She refused to change or adapt in public as well, which took its toll. She described going from a parked car to a club as a “nightmare,” a “gauntlet of ridicule.” Even in bigger cities – New York, Paris, London – she was frequently met with hostility.

“I was kind of more gender ambiguous, gender fluid, non-binary, but back then we’d say androgynous. So I confused people, and they didn’t like it, and they let me know,” she said.

It became apparent that when she and her wife, Lynette Reini-Grandell, traveled together, de Mars needed to build in time to recharge. Being subjected to public diminishment continually for one-to-two weeks was a form of oppression that was hard to escape.

Her wife didn’t understand why de Mars didn’t just tie her hair back or not put on makeup or blend in more to make it easier.

“She couldn’t understand that was not something I was capable of doing. That would’ve meant they won,” said de Mars. There wasn’t a community, or support dialogue, or even language to describe her experience.

Navigating the music scene was challenging, too.

“A lot of the clubs just didn’t want to have anything to do with us. We got blacklisted from some,” she said. “They just didn’t want to touch anything trans. It was too bizarre for them.”

Attitudes shifted
And then public attitude shifted. De Mars pointed to three cultural tipping points that created a pivotal time for trans visibility and acceptance.

First, Laura Jane Grace, an already-established musician in the punk scene, came out as transgender. In 2012, Rolling Stone published a feature, “The secret life of Transgender Rocker Laura Jane Grace” which got the conversation going in the rock and roll world.

Then in 2013, the popular Netflix show, “Orange is the New Black,” reached a wide audience as the first series in which a transgender character was played by an openly trans actor – LaVerne Cox as Sophia Burset.

Another show, “Transparent,” touched on important themes, de Mars felt. But in that series the father who came out as a trans woman was played by Jeffrey Tambor, a cisgender man.

And, in 2015, former Olympic medalist Caitlyn Jenner came out publicly as transgender, which opened up the conversation within the conservative crowd.

Together, these moments in pop culture transformed societal perceptions of trans individuals for everyday people.

“It kind of got a lot of people brave enough to come out and be themselves, be authentic,” said de Mars. She recalls it taking a couple of shows into her tour with Laura Jane Grace to realize she was performing for an audience of trans kids and their parents – a first for her.

“I’m very aggressively trans on stage,” said de Mars. And because in the 1980s and 1990s society viewed trans people as predators and pedophiles, she intentionally kept her distance from anybody younger than her. So when she found herself at a merch booth talking to kids who had just seen her on stage asking to take photographs with her and saw it was their parents who were the ones taking the pictures, this was new. Parents even told her it was so good to see role models on stage.

“I could not have imagined it happening,” she said.

Conservative pushback
This broad trans acceptance brought almost immediate pushback from the religious right, de Mars discovered. Conservative Political Action Conference affiliated politicians began trying to put restrictions in place for trans people. Yet in 2016, a bathroom ban that passed in North Carolina was met with such huge backlash – social and financial– that they repealed it.

“We all celebrated it because we felt like we won. It was the corporate world, and it was decisive,” said de Mars. But the law didn’t go away forever. Flash forward, and now North Carolina is one of 21 states that have some kind of ban on transgender people using public bathrooms and facilities according to their gender identity.

Bans on sports participation, gender affirming care and books with LGBTQ+ themes are popping up around the country. When Trump took office for a second time, his administration embraced these red-state laws and is now waging its own campaign at the federal level.

“Our administration is trying to portray the trans community as an enemy society, which is a very typical fascist, authoritarian technique,” said de Mars. “You have to find a common enemy to rally people behind.”

As de Mars explains it: Authoritarians gain power by manipulating people’s strongest emotions, in this case fear and revulsion. It doesn’t matter if what they say isn’t true or scientifically based, they’re tapping into some of the strongest emotions people have.

The queer community has always been an easy target; in 1933 Nazi Germany, more than 20,000 books from the Institute for Sexual Science, which researched the trans community (though the terminology was different then), were burned after the institute was ransacked by a student organization.

Today the oppression is presented in commercials, publications, rhetoric, and the removal of language and references from history centers and libraries.

Travel advisory
Travel is now becoming increasingly dangerous for transgender individuals. This year, transgender journalist Erin Reed added a third state to the Do Not Travel list on her Anti-Trans Risk Assessment Map: Kansas joins Texas and Florida as places with some of the worst laws targeting trans people. This has obvious implications for touring trans musicians, particularly those in underground bands who rely on rest stops and hotels to use the bathroom.

Now de Mars, along with any trans person traveling across some state lines, is at risk of being arrested for using the “wrong” restroom. She no longer drives to gigs in Texas and Kansas, choosing to fly into select cities instead.

The attacks on gender affirming care hit home for de Mars, too. She faced numerous obstacles accessing this care in earlier days – lack of availability, no insurance coverage and extremely high costs. Navigating approval systems involved jumping over hurdle after hurdle, and it took a lot of self-advocacy for de Mars to get approval for hormone therapy.

De Mars first came out in 1988. Coverage of gender confirmation surgery began around 2014. It would be 2018 before de Mars would take this major step for herself.

It took an emotional toll as she and her wife explored its potential impact on their marriage. (Reini-Gandell has a memoir titled “Wild Things: A Trans-Glam-Punk-Rock Love Story,” and de Mars is writing a memoir of her own. Their story is also featured in the 2003 documentary, “Venus of Mars”).

An island in a rising sea
While Minnesota continues to hold the line for trans rights, the Trump administration is still on the offensive, creating a volley of lawsuits and counter suits.

Recently, the State of Minnesota, in a coalition of 21 states and the District of Columbia, won a federal lawsuit protecting gender affirming care from attempts by the administration to withhold Medicare and Medicaid funding to hospitals and clinics who provide these services.

Minnesota now has the largest self-reported per capita population of trans adults in the country, according to the Williams Institute. Here, trans people are finding what OutFront Minnesota Executive Director Kat Rohn calls “a cultural value of care and protection” that goes beyond having policies in place or champions in office.

But Minnesota’s status as a trans refuge state doesn’t mean it’s immune to the threats seen elsewhere. The same bills pop up. “I can’t underscore enough that this fall’s election will have serious consequences, good or bad, for the state of LGBTQ rights in our state,” said Rohn. “People will need to get involved to ensure pro-equality majorities continue to exist here.”

Asked how it feels to be in Minnesota in this political landscape, de Mars said, “I feel like I’m on an island with an ever-rising tide.”

She’s had to contemplate the possibility of relocating to Canada or Mexico if her passport is revoked.

“That is a constant now in my mind. I have a house. I’ve got a recording studio. I have a career. Lynette has her horse. I have my kitties. I don’t want to leave the country,” she said. “Right now, I feel as long as I can be effective, and I can work to counter it, it’s more important for me to stay and to do that and to do everything I can.”

But if her existence becomes illegal and she’s faced with incarceration, she may opt to leave in order to continue speaking up.

At a recent ACLU fundraiser at Hook & Ladder with All The Pretty Horses, de Mars played an amped up version of “Even With Scars,” putting the full weight of the band behind it: “We are free/ Free as the stars/ Even with scars.”

Same strength. Same power. Louder.
“My community is under attack,” she told the crowd under the outdoor canopy. “It’s going to take all of us.”