Boyfriend

Boyfriend

Against Me!

The third track on Against Me!’s album Shape Shift With Me. The album focuses on dating and romance from a transgender perspective.

The song focuses on dating someone who still sees the narrator as masculine, treating her like a “boyfriend” when she’s really a girl. Laura has said that for her, dating is a dysphoric experience because she finds herself wondering why the other person is attracted to her: “Is it the fading masculinity that you see in me, or is it the emerging femininity?”

The same year the Against Me! song was released, Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara released their eighth studio album, which coincidentally also included a song called “Boyfriend,” where they sing “You treat me like a boyfriend.” As Laura Jane Grace recounts in diymag:

There was a funny coincidence with our song “Boyfriend,” where Tegan and Sara released a song recently called “Boyfriend,” and I heard it, and I was like “Oh my god.” I immediately reached out to Tegan and I was like “we’re subconsciously connected right now, in like a psychic way,” because we both have this song that is basically expressing the same thing from a different standpoint. As a listener, how you take in Tegan or Sara singing the words “you treated me like a boyfriend” as a queer woman [is different to] a trans woman saying that, based on even the way the voice sounds. How would society take that coming from us? Because really, when it comes down to it, I’m interested in that as a gender anarchist.