Country Singer Came out as Transgender Earlier This Year: Jenni Rose Opens up About Her Journey

Jenni Rose, the frontwoman and co-founder of the Texas country-punk band Vandoliers, is living her truth.

After coming out to her family and her bandmates last year, the country star came out as a trans woman to the rest of the world in an interview with Rolling Stone in April.

“For 36 years, I’ve tried to be anything but a trans person, and it never went away,” Rose told the outlet. “I know that 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.”

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Reflecting on her journey, Rose told Rolling Stone that as early as 4, she knew she “didn’t want to be a boy. But it was weird. I was stopped. I was told it was bad, because that’s what normal people would do: ‘Stop wearing dresses. Boys don’t play with dolls.’” Rose said that words like that instilled fear and shame with her, and so she hid true self from the world for several decades. It wasn’t until March 2023, when the Vandoliers performed in drag to protest against Tennessee’s law restricting public drag performances, that her “shell shattered” and she confronted her identity.

“I had worn a dress before, but it was in the dark, in private, or I was super ashamed of it,” she recalled. “Then, we went and bought dresses, and I was super happy about it… I put it on, and I felt really good. Just, Oh, I look nice! And I walked out onstage and played a great show. When It was over, I thought, ‘I was really brave today.’ The entire world got to see me in a dress the first time I wore one outside of a locked door. My shell shattered.”

Although Rose admitted that she “got really, really scared” and initially denied speculation that there was a member of the LGBTQ+ community in the band, she said about a week after the performance, she wrote in her journal, “’F–. I think I’m trans.’ I closed the book and didn’t make another journal entry for, like, two months.”

Rose said she realized she had gender dysphoria after re-reading Laura Jane Grace’s Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, and she ultimately sought therapy with a gender therapist.

“Within two sessions, she goes: ‘You are very trans,’” she said, adding that she was encouraged to go deeper as the Vandoliers began working on their album Life Behind Bars.

Rose eventually came out as a trans woman to her family in the summer of 2024, and came out to her bandmates Cory Graves, Mark Moncrieff, Travis Curry, Dustin Fleming, and Trey Alfaro later that same year.

“It’s exciting. It feels punk rock as f– to be in the trans space but in a country band,” she said.

Rose added that for now, she is “going to try to stay in the moment. In the last 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, like, really fucking bright.”