Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong says the current moral panic over transgender young people is “f**king close-minded.”
The 51-year-old rocker made the comment in a Los Angeles Times profile published earlier this week. Armstrong and bandmates Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool spoke to the paper about the political themes on their upcoming album, Saviors. Armstrong, who is bisexual, described playing with gender in one new track, “Bobby Sox,” a love song about watching TV with his wife of nearly 30 years, Adrienne Nesser. The song includes the lyrics, “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”
“But then in the next verse,” Armstrong explained, “I thought I should flip the script.”
“I’m kind of playing the character of the woman, but it also felt really liberating to sing, ‘Do you wanna be my boyfriend?’” he continued. “It became more of a queer singalong.”
Armstrong, who has identified publicly as bisexual since at least 1995, at the height of Green Day’s success, also recalled how a friend was recently brought to tears by the “Bobby Sox” lyrics.
“Nowadays it’s more common for kids to be LGBTQ, and there’s more support,” he said. “But for us, back in the day, that was like the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that.”
Of course, as more and more young people feel comfortable coming out as queer and trans, there has been a significant backlash in recent years from anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives, as Republican politicians across the U.S. push anti-trans legislation aimed at banning access to gender-affirming care for minors and parents fret over schools that support and affirm their children’s exploration of their gender identity.
Journalist and pop music critic Mikael Wood asked Armstrong to weigh in on what he described as “the current moral panic over transgender youths.”
“I just think they’re f**king close-minded,” Armstrong said. “It’s like people are afraid of their children. Why would you be afraid? Why don’t you let your kid just be the kid that they are?”
