“You know, how there’s a trailer park Tammy in your life, there’s a trailer park tr*nny in your life,” Adrienne Grammer says. “It’s kind of a metaphor.”
The “trailer park tr*nny,” Grammer says, is a foil to those who attack transwomen and transmen. It’s why in her “Trailer Park Tr*nny” music video, released on September 4th, she opens with a video of Nancy Mace, the U.S. representative from South Carolina, repeatedly using an anti-trans slur during a house committee hearing.
“I honestly wanted to take back the word,” Grammer says of her choice to include such a charged word in her lyrics and title. “If anyone’s going to use it, I want it to be my people. I want it to be like, ‘Hey, you can’t offend me. I made a whole song. You can’t hate me if you’re laughing, too.’”
After all, “Trailer Park Tr*nny,” Grammer’s debut single, is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, taking typical offensive rhetoric and making it catchy, with pointed lyrics like “Her name is Kaylee Anne./ She used to be a man” or “Be careful being handy./ You just fell in love with the trailer park tr*nny.”
“There’s not that perspective of transwomen writing and also making fun of themselves,” Grammer says. “It just came to me naturally, and it’s made to kind of lighten the mood now because I think everything LGBT issues in the media is just so tense and so heavy in society. … You can hate me all day long and have these preconceived notions of trans people, but this is funny.”
For Grammer, the song came when she herself needed something lighthearted. She was in the process of a move and the stress that it brought. “I just sat down and I said, ‘I need to write something funny. I’ve been writing these songs that are so sad, but I gotta see the light of day,’” she says. “And I swear it’s just like any other time that I’ve written a song. If I don’t get it in five minutes, it’s not a good song. I just sit down and I close my eyes; the melody and the lyrics — everything — comes together. It started with the first words of the song. … I’m like, ‘Okay, wait, something’s here,’ and then I just kept writing and kept writing.”
Songwriting has always been therapeutic in that way. She’s been musical since childhood, she says, always singing and into musical theater as a teen. But the songwriting didn’t truly come until her early twenties. “I started my transition then,” she says. “I just was lost personally, and in the best way possible, my transition was a lot more authentic, and I felt a lot more comfortable. So even though I had written songs before, this was just much more like coming from a truer place.”
Her songs vary in subject matter; not all of them are as satirical as “Trailer Park Tr*nny.” “I write from a place of being raised in the Deep South,” she says. “I lived in McDuffie County, Georgia, all of my life, until I was 19 and moved here.”
At that time, Grammer had moved to Memphis for her late fiancé Jay King, who died in a plane crash in 2022. “There’s a lot of articles about me locally because [of how my fiancé died],” she says. “I have yet to really reclaim my name, so I want to get my music out there. I want people to hear this, and I want people in Memphis, most importantly, to hear my music because this city means so, so much to me. I could have left and went back home after Jay passed away, but something told me to stay here.”
Earlier this year, at 26, she released as an independent artist her first single, “Trailer Park Tr*nny” — a song she says that’s been nearly two years in the making. “There’s no better time than now because I feel like I just feel like it breaks the ice.”
She has plans for an album, the genre, like her single, being country. “I feel like country music is not inclusive by and large [in audience and in artists], but there’s such a demographic for people like me,” she says. “There are a lot of people of the community that were raised in these small towns, just like me, trying to get somewhere and get out and go somewhere where you have people that are like-minded and like you, but there’s this underground kind of niche for it. And if it’s not underground, it’s definitely becoming more popular.
“It’s definitely tricky being the niche that I am and trying to figure out performing and who’s gonna book me,” Grammar adds. “But at the end of the day, art is art, and I love the city like the back of my hand.”