Beastie Boys paid for trans woman’s gender-affirming surgery

Donna Lee Parsons isn’t particularly well-known in hardcore/punk circles, but she should be. She played a pivotal role in rock history.

Before she transitioned, she founded Rat Cage Records, a record label that released the Beastie Boys’ first two EPs; she signed them at their very first show. Twenty years later, after Parsons came out as trans and the band’s meteoric rise to fame, the artists quietly paid for Parson’s gender affirmation surgery.

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From actresses and models to innovators and politicians, these women laid the groundwork for the modern trans movement.

According to member Adam Horovitz, since the men knew she wouldn’t accept the money if she saw it as a charitable act, they claimed they owed her royalties from their EP Polly Wog Stew.

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Parsons died from colon cancer a year after the surgery but spent the last year of her life proudly living as the woman she wanted to be.

She started in the scene by publishing Mouth of the Rat, a punk ‘zine. After moving to New York City with her girlfriend, they started the Rat Cage Records shop and quickly launched the record label. The record shop was a hub for punk/hardcore artists and fans. The label released several famous rockers’ first albums, but none had the same success as the Beastie Boys.

While still identifying as a man, Parsons often dressed in women’s clothing and was accepted as an eccentric figure in the scene.

In 2002, on her blog, Parsons wrote, “I was deliberately trying to look like a woman in public, although I still clung to the ‘shock’ element of punk as a protective buffer. I had a very long way to go.”

She said that the first time she heard the term “transgender,” she identified with it immediately.

“I saw the light at the end of a very dark tunnel and I ran straight for it,” she wrote.

But shortly after starting to transition, she was diagnosed with cancer and started treatment. Surgery and chemotherapy followed, but the cancer returned.

“My understanding was that she was pretty much dying and that she wanted to live out the rest of the little time she had left in the body of her choosing,” Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz wrote in the Beastie Boys Book. “So [Adam] Yauch took care of it. He organized it so we gave her the money for the [gender-affirming] operation, but it was under the guise of reimbursement and unpaid back royalties for the Polly Wog Stew record from 1982. Donna got the operation and then, within a year, passed away.”

“There seems to be a temptation among many of the people who have shared memories about ‘Dave Ratcage’ to speak about Donna as if she isn’t actually the person in those stories—as if, somehow, her pre-transition accomplishments and innovations do not belong to her. But it was, in fact, Donna who founded Rat Cage Records,” Norman Brannon wrote in his anti-matter newsletter as part of a touching tribute to Parsons.

“So if you’ve ever worn a ‘lightning bolt’ t-shirt or listened to Victim in Pain or found yourself fondly recalling a Beastie Boys show you went to, you have a transgender woman to thank for that. And we should know her story. If you call yourself a hardcore kid, Donna Lee Parsons touched your life.”

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