Even after LeSesne was accidentally outed by a swimming instructor at school, her mother forbade her from living in her true gender, forcing her into a sort of limbo where although her classmates knew she wasn’t a boy, she was still forced to perform as one. Still, there was one light in the darkness: at a summer job making fundraising calls for the National Organization for Women during her senior year of high school, her coworkers and supervisor actively encouraged her to present as a woman. “It was the first job I could be myself at,” remembers LeSesne.
LeSesne’s musical instincts would soon draw her towards another place where living as herself seemed possible: the rave scene. Desperate for a job and fascinated by bands like Lords of Acid, LeSesne sold her guitar, borrowed her brother’s old turntables, and began teaching herself how to create electronic music, gaining quick online buzz for her remix of Blondie’s “Atomic.” LeSesne, a Buddhist, found that “within the sounds, textures and beats there was a way of connecting with people, conveying emotions, asking questions, putting forth ideas and experiences, or telling a story.” For her, drum & bass became a conduit to the “web of interconnected consciousness” that is humanity. But in the flesh, the rave scene proved less hospitable. “Everybody knew I was trans, but the one guy that was willing to let me play…at the beginning of the night when nobody was there — he didn’t want Jordana showing up, is what he flat-out told me,” LeSesne recounts. “That’s what I had to deal with.”
Still, LeSesne developed a rapport with fellow D&B trendsetter Carlos Souslinger and his label Jungle Sky, and Worlds became her first of three solo albums with the label released as 1.8.7 (a name LeSesne chose both because it was genderless, and because of an incident in which she “murdered” another DJ’s speaker with a thunderous bass note; “you 1.8.7’d it,” he told her). But LeSesne had never intended for her first album to be released with any association to her deadname, and as she prepared her sophomore outing, she knew it would have to be as herself, come what may.
In 1998, the storm finally rolled in. LeSesne’s Quality Rolls hit shelves in August, alongside news of her transition. It was to be the album that cemented her place in music history; unlike the conceptual and somewhat jazzy Worlds, Quality Rolls is 72 minutes of concentrated dance power, from the funky and in-your-face “Rock the Party” to the epic “Jerusalem.” Flyer Magazine publisher Daniel Shumate praised the album’s “truckloads of chunky, sub-bass thuds,” judging that Lesesne was “arguably the first and remains one of few Americans to fully master the art of jungle beat production.” Her tours expanded, taking her as far afield as Tel Aviv. Prominent British dance magazine Mixmag featured LeSesne en femme on the cover of their July 1998 issue, alongside the proclamation “This Is Not a Publicity Stunt.” But though LeSesne expressed her desire to talk about the music rather than her identity (“I think the music speaks for itself,” she told the Philadelphia City Paper), there were plenty of thematic Easter eggs for trans fans in tracks like “Deep Stealth” and “Cross the Line.” Soon after Quality Rolls’ release, the music video for LeSesne’s “We Are Not Alone” would make her the first trans woman to have a video on MTV.
By 2000, LeSesne’s surgical transition had been completed, and she embarked on tour for her third album, The Cities Collection, another conceptual work with each track encapsulating the vibe of a different major American city. By the end of the year, her contract would be up, and her manager had told her she had people interested in her at Sony. But on February 23rd, 2000, during a fateful tour stop in Kent, Ohio, LeSesne was attacked by two men and knocked out while leaving the venue after her performance.
