I caught this This American Life piece about a trans guy’s experience with his voice as a singer on NPR on Friday, and wow did I get a lot of Feelings from it (in a positive sense! It’s a very good piece and you should listen to it!)

Voice Over - This American Life: Sandy Allen tells the story of learning to play an instrument that suddenly sounds very different — his own voice. (19 minutes)

The first roughly half of the piece is about hesitancy about going on T and that’s currently disc-horse on twitter and I don’t feel the need/want to get into it loll, but it’s a good perspective on it. But after that it’s about him working through his vocal changes and voice breaks and such, and it was so interesting for me to listen to his experience with it, cause when that happened to me it was like, traumatic, almost.

In 8th grade, I was still more or less a soprano, and in the all-boys choir that you had to be in to be in the honor choir (‘'’girls’’’ had to be in the all-girls choir) the soprano section was like me and a bunch of 6th graders. In the honor choir itself (or maybe it was just my standard curricular choir, I’m not sure) I was also able to be a soprano/alto, and I was learning that part for the final concert of the year, along with a handful of ‘'’other’’’ boys. Until, they decided that they wanted to go and just be tenors, and I was the only ‘'’boy’’’ left among the altos/sopranos (I know they’re not one thing I just can’t remember which one I was in specifically). And it felt really uncomfortable to me in a way I couldn’t quite articulate, even though I loved, loved, loved singing high! And I was literally weighing my options, this feeling of uncomfortability about being feminine(? or something like that?) vs, and I literally remember thinking something like this, that this’ll be the last chance I have to sing in this range that I love. And I ended up making the decision, and getting up without saying anything to the director and quietly moving to the tenor section of the risers, in front of everyone. He asks “oh, are you gonna be a tenor?” and I’m like, “yep”. And I ended up being right about what I was thinking, that was the last chance that I had to sing in a high range.

Then in high school, the freshman choir was split by gender (or by alto/soprano / tenor/bass but like, you know) and I was held back at the end of the year for, not being able to harmonize well at that point? Something like that, I don’t remember exactly. And so at the start of sophomore year, I’m maybe 2 weeks into my gender existential crisis and I’m in a ‘'’boy’’'’s choir. And I’m a tenor 1 (the tenor part that tends to sing the higher parts), and like, it could be worse. I still really like singing, and I got used to singing tenor the year before without any gender baggage attached - though at that point I am realizing that I actually do have a shitton of voice dysphoria, and am wanting to dig my larynx out of my throat with a spoon. But it’s not as bad when I’m singing, and I can at least do vocal warm-ups like an octave higher than the rest of the choir cause nobody can really notice.

And then, at the start of 2nd semester, we do another round of voice tests. And the long-term substitute we had (cause the normal teacher was on paternity leave for 6 weeks) places me as a baritone. And I just really really really really dislike the feeling of that but can’t say why without, y’know. So he ends up being the second person I ever come out to, after my parents just 2 weeks prior. I’m trying to explain after class why I don’t want to be a baritone and he’s like “but you’d be a good fit!” and I wait til I’m the only kid left in the classroom and am like, “um, the reason I don’t want to sing baritone is because I’m transgender ,,,,”

And alll that to give context to how it felt to listen to another trans person talk about going through those same changes, but in an intentional and gender-affirming and joyous way, in the end. And for a little bit, he expresses similar feelings of having “lost” a voice, but he comes out the other side really loving his new one. And him singing at the end of the piece, with a more stabilized masc voice, feeling confident and content in it, made me tear up.

He also says he specifically loves the sound of it specifically as a trans voice, which I’ve grown to love my voice for as well. I haven’t done very much voice training, but the little I have makes this graph ring very true for me, lmao:

a hand-drawn graph. in the bottom-left corner, there's a small section labeled "dude". in the top-right corner, there's a small section labeled "woman". the rest of the area of the graph is labeled "fruity canyon".

And do I want to do more voice training, and be able to sing comfortably in a high range? Yes, absolutely. But I’m sorta content with my voice as it is, certainly more than I was 3 years ago, and I think that’s what matters.

I originally wrote this as a twitter thread but decided to put it as a post here to serve as a more canonical version of the writing.