On finding my voice.

April 26, 2022

I’ve been feeling a lot of dysphoria about my voice.

Unlike trans masc folks who take testosterone, a trans feminine person who takes estrogen will not experience a change in their voice.

You can think of your voice as a combination of different instruments, each working together to create a unique set of sounds that our binary world classifies as either male or female. For folks who went through a testosterone-dominant puberty, that instrument thickens and becomes more dense, deepening the resonance that it produces. When trans masculine people take testosterone, it triggers this process.

As a trans woman, HRT did not change my voice. Because of dysphoria, I was compelled to find a way to sound more feminine. I spent hours learning about how the voice worked, doing exercises to play my instrument better, and painfully practicing in public. I learned how to make my speech patterns more musical, added a cadence of upspeak to my sentences, and I modified my vocabulary to sound “more like a woman”. I did all of this because of dysphoria.

Eventually, I began to notice that my voice was passing. Instead of misgendering me, people would make comments about how “powerful” my voice is. A TSA agent once asked if I was on the radio.

But with all of this validation, I still feel dysphoria about my voice. Dysphoria is not logical or predictable. Mine correlates almost exclusively with my depressive episodes. And once it’s in your head, it’s like a voice that never shuts up. It puts you on edge during every interaction.

I have yet to find a way to properly explain dysphoria to the cis people in my life. All I ask is that you take our word for it when we express how painful it is.

We are now seeing states move on from children, to proposing bans on gender-affirming healthcare for adults. There is absolutely no chance I would be alive today if I couldn’t access that care.

My primary source of dysphoria comes from my singing voice. When I’m low, I hate my inability to sing along with most female vocalists. But on the upswings, I sing without reservation.

This is Welcome by Hey Rosetta, and my first performance as Grace.