To T or not to T
For transmasculine singers, the choice to undergo hormone replacement therapy—to take "T," or testosterone—is rarely a simple one. The author, Woody Knight, a nonbinary trans man, discusses his transition to testosterone, which he believes causes physical changes at a slower rate than intramuscular testosterone injections. He initially refused to transition as he was afraid of being visibly trans or visibly a man, and was reluctant to lose his alto singing voice due to its thickening and potential deepening. He returned to the testosterone a year later due to frustration over being misgendered and resumed daily applications of the gel. Despite this, he remains committed to his nonbinary identity as a singer and is recording his first album this summer. The author acknowledges that testosterone affects every trans man differently, but acknowledges that it doesn't matter how much it affects the individual person.
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The first time I started testosterone, I stayed on it for three months. The 2022 edition of my four-piece band was only a few months old. After I was done fishing around online for “street ’mones” that spring, a transmasculine homie gave me several months of T gel as a gift to begin my own transition.
T gel causes physical changes at a much slower rate than intramuscular testosterone injections, but I wasn’t ready even for that. I was terrified of what my family would think; I was scared of transphobic social repercussions if I were visibly trans or even visibly a man. I wanted specific changes (body hair, bottom growth, increased muscle mass) and not others (deepening voice, acne, potential balding), but with hormone therapy you can’t pick and choose. My internalized transphobia told me that having a beard and breasts at the same time (even if only briefly) would be ugly. And I wasn’t ready to lose my alto singing voice—testosterone treatment thickens the vocal cords of people assigned female at birth, and it can drop your pitch by octaves.
I returned to the boy juice a year later because I’d gotten frustrated with constantly being misgendered. After I got sober in summer 2023, I dug my heels into my gender—I’m a nonbinary trans man—and resumed daily applications of the T gel that I’d abandoned in my bathroom cabinet. It was exhilarating; even without immediate results, each application affirmed to me that I was not a girl.
I went to my family home for a few weeks during that time, and I remember applying the gel in secrecy, carefully discarding the empty bottles out of my parents’ sight. Before the season was over, I was leaving Planned Parenthood at Division and La Salle with six months’ worth of testosterone vials and syringes.
My transition fears had mostly subsided, and I became more willing to embrace the unknown. Two transmasculine singers I admired, Chicagoan Dreamer Isioma and California-based Miki Ratsula, had both transitioned with no change in their singing voices, so I felt confident I could do the same. But my confidence was ill-informed—neither Isioma nor Ratsula had used intensive testosterone treatment. They’d made gender-affirming bodily changes (including the development of facial hair) via top surgery, weight lifting, and other nonhormonal methods.
I actually didn’t know of a single transmasculine singer with an unchanged singing voice, and that realization threw me into a depression. My identity as a singer is as strong as my identity as a nonbinary man, and I don’t have faith I could relearn to use my voice after a second puberty. I’m also recording my first album this summer. In what world does it make sense to guarantee myself a croaky, squeaky voice while I’m paying thousands in studio fees? I ignored the lump in my throat and shoved the testosterone under my bathroom sink. That second trial run lasted only 60 days.
Since then I’ve realized that I don’t have to decide by myself, in a vacuum, whether what hormones might do for me is something I want. By practicing some Good Old-Fashioned Journalism, I can better parse my feelings and arrive at a more thorough understanding of the stakes.
“The best way I can usually explain it to people is—you know that song by Minnie Riperton, ‘Lovin’ You,’ with its really high whistle tones?” they say. “I could go about five whole tones above the highest note in that song.” As a kid in choir, Woody could show his peers how to hit the notes on the sheet music—and he could help basses as well as sopranos.
Woody did intensive research before going on testosterone, but it stressed them out that so few studies had been conducted—another example, as they put it, of “professionals not really knowing what they’re doing when it comes to queer people.” Eventually he found himself in a painful feedback loop: he liked what he could do with his voice, but listening to it on playback made him dysphoric.
“People kind of forgot about the [transmasc] voice. That was the last thing, and it was an afterthought of transition,” they say. “People thought, ‘Oh well, T will drop the voice, and then you’ll just sound like a man so it doesn’t matter.’” But testosterone affects every trans man in a distinct way, Knight says, so researchers “just don’t know enough to tell anybody [transitioning] what’s going to happen [to their voice].”
Kelli Morgan McHugh is vocal coordinator for Northwestern’s musical theater certificate program and a private voice teacher, and in both realms she focuses on gender-affirming voice care. McHugh started working with transgender students three or four years ago, around the same time her young son came out as transgender.
“I felt like this was my purpose and my passion,” she says, “trying to push the boundaries of what we think the voice type is and what our voices mean to us uniquely and individually.” One way she does that is by encouraging her students to describe their voices without designations like “soprano” or “tenor.” One might have a “warm jazz voice,” for instance, or be a “contemporary rock belter.”
McHugh explains that people assigned male at birth usually develop a prominent Adam’s apple, whose cartilage protects the vocal cords during the rapid structural changes of puberty. Trans men don’t develop this structure during an exogenous puberty—meaning a puberty catalyzed by HRT, not by hormones produced in the body. This means that the changes brought on by T can make your throat feel constricted, like it’s harder to breathe, as your body adapts. The lowering of your voice typically happens within nine months. McHugh advises students to continue singing as their vocal cords thicken, to keep their voices flexible and agile.
Michael-Ellen Walden is a genderqueer trans man who teaches early childhood music classes. He’s been on testosterone for two years. “I’m constantly singing,” he says. “I’m singing instructions, singing redirections, singing almost the entire class, because that’s what keeps their attention.”
Walden says that it’s very vulnerable to be an adult man “whose voice is cracking, whose voice sounds like a teenager’s.” His unchanged voice was a high soprano; today he sings tenor, though he has a strong falsetto that can reach the mezzo-soprano range. Walden has never had vocal dysphoria, and he didn’t want his voice to be lower. The potential loss of vocal agility and ease was the primary reason he delayed HRT, even though he suffered from body dysphoria that caused depression.
Walden’s voice hasn’t settled yet, but he’s worked with McHugh for the past year. He says his voice still fatigues more quickly. “My work on my own has been about managing my emotions as much as managing my voice,” he says. “It’s really frustrating to not be able to do things I used to be able to do.”
He likes how his laugh sounds, though, and he likes that he can make his students laugh by doing silly or scary low voices for puppet characters. “I’m still in a particularly tricky part of my transition, but I’m also really early in my HRT journey,” he says. “In a decade, two decades, these first few years of my voice changing and all this frustration will just be a blip.”
McHugh says that watching her formerly upper-register singing students struggle with the anxiety of losing their range during transition is one of the biggest challenges for her. “I’ve seen someone desperately want their voice to align with their gender identity and their body, and they start taking testosterone, and that is so happy,” she says. “But they miss those old high notes that they had.”
She says the culture of vocal performance maintains that high notes are the most impressive, so her transmasc students have to shift mindsets. “What are your high notes now?” she says. “What is impressive now? What do you like about your voice now?” When her students’ voices start cracking at around three months, she introduces fresh music into their lessons. “We have to not think about what was—we have to move forward into what is going to be.”
If you decide not to pursue HRT, there are still ways to masculinize or feminize your voice without hormones. Brains are powerful, McHugh reminds me, and you can change your voice to a surprising extent just by doing vocal exercises.
Renée Yoxon is a gender-affirming vocal coach in Montreal who’s spearheading the development of exercises that help you get to your target voice without HRT. Yoxon calls their exercises “cognitive load games,” and they’re designed to train you into the habit of holding your larynx higher or lower, thus raising or lowering the pitch of your voice.
After all these conversations, I’ve made up my mind—as much good as testosterone treatment has done for other people, right now it’s not for me. My body already presents androgynously in a way that feels euphoric. I can address chest dysphoria or a desire for facial hair without a testosterone metamorphosis. If my feelings ever change, HRT will still be an option. Transmasculinity is diverse. My queer masc siblings and I all embrace masculinity to feel closer to our internal center, and only each of us individually knows the precise path we need to take to approach that center.
المواضيع: Music