Testosterone & Your Singing Voice
greetings, fellow kids! perhaps you are trans? perhaps you are considering hormones? perhaps you have concerns?
perhaps you are scared fucking shitless that your singing voice will be ruined and destroyed forever and everything that is worthwhile about you will be destroyed with it and you will never be able to make music again?
me too!
so I took all that terror and I turned it into art, because what else are you going to do when you sacrifice your only beautiful thing in exchange for your life?
Here is me, four months ago, taking my first dose of testosterone. Yes, it is my real first dose of testosterone. Yes, I had to do this in one take.
Notice that my voice was good. I mean, it was really fucking good. I never did anything with it except school plays and campfire singing, but it was a really good instrument that I could have done something with, you get me?
Only, I hadn’t done anything with it, and I finally figured I was too old and unskilled and unfeminine to ever be the next Broadway star, so I broke it.
Which was, in a distant but meaningful way, partly because of Hamilton. And one month in, I could still sing Eliza’s part:
But that was only a month in, and my voice hadn’t really started to change yet. That was obviously not going to last. Here’s me after two months:
Still got some of those high notes! But they’re starting to get a bit creaky and unreliable, and I’ve got a whole extra octave down the bottom I’m not used to.
Three months in, I definitely couldn’t do Eliza. That turned out to be absolutely OK, because I could do Javert.
hey you know what my voice sounds pretty fucking good there. it’s not the same voice I had when I started but I still sound like me, you know? I’m still learning the new instrument, it’s not really finished yet, but I haven’t gone all the way back to a kid with his first recorder. I still sound like an adult who kinda knows how to sing.
The difference between Eliza and Washington turns out to be about four months.
Stay tuned, kids. This is not my final form.
And then I did Hades! Only I did shift it up by a little bit because I am not totally comfortable in the lowest notes yet, but they are notes in my range that I’m unsteady with, rather than notes I can’t hit, if you see the difference?
hey now hey now look at this we’re all up the Sondheim:
hello. you are here because I told you it was not too late for hrt. it is not too late for hrt and you can sing the whole time you’re changing.
