Open your mouth. Not too wide. You’ll want no tension in the throat. All the muscles should be relaxed. Just let your jaw hang there, a limp slick of bone. Run the backs of your hands along your cheeks if you must, to loosen all those strands of meat you use to chew.
Feel your tongue fill the lower cavity of your mouth; let your tongue spread out and cup slightly in the middle, the outer edges flowing over the teeth. Teeth are an obstacle (aren’t they? don’t you find?): white juts standing in the way of airflow.
Breathe, then, when you’re ready, a deep breath that spills air into lungs. Work the muscle beneath your lungs to fill them to capacity. All those little sacs of air, all that oxygen. The whole mechanism should be as sturdy as a flute. Good, yes, just like that. Do you feel your stomach tightening? That’s how you know it’s working.
Now sing.
During my four-semester stint at a music conservatory in Cleveland, I change majors no less than three times. There is some level of mutability at play that I haven’t reckoned with yet. I still believe I am a boy, and will for a few years. But I’m not exactly at my best either, courtesy of trying to force myself into gendered boxes that I can’t fit. I think that if I simply change the thing I’m studying, everything else will fall into place. It will be easy to see in hindsight why that doesn’t work.
Generally, you have to have a middle-to-low chest range to make a good countertenor. When the male voice flips into the higher register, there has to be enough darkness to the tone to produce soprano (high) or mezzo (medium-high) notes that are mysterious and otherworldly. The idea is not to sound like a woman, or even a man who sounds like a woman, but something other, something in-between.
When I ask my voice teacher to please train me as a countertenor, he says, “There’s too much tenor in your voice for you to counter it. Let’s stick with the high male repertoire.” I’m happy to have a voice good enough that I can study music at this school at all, even if I often wish it had never changed. I learn to think of myself as a contralto, the female equivalent of a countertenor. I sing male repertoire to fit that mold.
There exists in opera something called a “pants role,” typically for a mezzo, in which a female singer plays a male character. It smacks of outdated gender roles (“Look, she’s wearing pants! Weird!”) but it’s also a type of role that pushes back against the intense categorical gendering of classical music.
Categories exist not only for types of voices, but also for types within those types. A dramatic tenor will sing music that calls for a much stronger, more mature tone than his (but never her) comic counterpart. Body type is not exempt from category. Dramatic tenors are supposed to be beefy. Comic tenors are usually beanpoles. It’s all very old, and creaky, and bad for my poor, closeted brain. So I sing, where I can, like a girl, who is singing like a boy. I do this as if on instinct.
It doesn’t work. There is no word in the classical repertoire for what I am. In the winter of my third year, I leave music school. I am no longer a tenor. I am something else entirely.
Farinelli must have loved intensely. He would have had to, in order to produce the sounds he did with his own body. Born Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi in 1705, he spent his earliest years in a noble family of celebrated musicians. His father was the maestro of a church, his mother a Neapolitan citizen. But it was his brother Riccardo, a composer, who had the most impact on his early life, writing operas in which he would reserve roles for Farinelli.
There was nothing unusual about Carlo’s fall. Many young boys at that time had “accidental” spills off of a horse, especially if they were musically inclined. If certain parts of the body were crushed beneath the great beasts of burden, well then, those parts would simply have to be removed, or risk endangering the boy’s life. So the logic went. The surgical removal of the offending parts would ensure the boy’s voice would never change: a fortunate bonus.
A castrato could sing in church or at court forever: at best, enriching his family in the process; at worst, ensuring his place in Christian society. Church choirs have always needed sopranos, but at the time, no women were allowed to sing. Castrati were a solution for a self-inflicted problem.
Carlo’s horse accident happened when he was between the ages of eleven and twelve. His testes were removed shortly thereafter. His voice was beautiful, but now it would be immortalized, and Riccardo would always have a soprano for the operas he wrote. No one could have predicted, of course, that Carlo would become the baroque equivalent of a pop idol, but there must have been signs.
He wasn’t a peasant, as castrati of the time usually were, but an 18th-century nepo baby. His father Salvatore Broschi had connections at various Italian courts. But death also comes to the wealthy, and especially the minorly wealthy, and his father was no exception, dying suddenly in 1717. The family’s status was threatened, leaving only two sons to fill the male gap: one a struggling composer, the other, a boy whose voice had not yet changed.
But the voice was worthy of preservation. Sacrifices would have to be made. The family would have to invest in an accident. They didn’t know how fortuitous a fall from a horse could be, but they must have dreamed. How could they not, pinning their hopes on a voice like that?
In order to produce vibrato, the vocal mechanism needs to be loose enough to “spin” the air as it leaves the mouth. At its best, vibrato is not forced, but allowed to occur. What you might think of as “vocal cords” are actually folds. These slip past each other at a rapid pace, forming vibrations in the air expelled from the mouth. The folds are wet, and slippery, and if you place a camera down your throat, the effect looks somewhat obscene.
The real tension of singing does not occur in the throat, but lower, in the diaphragm, and (if you want to be poetic about it) in the heart. In musical theater and in opera, singing happens when the emotion of a character is simply too big to be encapsulated in spoken language. The vocal folds do their cleanest work when loose and unobstructed. The depth of a voice depends on the thickness of the folds. Once the folds thicken, deepening the voice, they can never be thinned again, except surgically.
Testosterone does this thickening work in boys. The process is generally called puberty, and is, in many U.S. states, legally mandated. The decision of what is to be done with a changing body does not often include the choice of its owner, which is itself a tragedy. In the grand vibrations of the universe, what does it threaten to let someone choose the frequency of their own voice?
Something in a self-hating adolescence makes you fall in love too easily. You wear your boyishness clumsily, as a loose-fitting armor. Some people love the armor, the YMCA gym-trained gauntlets of taut runner’s muscle, the half-helm of the patchy denial beard, but they bolt when they catch sight of the squishy parts beneath. You like to be the little spoon, or cry at movies, or wear perfume. A lot of straight girls don’t know what to do with that. So when you find someone who does, you accept any treatment that comes with it.
Before I leave music school, I date a coloratura soprano. Afterward, I date an internet psychic, then a film major. I am not so much a boy seeking a girl as an open wound seeking open wounds. My chosen partners are all artists in some way or another. The stereotype of the tortured poet has to come from somewhere, right? Something about the act of creation brings together the bloodied.
I have been out of music school for several years, and I’ve been dating the film major for a year-and-a-half, when I learn that I am trans. The film major is in the process of discovering their own queerness and inability to date men, so it basically works out. Late one night, they shuffle up next to me in bed.
“So,” they ask, nonchalant as a bird pecking the ground. “When are you getting The Surgery?”
I tell them I haven’t really thought that far ahead, which I haven’t. The truth is that I’m not sure I even will. Some would say this lessens my transness. The film major stares at me, hungry for something.
“That’s a shame,” they say. “You’d look so pretty with a pussy.”
Open your mouth again and yawn. No, not a half-hearted yawn, really put your whole chest into it. Vocalize. Bellow your yawn like a Midwestern dad watching baseball. Now pucker your lips to the diameter of a straw. Hum a single note through it, loud enough to be heard, but gentle enough that a candle flame would still flicker safely in front of your mouth.
Hold that note for as long as you can. How many seconds do you think you can last? Set a stopwatch on your phone if it helps. Think, while you put yourself through this, of how relaxed your throat feels in this moment, how unbothered your palette. Lower the center of your tongue enough to form a golf-ball sized cavity in your mouth. Keep going; you have more in the tank. I promise.
It helps to let yourself dissociate, to forget you are anything more than a consciousness housed in a closed system of air sacs and blood vessels, with some neurons and organs for good measure. Everything on top of that is extra, your hair, your cartilage, even your vocal folds. Are you still so sure that you are your body?
Remember, if you haven’t already, that your lungs are about to empty. Don’t panic. Let it happen on its own time. There’s plenty of air where that came from.
Check your phone. I’ll bet you’ve lasted longer than you thought you would. There will be a moment, right after you stop singing, when the sound is still reverberating off the nearest wall. Listen to it dissipate, as the air becomes still again.
That was you.
Carlo’s rise to fame was relentless. At age 13, he made his debut in Naples and two years later sang for the first time in Rome. He was admired for his youth and for the purity of his voice. He was known to embellish floridly. Italy welcomed him, then Vienna and London. At 15, he took on the name Farinelli to please his benefactors, the brothers Farina, though he was often called il ragazzo, or “the boy.” Carlo Broschi had been born, but Farinelli was made. Such procedures require a name as payment.
Contemporary gender theory asserts that gender is a spectrum, a dichotomy between blue and pink with a gray, non-binary area in-between. This is often understood to be a modern concept, and evolved beyond the domineering conservative understanding that you are what you have in your pants.
But genital-based policing of gender roles is also a modern invention. In Renaissance Italy, gender existed on two fluid, parallel spectra: maleness and femaleness. Positioning on these spectra was not inherent, but based on choices made throughout the course of a life. Proximity to the “opposite sex” could increase maleness (virility) or femaleness (effeminacy).
Then, as now, the arts were primary grounds for gender experimentation. Popular artistic representations of Orpheus depicted him as more effeminate due to his artistic sensibilities and womanly devotion to Eurydice (fellas, is it gay to resurrect your wife?) There was a middle ground, often reserved in popular imagination for both the divine and the profane, which were, as they always are, inextricably linked. Religious paintings played with this proximity. Saintly women were sometimes depicted as touching, kissing, or even penetrating Jesus’ wounds.
The divine was seen as beyond gender. Angels and devils were outside of the binary, as were castrati, putting them at the crossroads of male and female, divine and profane. Castrati were also seen as magical. Contemporary reports implied that Farinelli, while employed by the Spanish royal court, cured the depression of King Philip V with his voice alone. It doesn’t matter how true the story was. By that point il ragazzo and his Prozac-voice were as good as divine.
I trust you know about The Surgery. If you’ve read this far, I trust you are at least supportive. If not supportive, I trust you have opinions of it, though it will likely never affect you, and it would probably be better for everyone for you to think of things that will. Whatever the case, you have some varying degree of fascination about it. It’s okay; I know you do. You’re only human, after all.
Growing up in Ohio, I knew nothing of The Surgery beyond what I saw in popular media: the lampoonings of trans people in South Park and Family Guy, the lotion-bearing menace of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.
You might have been the same: called The Surgery a “sex change operation,” giggled at the dinner table about some tranny you saw at the grocery store, and called it a day. Or perhaps you were enlightened enough to un-remember the square jaws and broad shoulders and (yes) deep voices that marked the popular imagination of transition before the widespread availability of hormones.
Then the spectre of child mutilation reared itself, and the eye of popular media hallucinated castrations for fetuses and double mastectomies for infants, and suddenly, one way or another, you gave a shit about us. Nevermind that the age of the horse accident is over now that there’s no money in it. Nevermind that the only step taken is often to block puberty while the person with the body figures out what they want to do with it. Regardless, even the best of you were unnerved. You thought you knew how many of us walked among you, but you were wrong. There are more of us than you knew to imagine and fewer of us than you were told to fear.
I think of a world in which I knew, as an adolescent, that I could have stopped the train that ran roughshod over my boy soprano range, and I swallow the kind of wailing that I would have once seen cartooned. Whence Farinelli? Who is left to tell you that the real violence is in the denial of choice?
After I learn who I am, I don’t sing in public for years. For one thing, by the time I figure it out, I’m a grad student in rural upper Michigan, a far cry from my one-time musical dreams. For all its water, the peninsula is uncomfortable with fluidity. My voice gives me away, at the grocery store, in line at the drive through, at the pharmacy. More times than I can count, I am called “ma’am” when I’m silent and “sir” when I speak.
For a lot of trans femmes, voice feminization training is the chosen avenue for greater acceptance in these kinds of spaces. There’s a cottage industry around the therapy: clinics, zoom sessions with speech trainers both licensed and unlicensed, YouTube channels, mostly uncovered by insurances that consider this training cosmetic and inessential. It’s a lifeline, but also too often an expectation. A lower voice makes you “clocky,” and, after all, isn’t passing the whole point? Nevermind the contraltos, or the countertenors, or castrati, who are always seen as the gender they were born as, despite voices that might suggest otherwise.
I don’t voice train, but I make tweaks to my vocal mannerisms. Even without altering pitch, there are a thousand little ways to adjust the voice to fit a new mold.
I become a scholar of speech patterns. Women are trained socially to use more of their vocal range in speaking, ending sentences with rising intonation, as questions meant to be answered by the falling intonation of men’s sentences. When they lower their voice to the bottom of their range, they use a crackling intonation called “fry,” which the most vocal of those who lurk in TikTok and YouTube comment sections seem to hate.
But even absent of fry, comments sections always find a way to hate women and their voices. The main thing I learn about speaking as a woman is that you can never do it correctly. No matter what you do, there will always be someone to cut you off at the throat.
It was Farinelli’s body, not his voice, which gave him away. Absent of sex hormones, his frame grew tall and gangly, as his bones became porous and fragile. What must the people of Rome and London and Madrid have thought when they saw him walking among them? Did they stare the same inscrutable stares as I see in Michigan, void of emotion, searching for a definition? When he opened his mouth to speak, did their faces betray disgust?
After my breakup with the film major, I start speaking to people on dating apps. I self-disclose my identity. I put a trans flag in my profiles to lessen confusion. Still, confusion happens. Before I go on any dates, I tend to say something like, “Is it a problem for you that I’m trans?” Most say they didn’t know (who has time to read a profile?) but that it’s not a big deal, or that they don’t care what I am, and then find some reason or other to cancel anyway.
The night before a date with someone who has given the impression of singleness, she messages, asking if I’m pre-op or post-op.
I say pre-. “Is that an issue?” I ask.
She says, “Not to me, but my boyfriend might mind.”
I stare at the word “boyfriend” on my screen for a while before unmatching. I ghost her. What else would I do? What would you?
In the early 18th century, castrato writer Filippo Balatri invented a mythic origin story for the castrato, writing, “He started by asking me whether I was male or female… I was all confused about how to answer. If male, I’m practically lying, if female still less do I say what I am, and if neuter, I would blush… I finally answer that I’m a man, Tuscan, and that cocks are found in my region who lay eggs, from which sopranos come into the world…” Though castrati weren’t necessarily trans, this kind of joke is still familiar to the modern gender-nonconforming. Unable to control others’ mystification of our existence, we have no choice but to laugh in their faces.
As castrati gained prominence throughout a Europe that was growing more secular, both church leaders and contemporary Enlightenment thinkers cast them as perversions. Even the uberwoke Rousseau wrote that castrati were a “sacrifice [of] nature to fortune.” Throughout this period, derision for castrati seemed to be the only thing on which the church and intellectuals could agree.
The act of sex was then (and is now) fraught with gender politics. For renaissance men, having sex with women could put them at risk of increasing their femaleness, and, it’s worth mentioning, vice versa. But castrati were seen as in between genders, and divine, and so became objects of (usually male) erotic fixation, with opera producers often casting them in Siren, angelic, or femme-type roles. To what extent the sacro-sexual designation of castrati contributed to the inevitable moral panic surrounding them should be obvious to anyone paying attention to the modern phenomenon of conservative alpha males cruising Grindr for trans women before voting their rights away. It seems some men have always wanted to reach out and fuck the face of God.
One last exercise:
Stand up straight, as straight as you can. I’ll bet you are curving your spine inward toward your belly button in an attempt to feel taller. Cut that out. Standing straight doesn’t feel like you think it does.
Try this. Imagine a string reaching from the ceiling into your forehead, through the length of your body and anchoring itself to the floor. What happens when that string tightens upward? When the fishing rod of the universe decides to reel you in? When the body peels away from the soul like the rind of a ripening fruit and you are lifted out of the form you were stuffed into, free from the obligations to which those with bodies must fasten themselves, free from all the physical markers of the person you have been told to be, free even from your voice?
What happens when you picture yourself unbodied, on a hooked line reaching up to the stars? Will you be the same when you return?
Will you still sing?
Shortly after I move to Minneapolis in 2024, I attend a Friendsgiving hosted by members of a web of polyamorous relationships: I have a partner, who has a partner, who has a wife, who has several partners, and so on. For various reasons, my part in this arrangement will not last long.
But for now, I’m here, and looking around the room, and realizing I have never seen so many trans people in one place. I am reeling from another election cycle in a way those around me don’t seem to be. Perhaps they’re keeping it in. Perhaps those from Minnesota have a more hopeful understanding of the present than my red-state home trained me to have.
Whatever the case, I soon find myself in the kitchen, sitting in a yellow bowl-chair with a cat on my lap. Another trans woman (my third partner, four times removed) comes in to refill on macaroni. As a fellow musician, she has in her bearing the kind of hard-fought confidence that we often learn to embody so well. We talk about The Shins, then the election, then when that gets tiring, performing. I’m in a band, and so is she, and it turns out we both have aspirations of smashing a guitar onstage. I ask whether she’s ever done voice training.
“No, fuck that,” she says. “I like my voice.”
I say something I will not remember later.
She shakes her head. “Look around. Whatever else is going on, this is a great place to be trans.” She walks away, joining a performance circle in the living room, leaving me sitting with the cat and my slice of pie.
What would Farinelli have picked for his voice, if he could have? Did he ever make peace with a voice he didn’t choose? His life was set in stone the moment he fell off of the horse. Given the option, would he have sung at all?
I can only hope he met others with voices thrust upon them by greed and circumstance, that he stood in good company and sang well, and sloughed off those who thought his voice was a sign of the devil. I hope that, at least once, he loved the way the air spun as it left his mouth. When Farinelli stood in candlelit regalia, in front of an orchestra and an audience of ogling nobles, I hope the acoustics bounced himself back into his own ears, and granted him the sound of divinity.
