Voices
CW: Disordered eating
“They will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.”
—from Wendell Berry’s “Do Not Be Ashamed”
High school:
I am playing a character in our school musical who is a man. “We can change the character to a woman if you want,” says the director. But, overachiever that I am, I relish a challenge.
I steal ACE bandages from my parents’ medicine cabinet and wrap them around my chest like I’ve seen in movies.
“You don’t have to do that,” my friends say.
I look in the mirror and get a funny feeling in my stomach. Like a tiny ray of sunlight.
A little voice whispers in the back of my mind -
This doesn’t look half bad, you know.
Sophomore year of college, a voice lesson:
I have been assigned to learn “Voi che sapete.” My voice teacher, thinking he can be helpful with masculine character expression, says, “sing from your dick.” I blush, like any modest young woman should at the mention of penises.
The little voice in my head nudges - But aren’t you curious? What it’s like to…not be a woman?
I push the thought aside immediately, embarrassed.
But it doesn’t go away.
Junior year:
I get a pixie haircut, a secret desire of mine since high school. I stand in the bathroom for at least an hour afterward, looking in the mirror and touching the shortest sections where the hairdresser used an electric trimmer. I can’t stop smiling.
A friend scoffs, “it’s cute, and clearly you’re just trying to get more of a ‘mezzo’ look. But I don’t know if you’re really pulling off ‘boyish’.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut, accused of something that doesn’t feel quite right.
The voice in my head points out quietly, but you’ve known you wanted this for longer than you even knew you were a mezzo.
Maybe boyish is actually the point?
Opera workshop:
My first real pants role. I spend hours “researching” - secretly walking behind men, imitating their posture, their gait, their mannerisms.
And something happens that I don’t expect. Trying on physical masculinity, it feels like I’ve expanded to fill a space I didn’t know I could. Like the physicality I have been wearing my whole life has been a size too small.
I try it out for my friends.
“Too feminine. Too…gay? Honestly, your body will give you away anyway, with those hips.”
My excitement evaporates, replaced with the shrinking feeling of shame. The voice counters, but they don’t know how good it makes you feel. Why don’t you tell them?
I can’t. Instead, I spend the night staring at my hips in a mirror, seeing a body that feels…wrong.
A Friday night off:
I am doing an internet deep dive on pants roles. With every photo, every video clip I am more and more captivated, unable to shake the feeling that something about these roles just feels “right”.
I discover an article published several years prior that stops me dead in my tracks - “Opera’s ‘Fat-Shaming’ Controversy.”
I read on feeling like I am going to be sick. An entire collection of critics have disparaged Tara Erraught’s Octavian, commenting on everything from her “puppy fat” to the fact that she is not believable as the teenage boy lover of the Marschallin and that her physique is “intractable”.
Looking again, I notice a new trend in the images I am searching - one after the other, photos of thin, toned, androgynous women in breeches. It begins to sink in that at 220 pounds, 5’6’’, there is only one way the opera world will ever see me.
As a woman.
Clearly, something about that bothers you, though, posits the voice. Is that really how you want to be seen?
How you see yourself?
A coaching:
After working through an aria sung by a woman character, the coach takes a step back and looks me up and down. “You know, most German arias for lyric mezzos are for characters that are young men. It’s nice that there are arias like this one for singers who look like you.”
I sit in the hallway afterward, so overwhelmed I am shaking. Knowing that I am fighting an uphill battle against a fat-phobic industry.
Knowing that I can’t quite place this feeling of “rightness” I get when playing boys, except to believe that it means that I’ve just really found my place as a mezzo.
Knowing that what you want is to be seen a different way, even if it’s just on stage, adds the voice insistently.
Knowing that what I want is incompatible with the body I am beginning to feel trapped in.
Senior year, post-rehearsal:
I am in my car, eating fast food for the fourth night in a row. I look down at my body and am suddenly sobbing. Shame presses on me like a weight, crushing my chest. I can’t breathe.
The voice is trying to say something, but a chorus of other voices is drowning it out: mentors, colleagues, the entire industry. “No one will believe this body could be a boy's. Who do you think you’re kidding? How are you going to get the roles you actually want when you look like this?”
The next day, I throw away all the food in my refrigerator except for a bag of spinach and I buy a pair of gym shoes.
8 months later and 70 pounds less:
The same coach as before congratulates me after an opera scenes performance from Nozze di Figaro. “Excellently sung. And you know, you finally look like a Cherubino.”
I look sheepishly down at my feet, emotions surprisingly twisted and uncomfortable despite my apparent success. The voice counters quietly, But he thinks you’re believable as a boy on stage now. Isn’t this what you wanted?
And I think about the feeling of pure sunshine in my stomach when I looked in the mirror earlier that day and saw the outfit I put together for the performance. Nothing that special - a navy blue button-up, jeans, and red high-top converse. But like a Magic Eye illusion, I blinked, and the reflection shifted. I saw something that had always been there, but that I didn’t yet have the ability to perceive.
Something I liked so much that it scared me.
”Yeah, I guess it is.”
Summer, post-graduation:
It is 96 degrees Fahrenheit outside, full humidity. I return home from a run, on the brink of heat exhaustion, and collapse on the couch. My roommate asks me why I decided to go on a run in these conditions, since “clearly it was not safe or healthy.”
I laugh it off.
The voice is nowhere to be heard. Instead, all I can hear in my head is the imagined judgment of everyone else - “No one will actually let you sing Cherubino if you can’t keep the weight off.”
One night, alone:
I step on the scale. I have gained 5 pounds, despite having been extra-“good” this week on my diet and exercise.
I see red. I just can’t keep those last few pounds off. Furious, I start emptying my cabinets of every possible “bad” food, filling the trash can. I toss an unopened pint of ice cream.
In my frenzy, I snap -
“Well, don’t you have something to say about all this?”
The voice responds, a tone of complete calm in the middle of my mental hurricane -
You seem pretty determined to look a certain way and do whatever it takes to get there.
“Of course! I need to be perceived as a guy! How will I ever get there when every pound just adds to the places that make me look like a woman?”
You…need to be perceived as a guy. Why exactly is that?
“My body is wrong. Wrong for my career. I will never sing the roles I want if I can’t keep the weight off.”
And why do you want those roles so badly?
I think we both know that this isn’t really just about your career.
I pause, face-to-face with a truth that I simply couldn’t see before. That I have been too ashamed to acknowledge.
I retrieve the pint from the garbage, grab a spoon, and sit down to think with my mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Rehearsal, at a pay-to-sing summer program:
“Do you want to kiss? In the finale? Are you comfortable with that?” she asks. I have never kissed a woman before.
“Uhhhh…yeah. I’m fine with that.”
Between dress rehearsals, she ruffles my hair, says what a cute little page boy I am. She has a boyfriend.
Come on, you know how much you like it when she calls you handsome, the voice teases.
Singer roommate movie night:
After some debate, we settle on watching Cendrillon, because I have never seen the opera before and my friend is convinced I would love it.
One act in, and my jaw hits the floor.
From the moment Prince Charming appears on the stage, I cannot take my eyes away. The whole show, I can’t shake the feeling that I just inexplicably know him. That I understand him more than any other character I’ve ever seen. That I’ve been waiting for him, somehow.
Maybe, says the voice, that’s because he’s you.
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s just how much I relate to him feeling alone and misunderstood.”
You know that’s not what I meant.
A trial lesson at a potential grad school:
“I hear a lovely high mezzo quality in your voice. But you’re not done growing. If you keep singing high B’s like that, I’d bet you will be a soprano.”
My stomach lurches. A pit opens up, panic spreading through my chest.
“No, I think I am definitely a mezzo”, I assert hastily.
Later that night, I cry alone on my friend’s pull-out sofa.
You can’t let them take your pants roles away from you, the voice says.
“I know”, I whisper back.
March, 2020:
I believe I have been rejected from every graduate school I applied to. I am living alone, and have far too much time to sit at home with no required social interaction.
Drunk one night, I shave my head. I put on the chest binder that I bought “for performance purposes”.
I look in the mirror. The voice in my head laughs with me and says, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
First day of grad school, in person:
I spend 30 minutes deciding what to wear. I put on a button-up shirt, but don't like the way it looks. I dig my binder out from the bottom of my bra bin and put it on. My anxiety spikes.
You know, you don’t have to be ashamed to wear it in real life if you actually like the way it looks, encourages the voice.
I tug it on and rush out the door before I can change my mind.
Flash forward, we are sitting in a circle discussing poetry. I am next to the instructor and am suddenly conscious that my completely unshaven ankles are showing as the legs of my pants ride up. Will someone notice? The teacher looks over and down and suddenly says my name, pointing at my ankles. I think I am going to have a heart attack.
“I love your shoes!”
What are you so afraid of? asks the voice.
Grad school, Christmas Break:
I get a phone call from the director of the program. “I want you to play a very specific part in the production this spring. The silent role. The boy. I know it’s not usually done by women, but I just can’t get the idea out of my head of you doing it.”
I feel my heart skip a beat. There are definitely other guys who could play the role, but she asked me.
She thinks you’d make a great boy, the voice says quietly. And not just because of your voice.
But I wrestle for a while with the character’s gender identity - the director has left it totally up to me how I choose to play it. In her words, “I know you’ll do something interesting with it.” In the end, I stick with boy, but for some reason deep down I have a fear that someone will assume I am playing the character as transgender, rather than just a “pants role”.
Of course, no one ever asks or likely has even considered it. Except me.
And every time, the voice insists: Maybe there’s a reason you’re fixating on this.
Recital project planning:
We are creating a program focusing on the experiences of queer women. My recital partner brings up a potential speedbump that has developed as the project has progressed - “We both identify as queer, but I know you also have mentioned that you think you might be non-binary - do you feel comfortable with performing a narrative specifically about women?” “Of course”, I respond, “I still think of myself as a woman in most ways.”
I don’t think you actually mean that, pokes the voice. You want to be perceived as a woman?
“I’m not sure that I’m really non-binary. I’ve been seen my whole life as a woman, and I didn’t always hate it. I just don’t really relate to other women and their expression most of the time.”
Interesting. Maybe that’s because you’re…not one.
“No. I just…have to be”, I reassure myself.
Not allowing my brain to linger in that terrifying black hole of possibility. To be consumed by the fear of creating one more obstacle between myself and the world, my family, the music industry.
“Maybe I just need to try presenting more feminine. Put more effort into connecting with womanhood. I’ve been so distanced from it for a while, that’s probably why I’m confused.”
I doubt that will help, the voice butts in.
I tune it out and do it anyway.
Valentine’s Day, a party:
Dress code is fancy. I put on my sexiest red lace bra, one I haven’t worn in years. I wear it to be seen, underneath an open jacket. Red lipstick to match. I don’t know what makes me happier, the fact that people tell me I look sexy, or that people seem surprised to see me wearing something like that.
But, I take no pictures of myself, and when I take a break to go to the bathroom, I can barely bring myself to meet my own gaze in the mirror.
I look at my reflection, desperate. “You have a body plenty of women would be jealous of, why can’t you just be happy?”
The voice cuts in, insistent.
I think you already know the answer to that one.
“But people like me like this! I feel noticed, wanted….
It’s just easier this way.”
Easier for who? Everyone else? You don’t even want to look at yourself.
You can’t shame yourself into womanhood forever.
“Enough!”, I yell. I take the voice, and shove it in a mental box. Bury it so deep I can’t hear its protests anymore. I’m done listening.
Silence.
Grad school, post-recital:
I watch the recording for the first time. The silky floor-length gown accentuates every feminine curve. I am mesmerized by how stunning it looks.
But who is that wearing it? I don’t recognize her. The disconnect in my brain between myself and my own body is terrifying.
And the silence in my head is deafening.
At a friend’s house:
I have used she/they pronouns for over a year now, when it comes out in our conversation - “I kind of like it when people use they better. But I don’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
“It sounds to me like you want to use they/them pronouns.”
My knee-jerk reaction is to brush them off, to hide again behind the easy, agreeable option.
But I feel a nudge, from somewhere in the back of my brain. And…I listen.
“Yeah. I think I do want that, actually.”
Early summer:
I run to Target for a new pair of sunglasses. I walk over to the men’s section, looking to see if they have the shape I prefer over there. While browsing the rack of glasses, something catches my eye: a short-sleeve white button-up embroidered with green leaves.
A nudge from the back of my brain, this time more insistent.
I find a small, pull it off the rack, and then see a light green tee shirt I could wear underneath it. Soon I have a whole armful of clothes.
I spend 45 minutes in the dressing room, crying and laughing each time I look in the mirror.
I know then and there what I need.
A few days later, I am in H&M, standing in front of the mirror in a men’s suit.
And it hits me. That sunshine feeling in my stomach that always comes with dressing for pants roles, but enough to make me feel like I’m glowing from the inside out. Giving off my own light.
“I’d better get this tailored before my next performance.”
NYC Pride weekend:
We sit in a circle in Washington Square Park, and talk late into the evening. Everyone goes around, sharing their personal journey with queerness and gender. As the attention lands on me, I realize I have no idea what to say. All these people seem to know who they are, but I sure as hell don’t.
Please.
Cautiously, I open the box.
The voice offers, I can help.
I take a deep breath. I respond.
“So I guess a huge part of my understanding of my gender identity has been shaped by singing…”
This morning:
I carefully pull the nude spandex down over my chest and take in a deep breath. I feel resistance around my ribcage from the binder, but one thing is noticeably absent in this moment - the constricting pressure of my own shame is nowhere to be felt.
I put on my new suit, ready for an audition. Ready to show the panel someone who actually feels like…me.
I turn sideways, look in the mirror.
“This looks pretty good, you know.”
The voice speaks, words tumbling out of my own mouth.
A voice that has been my companion, my complete frustration, my gateway to freedom.
I’m not sure where I’m going, and I have a long way to go, but one thing I am certain of:
we are going there together, he and I.