Learning to speak and sing

My evolving relationship with my voice

Growing up, I had my voice highly praised by some and highly criticized by others. Frequently, people have told me that I have a beautiful singing voice, even calling it “angelic,” a modifier that discomforted me, as it seemed so tangled up with people’s perceptions of me as an innocent young “princess.” And people have also sometimes told me that my speaking voice sounds powerful, especially when I give a speech meant to inspire. When I spoke at a memorial concert last year for a college student who died of suicide, afterwards someone told me that I sounded like a religious leader. This comment surprised me, as I did not grow up in a religion, so I did not have such leaders to look up to and imitate. But also, the criticism that I endured as a child has made me often receive praise with disbelief.

My mother used to be harshly critical of my singing voice. Sometimes I’d sing for joy at home in her presence, and she would tell me to stop with much annoyance. When she did permit me to sing for her, she rarely would offer any praise. Instead, she would tell me to just sing for fun, as if to imply that I did not have the ability to sing as a career. I never wanted a career as a vocalist, but this comment still hurt. It’s as if there’s no middle ground between just liking to sing without caring about technique and devoting yourself to a pre-professional regimen of training.

One time when I was in high school, she compared my voice to that of another high school student who was involved in musical theatre. That student had a great voice, she said. But my voice was only “good.” This baffled me, as although I did believe that that student was a better singer than I was, especially in the musical theatre genre, I attributed our difference in skill to my lack of training and experience. Yet my mother would not permit me to take vocal lessons, since she would only let me pursue singing “for fun.” It was only during my fourth year of college when I finally convinced her to let me take singing lessons because it would be useful for me as a composer. And once I had some training and began to improve, my mother stopped criticizing me as harshly (though she still doesn’t really give me praise).

When I was in fifth grade, I was put into speech therapy at school. Apparently I had a mild stutter and did not consistently pronounce my th’s correctly. The latter was true because no one in my family could say th’s, but upon starting speech therapy, I obsessively practiced the phoneme with made-up phrases like “Meredith’s birthday is on Earth Day” until I had it solid. The former may have been exacerbated by anxiety, especially as I was starting to be told that “communication” was a weakness for me, just as “social skills” in general were. My father, who himself struggles with communication and social activities, began to berate me for making social errors like saying “no” too enthusiastically or standing alone rather than socializing with the girls; repeatedly he preached and yelled about the concept of emotional intelligence while showing very little willingness to improve his own skills. Even though in fourth grade I gave enthusiastic school presentations with ease, recruiting my expressive skills as a performer, in fifth grade, my public speaking skills plummeted due to my shattered confidence. I was in speech therapy for only one year, but it took many years after that for me to fully regain confidence in speaking.

My father, who is so misogynistic that he seems to appreciate some of my androgynous characteristics, frequently tells me to speak with a lower-pitched voice in order to sound more confident. I find this advice so frustrating because, aside from it being misogynistic, it interferes with my attempts to figure out how I personally feel about my voice as a non-binary person. I actually do like to speak at a lower pitch and with more resonance in my voice for some occasions, but what matters isn’t how confident I sound, but rather how grounded I feel. On the other hand, there are occasions where I’ve found that I naturally take on a higher-pitched and perhaps more melodic voice, sometimes as a form of masking or social performance, but also at times simply because that is how my spirit wants to move. For example, when my father’s anger becomes out of control, my instinct is to defuse the situation by speaking in a gentle, high-pitched voice that sounds as non-confrontational as possible. The strategy has been stunningly effective.

But how do I feel about my voice? Does it cause me gender dysphoria? Are there characteristics that my voice does not have that would give me gender euphoria? Right now I’m still in a stage of exploration, seeing what my current voice is capable of. As a sophomore in college, during mood episodes that caused my body and spirit to express themselves in new ways, I discovered joy in speaking in a playful, high-pitched “child voice,” which I did not feel was gendered but rather had the buoyancy of an infant sailing the clouds of daydreams. The following year, I acted in a student production of Hamlet, taking on the role of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. During the audition, when asked to do a cold read in that role, I spontaneously began to speak in a deep, intense, resonant voice that felt freaky and delightful at once. I did not know that my voice could carry such weighty, androgynous power.

Generally, regarding my gender identity, I have found delight in experimenting with all the hues and values of the gender palette. I joke that my aesthetic is “femme gay man,” but even that can mean different things on different days. I have a sense that it is similar with both my speaking and singing voices. In my vocal lessons, I am exploring both extremes of my range and having a lot of fun overall. My voice type can be perhaps best summarized as a light soprano with strong lower extension, which basically means that soprano roles work best for me in the classical style, but mezzo roles in the contemporary musical theatre style make the lower part of my voice shine. I like singing roles of different genders, sometimes transposing a song written for a low voice to fit my range. As a performer, and as a person who in many ways approaches life as performance, I delight in manipulating the contrasting energies in my soul like a sculptor of dancing clay.

If I could choose, maybe I’d prefer having a somewhat lower-pitched voice, as I have often wished that I could access lower notes that currently I cannot. But even just considering going on testosterone to biologically change my voice scares me, because unlike other medical procedures for gender transition, there’s no way to determine the exact result, as hormones affect everyone in wildly different ways. I did sign up for Renee Yoxon’s online course “Mix & Match! Designing Your Nonbinary Voice,” which teaches you different ways that you can manipulate your speaking voice with or without hormone treatment, but as I can be really terrible with self-paced online courses, I have only so far gone through the intro module. It’s there though for whenever I feel like diving in again and experimenting with my vocal instrument just as it is. I think of experimenting with my speaking voice as similar to the task of the voice actor, whose vocal expression can transcend age, gender, and even species.

But vocal training, whether for singing or speaking, isn’t just for preparing for a particular profession. It’s a journey of becoming intimate with the unique qualities of your own voice, your personal palette for expression. I think everyone can benefit from exploring what their own voice can do and encountering previously hidden abilities that can be a surprising source of joy. Many people are insecure about their voices, until they learn that the standards by which they have been judging their voices simply don’t apply to everyone. And since the human voice continues to change throughout the whole lifespan, the journey is lifelong.