Resonance

Voice training today. Speaking in head voice for a long period of time really strains my throat. I gotta keep at it if I'm ever gonna get where I need to be. My biggest problem isn't the mechanics of it; it's the mental block of not wanting to hear my voice as a crude imitation of what I'd like it to be. Mid-puberty, I was in high school choir. I took great pride in being able to sing semi-competently with the altos. The next year, when my voice dropped far enough to put me in with the basses rather than the tenors, I wanted to cry. Any recording of my voice gets me dingy beyond belief. I hate it.

It's the space between the genders that gets to me more than presenting as male. Life as the raw burning question mark that bears panoptic interrogation. You roll down a steep grade into the uncanny valley, and it seems impossible to get back out onto the other side. I don't pass. Probably won't any time soon. It's so tiring, seeing the outside world as an unknowable cauldron burbling with ridicule and danger. I only go out dressed for doctor's appointments. It's safer, although it leaves me feeling hemmed in.


I'm convinced it's better to just accept the identity of trans girly girl and learn to be defiant and proud later. I'm 27. I don't have the energy to be a revolutionary anymore, if I ever had it at all. And, in a weird way, it would feel like forsaking that small, second shot at girlhood that seems to inevitably follow the initial stages of transition. But this is another point where the princess-urge overlaps with survival instinct. Exempli gratia, you can recognize the narcs from the burnouts because the narcs have longer hair. So with trans* and cis women, respectively. I'd never cut my hair as short as my partner, impossibly cute as she is, because I can't lose that gendered social cue.

No great ending to this train of though. It just keeps making stops.