Washington State Hates
“THAT WON’T PASS,” Seth said last night from Tokyo, talking about Initiative 638, a statewide requirement that Washington girls prove, via medical verification, that they have vaginas to be allowed in school sports. After all, it’s so blue here. And the bill is so fucked up.
But it is passing, so far. With 60 percent of the votes counted, it leads comfortably, in every county but two. That is, it’s leading in the county where I live.
The two Democrat-endorsed Supreme Court judges on the ballot are winning and eight of the ten U.S. House seats have already been won by Democrats. We voted not to repeal a tax on millionaires and not to give parents notifications of every medical and mental health treatment their kids receive at school. And. Even the good people of this liberal bastion so hate or fear trans people that they’d subject children to such indignity. Barbarity.
This morning, I was set to publish this story below; your inbox would have read, “I Sound Trans. You’re Welcome!” Then I woke up with a bad feeling and checked the news, which I nevvvver do, and felt compelled to share trans news and tears.
Onward, then, to the trans-celebration part.
Listen to this story.
ONCE UPON A time, I wrote a big story about my big wiener for a big magazine.
Afterward, a big audio app contacted me because they had the rights to run an audio version, without further renumeration to me. It’s like, the one point I missed in the story contract, having been so focused on making sure neither the magazine nor the photographer could use any pictures of me again without permission.
“This is totally unheard of,” the magazine and photographer said.
“Well, you can put it in the contract and take photos of my trans body, or not take photos of my trans body,” I said.
Proud of you, 2020 Me.
The audio app emailed to ask which of three listed voice actors I’d prefer to narrate my story. I googled them extensively and gathered that they were all non-trans. I sensed that the app producers asked only because they knew how unwoke it was to have a cis, straight-sounding dude read such an aggressively trans story by a gay-sounding trans writer.
None of these actors, I responded. Get a transmasculine actor.
We don’t have any of those, they responded. But you could do the recording if you want.
I asked if I would be paid like the cis readers. And they said: No! I couldn’t be paid. They just weren’t set up for that kind of thing. When I told them to figure it out, to not have a trans person do for free labor for which cis people are paid, they put up some resistance.
Ultimately, they offered me $300. I don’t know if that’s what cis people are paid for such work. I was out of energy to fight at that point.
Most important, I was happy—I am always happy—to have more content in the world in a voice that sounds like mine. Even though I have spent so, so much time hating my voice.
“I THOUGHT YOU sounded trans,” a cis woman said to me on the phone a few years ago, when I told her I was trans. I almost hung up on her.
FYI, this is not an appropriate thing to say to someone. As a rule of thumb, if you couldn’t substitute “trans” with any other minority, it’s a thumbs down. (“I thought you sounded Asian!” 👎🏻) Trans people don’t ever say it to each other, in my experience, even if we’re thinking it. Mostly it’s because we know we’re often sensitive about what our voices sound like—and mostly, I imagine, that’s because we’re taught to hate ourselves. We’re sensitive that we don’t sound cis. If transness were exalted, it could be the highest compliment to say to someone, “You sound trans.” Because transness is not exalted, and we’ve been erased and maligned, what it smacks of instead is, “I thought I sniffed out a non-cis.”
The purpose of that phone call was to determine whether I should hire the woman for Family Constellation therapy, which would involve her bringing along eight other friends and colleagues. I asked if any of them would be trans. No, she said. But, she said, “If it makes you feel better,” one of her friends who would attend, another cis woman, only slept with trans dudes.
It did not make me feel better about this $800 session. It didn’t make me feel any better about anything. I think it actually made me feel worse about pretty much everything. (“If it makes you feel better, my best friend only has sex with Black dudes.” 👎🏻)
A few years into transitioning, I went to the Voice and Speech Therapy department of the University of California-San Francisco’s trans health program. First of all: Amazing that this department exists. And how lucky I was to be able to go to it, courtesy of Medi-Cal. Its therapists help patients find their most authentic voice, emotionally and physically. I even had a doctor stick a telescope down my throat to see if I was a candidate for vocal-chord surgery that would “masculinize” my voice.
The doctor said that my voice was technically already in the “masculine” range—all these scare quotes just to point out that it’s only binary oppression that decides for us what maleness and masculinity are. It wasn’t my vocal chords that were the issue, the doctor said, but how I used them.
I used them like a girl. Or an effeminate homosexual.
Gabriel Mac
“I want my voice to be so deep that I can talk as much like a girl as I want and not get mistaken for a girl!” I exclaimed, and whined, and at various points cried, to the vocal therapist I was assigned after the doctor determined that surgery wouldn’t do much or maybe anything for me. Once a week, the therapist and I met over video, there in the early wilds of covid telehealth.
When I very first started transitioning, I’d met regularly with a vocal coach who specialized in trans voices, our first appointment on the first day I took testosterone. True to the way I did everything else, I thought that if I just threw enough work and therapy at my voice change, I could fix it, like it was a problem to be solved, rather than a quality to be embraced—let alone celebrated.
I knew trans guys who had either never talked “like” girls, having played butch lesbians in their earlier lives, or who code-switched to what men are “supposed” to talk like after their transitions, dropping into the bottom of their range and removing expressive inflections. As much as I felt like I was being stabbed every time a customer service representative called me “ma’am” on the phone, it was never ever, not even for one second, a consideration that I was going to work at removing my female-socialized intonations. They just didn’t feel wrong to me; on the contrary, it was “male” emotion-stripped vocal patterns that felt, and sounded, flat and contrived.
In almost ten years, I faked them twice. For me, both times felt worse than the stabbing of being misgendered.
Neither the vocal coach I saw first nor the speech therapist I saw later were trying to make me sound like a straight cis man. Rather, both of them tried to help me work through emotional blockages to using my voice at all. It was constricted, by fears of taking up space and expressing myself, lest either get me hate-crimed or harmed. Both of them watched me cry a good deal, as I tried to simply project.
The therapist gave me a few pages’ worth of daily vocal exercises to do. I would take them out into the woods, where I would work on them—blowing out certain consonants, doing scales up and down and up again—sitting against trees, or seated by the bank of a creek. It only took a couple of days before people stopped misgendering me on the phone, even though I didn’t change the way I was talking. “I can tell your voice is deeper,” my then-boyfriend said. It got rounder when I exercised it just a bit, which sounded more manly to people.
Just like that.
SETH SUBSCRIBES TO an app that reads internet content to him. He bought the premium membership, which allows him to have licensed AI clones of Gwyneth Paltrow and Snoop Dogg narrate his news.
“I think people should have the option to have a very gay trans person read to them,” I said.
Consider listening to the weather! Imagine someone who sounded like me telling you the time in Culver City at the top of All Things Considered. Can you fathom it? I can’t. Therein is the problem, for us all: The erasure of queer and trans existence narrows our sense of what’s possible for all individuals.
In The Faggot-Witch Whenever’s first year, every time I recorded a story was emotional and powerful for me. I did not do the voice-therapy exercises first; I haven’t done them since I stopped seeing that therapist more than five years ago. I don’t want to do them, not because I’m lazy or they’re hard but because I want to do the work of accepting my voice at its least “manly.” Of loving a gay and trans voice that I’m not doing a bunch of work to make sound more like what we’re all poisoned to think voices “should” sound like. That work was challenging enough that I recorded only a few.
“I want you to read this to me,” my friend Cody said to me in December, when I published a love letter to my penis on its fifth birthday. Whether or not he has an app like Seth, he’s right that I’m the one person of exactly one who can read that story. Maybe that’s why I didn’t create an AI clone of my own voice, as I planned to do for the whole last year. I even held a subscription to Eleven Labs, a popular company for it, but never uploaded the voice clips it needed.
Gabriel Mac
I would have to record readings of my stories manually, then. I gave it a try, thinking it would be a teeth-pulling, prohibitively time- and resource-consuming chore. Imagine my surprise that instead, it wasn’t just easy, but energizing. In the four years since I launched this site, whatever work I’ve been doing to love myself has been the most important voice therapy of all.
