Voice drop

I wanted to highlight this change, on testosterone, because I’ve vacillated so much over time, and it seems worth noting.  Initially, this was the thing I feared the most.  It’s one of the changes that happens early on, is irreversible, and is most noticeable.  I wanted to avoid it all together, partially because I wasn’t ready to come out beyond what I was comfortable with (my community and friends).  I didn’t want this change to “out me” before I was ready.  Also, I didn’t want to tip the gender balance – I wanted to be, over-all, androgynous and not definitively masculine in any way.

When I was on a low dose of Androgel (for over 2 years), I successfully kept things right where I wanted them.  Then I went off T completely for a while, and in that time, I started DJing for a community radio station.  I didn’t like listening back to my shows at first, so I just didn’t.  They felt cringe-worthy.  Eventually I started listening, and improving, and switching things up.  I started to find my voice, suuuuuuper gradually.

About a year in, I was ready to plunge into T-injections and all the changes that may come along with that, including my voice dropping.  I had already come out with family and at work and had changed my name legally, so those things were no longer road-blocks.

It was a bizarre and largely private thing to go through.  I don’t talk all that much in my daily life, to begin with, so it was a lot of testing out the changes, daily, in my car alone.  And then also the radio show, weekly.  I know there were times when my voice cracked, but I haven’t listened back, specifically, for that.  I’m sure I could find those moments, in the archives, if I really wanted to.  But I don’t!  Haha.

Fast forward, and I am super satisfied with my voice as it is now.  I have a hard time relating to how tortured I felt about it in the past.  Along with increased confidence and comfort with my body and my place in the world, my voice just feels natural.  It also just feels so much easier to find words, to converse in all sorts of situations, and to be more out there.  It is awesome in so many ways.

In preparing for my 100th radio show, I did go back to those first few shows and listened to them probably for the first time.  And they WERE totally cringe-worthy, haha.  My voice was stilted and stiff; I sounded so unsure of myself.  I did a cool thing where I isolated some of the sound clips from those early shows, and then I played them live, on my 100th show.  Here’s me, talking about lunch over the course of a handful of shows, before T-injections, and then me interjecting over top of that – you can really notice the change in my voice that way!  Also my best friend was there in the studio – she’s the third voice on this track: