Content note: This article discusses mental health and trauma.

I was sitting in my therapist’s office at the gender clinic. My therapist asked me what types of treatment I was interested in, and I told him that even though I wanted to start taking testosterone, I couldn’t.

I’m a singer, and have been for a long time. My voice was not just my own emotional safe place, but it was also my job – my financial stability. So, the idea of not being in control of it was absolutely terrifying.

I told him that if I could ever let myself start taking testosterone, I would make an album that documented the way my voice changed. I thought I was going to be 60 years old when I could finally take that leap.

It took me four years to realise that I couldn’t wait until I was 60 to become myself.

Header image of the author, taken by Frida Böling

The first time I heard a change in my voice, I cried out of happiness.

How could I have been scared of this? I thought.

When I started feeling my chest vibrate when I spoke and when I sang, I asked every single friend I met to put their hand on my chest and feel how it resonated. I walked around my living room simply making noise: humming, singing, talking out loud to myself.

The feeling of my voice – more than the actual sound of it – filled me with a euphoria I had never felt before. It felt alien to be so connected to my body, a thing I had avoided contact with for so long.

The first time I sang on stage after starting testosterone, my voice cracked, and I couldn’t reach all the high notes. It was scary in a sense. I was gaining something, while losing something else: control.

At the end of the show, I shared with the audience that this was my first performance since starting testosterone. The entire room burst into wild cheers and applause as I yelled, “I am going through puberty!”

The cracks in my voice and the sour high notes, which could have felt like a defeat, instead became a celebration of change.

Image by: John Paul Bichard.

Welcome Home is an album that chronologically documents how my voice changed during my first year on gender-affirming hormone treatment with testosterone. It interweaves my personal journey with the tale of a machine who has a distant memory of once having been a human child. Their body parts were exchanged for machinery in an attempt to make them into the ‘perfect child’, and now they are longing to reconnect with their lost humanity.

I wrote this story before I knew it was going to document my changing voice.

“Home”, for me, is a word burdened with both trauma and hope. Burdened, because hope has often felt like something dangerous to me, like a gateway drug to dogmatism. The album’s title, Welcome Home, encompasses how starting testosterone was a way for me to come home to myself and to my body, as well as the story of the machine and its relationship to humanity.

Throughout the album, the voice of the machine’s creator tells them to come back home, that it’s safe there now – or safer, anyhow. They try to convince the machine that everything that was done to them was done out of love and care – that they had to be broken to be rebuilt into something stronger. When this is the only relationship someone has to the idea of a home, the entire concept becomes tainted – and the very human longing to come home, even more so.

In the album’s narrative, the machine then rips the motherboard out of their skull and starts feeling the nerves reconnecting. They start being in their body again, feeling the hope and the hopelessness, the fury and the grief. When they start processing their trauma, then home can finally be a representation of something different: a place where they are welcome, safe and free to be themselves.

Image by: Frida Böling.

My life’s journey and the story of the machine are one and the same. We came into the world one way, and through our childhoods, we were shaped into something else. The machinery is a metaphor for CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) caused by experiencing recurring or long-term traumatic events. I experience these symptoms as machine parts installed within me in an attempt to build the perfect machine: one that doesn’t protest, one that obeys, listens and never stops working.

I also perceive my femininity as something mechanical, forced and performative. Something that wasn’t there initially, but was installed in an attempt to create the perfect woman who is similarly subservient and docile. Starting testosterone was a huge step away from this ‘machinery’ – a way of coming home to myself, and to feel human again.

‘Corrupt Imagination’, the last song on my album, and is a duet between my voice before starting testosterone and my voice one year later.

It wasn’t always intended as such; I wrote it in 2021, before having decided to start testosterone, and recorded scrappy demo vocals for it.

When I re-recorded it after starting testosterone, it never quite achieved the expression of the original, which infuriated me. Then I tried singing harmonies with the demo recording, and immediately knew that this was what the song had to be: a duet.

It’s a song about processing trauma, and the pain and relief of feeling like you are back in your body. It says that you are the person who the fucked-up things happened to, but also the person that survived those things. So of course, it had to be sung by both versions of us. With both of our voices.

Image by: Frida Böling.

It’s been a couple of years now since I started testosterone, and I still haven’t gained back full control of my singing voice. I haven’t been able to glide smoothly across the break between my head voice and chest voice, though this is getting easier with time and practice.

In some ways, the things I was terrified of before starting HRT happened: I did lose control of my voice, I did have to start from the beginning in my vocal training and relearn some of the most basic techniques. But if I thought my voice was my safe space before testosterone, then today it’s a haven.

All of my most euphoric moments are connected to my voice: The first time I sang in a tenor section in a choir. The first time I sang with my sister after starting HRT, and she turned around and asked, “Are you singing an octave down?” with her jaw dropped and eyes widened. The first time I sang the duet with myself live on stage, feeling such a deep connection to my past self and wanting to reach out to them and let them know we’re home now.

It’s not just my singing voice – it’s my speaking voice, too. Every day, I use my voice to find calm within my body by humming and feeling the vibrations in my chest. I use it to stand up for myself and for other people, to tell stories, to teach, to ask questions and to express love.

I have never regretted letting my voice change, not even for a second.