Trans Man: The Teenage Years

Midway through puberty, my voice started cracking.

I wasn't sure what happened at first. I'd be in the middle of a sentence and suddenly the sound wouldn't come out right. My voice would switch tones abruptly, or refuse to make a sound at all, usually in the space of a second or so. I'd try to clear my throat, but it never really worked.

And then my voice dropped. I mean, seriously dropped. I'd gotten used to speaking in a nice, feminine child's tone, and suddenly I didn't recognize the sound that was coming out of my mouth. It never dropped below an acceptable female level, and nobody else noticed, but you can bet I was self-conscious about it. See, my mum had told me about puberty; she'd told me that girls' voices changed but that they didn't crack like boys' did. There were so many ways to interpret that statement that I was sure that I had violated a rule of girls' puberty somewhere.

The main problem with this story is that there are three different ways that it can end, all of which are pertinent to my life story, so I feel that I should include them all.

1: Deeply embarrassed by my lower voice, and not wanting to be seen as any more unfeminine than I already was, I started forcing my voice into a higher register - especially when talking to my parents. It wasn't hard or miserable or anything, but it still hasn't become natural for me.

2: The sudden drop in my voice got me wondering if there was something off with my body. I already had a few of the other classic symptoms - male tendencies, mainly - but this was my first real clue. Though I later found out that it wasn't unheard of for girls' voices to crack (though it was unusual), the beard hairs that came in later confirmed a hormone imbalance.

2a: I had very mixed feelings about the whole thing. I was feeling a lot of pressure to be feminine, both overt (my mother telling me how to attract boys) and subtle (my mother constantly criticizing my aunt and her lesbian lover for being unfeminine). On the other hand, there was a feeling - more a primal urge than a voice - that latched on to every masculine aspect of my puberty as "correct." Ergo, not only did I have to wonder why my body was doing this, but I had to deal with the feelings that came with it - that strange feeling of bitter gratitude, of disbelief that this could actually be happening and a deep desire, against all reason, to embrace it.

2b: Equally as confusing was the pattern that I was starting to see in myself. I'd always known myself to be a nonconformist, sure, but suddenly I realized there was a pattern to my nonconformity. I liked boys - and not just in a romantic sense; I wanted to spend time with them, talk with them, do the things they did and just generally hang out like guys would. I liked boys' clothes, and had always favored them over girls'. (When I watched Smallville, I spent a large part of my time ogling Tom Welling's wardrobe.) I sat like a guy, which had always irritated my mother (who wanted me to be ladylike, and didn't understand the need to accommodate imaginary genitals or large thighs). There was no ignoring it - I consistently leaned toward the masculine.

As all of this stuff hit me at once, I had exactly one question: Why the hell wasn't I a lesbian?