Building a Mermaid, Part 1
A voice floated through ether and reached the speakers of my computer desk. The woman speaking was unknown to me, but it was a woman’s voice. She was clockably trans in a way that felt natural, confident. I wanted to know her. I wanted to ask her how she got through the awkward, early phases of transition. As my voice teacher played the recording through our Zoom session, the words she was saying suddenly became familiar, though the voice was still strange. They were familiar, dear reader, because they were the first words I ever wrote for this blog. As the milliseconds passed I realized, as it played back through recursive, aural-processing algorithms of analog-to-digital-to-analog, that the voice was mine. I realized the voice was mine and I wept tears of joy.
Gender dysphoria is a strange creature. It’s a condition with a known cure that, for a brief eternity, makes the symptoms worse. Gender transition produces such joy in those who participate in it that it has reached medical consensus as the prescription for dysphoria. It also is a process that places dysphoric symptoms under a lens and causes those experiencing them to feel dysphoria harder than they ever have before. Before transition, I spent a lifetime denying and hiding from the truth that looking in the mirror was an agonizing experience. That denial, to a point, was saving me from pain. Knowing that you are trans is a self-admission that your body is broken in some fundamental way, and that your survival rests on changing it.
For me at least, knowing that I needed to change my body did not come with any clarity on what exactly needed to change or how to do it. I didn't, and mostly still don't, think of myself as a woman. I just knew that trying to be a man was failing me. Perhaps binary trans folks come out of their eggs with some amount of clarity of who they wanted to be at the end, but I did not. What I did have was a vague direction towards the feminine and no idea where I would stop. Maybe that's every transfemme in the beginning. After all, the term trans implies an action, movement, and not a destination. Perhaps, like some species of fish, my gender needs to constantly move to keep itself alive.
Once upon a time, there was a mermaid who lived in the ocean. She hung out with all of her fish friends, swimming among the sea caves and watching the sailfish races. She sang in a whale chorus and marine life would travel for miles to hear her deep, resonant songs. But while she loved her friends, she knew that there was something different about her. Some part of her wasn't meant to be a fish. She wondered what it would be like to live on land with the humans.
Over time, she began to live closer and closer to the shore and began to observe them from just below surface. She was fascinated by the way they danced to their sea shanties. She tried to emulate their stiff hips as she swam. She befriended those who knew about their ways. She met a dolphin, who performed and played for the humans, and a crab, who walked among them on the beach.
The dolphin loved humanity. "They're so friendly!" he barked. "They love it when I dance and sing for them. And they shower me with delicious fish!" He swam in circles and cackled in joy. "And my trainer, she's the best. I feel like she really gets me!"
The crab, however, had a different opinion. "They fear us. Every time a human sees me they scream... or worse, chase me away! I even heard," she held her claw up to her mouth and whispered,"that they eat us."
"Ha!" The Mermaid's deep laugh echoed for miles. "That couldn't possibly be true! Humans are so beautiful. And kind! Dolphin just said so. I'm going to walk among them some day. The sea witch is going to give me legs and I'll be human."
"The Sea Witch!" the crab snapped. "They never help anyone without a cost. They're going to take that beautiful voice of yours!"
When I decided to transition, it was to allow myself to imagine what I could truly become. A world opened itself to me, I just had to look in the mirror and envision a softer face and a curvier body. With some hormones and some new clothes, it would arrive, but in the meantime, I still had to be a person.
As I started to go out in the world as a femme, I was reminded that society didn't always share my perception. Those experiences caused me dismantle every aspect of my interactions with strangers for what exactly made me clockable. Not clockable as a trans woman, no. I don't mind being visibly trans and in liberal, queer Seattle, it’s enough to mostly avoid getting misgendered. No, I was clockable as a nothing more than a man in a dress.
Every misgendering is an invitation to destroy your ego. An errant "sir" would cause me to dissociate into nothing but the sensory output I put into the world, a series of sights and sounds that everyone placed into some unknowable, subconscious equation to determine man, woman, or other. Starting with a body hardened by years of testosterone, I started wearing dresses, painted my nails, and beat my face with makeup, but still, someone would ignore all that and slip a "he" or "sir" into conversation. Each time, I would over-analyze every part of my body and come up with something new to try. Maybe I should start tucking. Maybe I should start zapping the hair off my body follicle by follicle. Maybe I should change my voice.
I'd be lying if I said these changes were unwelcome. Transition is a wonderful crucible. It melts you down. It reforms you and molds you into something new. You anneal, you find the flaw in the mold, you chisel it away, then you re-liquefy yourself in holy fire. I am desperate for the opportunity to rebuild, I just wish it didn't come with such unintentional cruelty.
At times since I found my voice, it wanders off back down towards the masculine. Unlike a number of sources of gender dysphoria, vocal chords affected by testosterone don't have a medical intervention, or rather, the medical interventions available do not have the overwhelming levels of success as hormones or reconstructive surgeries. Vocal training is the best known solution, but it will always be at a disadvantage. Masculine hormones thicken and lengthen the vocal chords and expand the sinuses in a way that creates a deep resonance and masculine timbre. The training teaches the muscles involved in voice to only use a small amount of the vocal chord mass and shrink the sinuses. Every time you speak, it's like squeezing a bassoon to make a clarinet. On top of all the work involved to make that happen, you're pushing air out of a much narrower passageway than you're used to, so your diaphragm and lungs have to work harder to make a noise. When I'm tired or have a lapse in focus, my voice will naturally wander to a lower register and the dysphoria hits.
Well... Not dysphoria, really. It's some other pile of gender related emotions: dissociation, followed by a calm as I recenter in my body, then a dash of self-flagellation and forgiveness. Then, it always ends with with a question: Who am I doing this for? So much of my dysphoria is the result of how I'm treated by others, so how is changing my voice anything less than capitulation to the same system that wants me dead?
The witch's lair was not as dreary as the mermaid was led to believe. An anglerfish chandelier illuminated the vast antechamber. Pink and purple coral grew out of conch shell sconces on the walls. In the center of the room, pillars displayed their prized possessions, Poseidon's trident, the masthead of the Argo, and the golden apple of Thetis among them.
The witch was a merfolk as well, with beautiful lavender skin and orange tentacles instead of legs or fins. They beckoned with a tentacle from a throne of chiseled sandstone. "Come closer, my dear," they purred. The mermaid swam over hesitantly as a shark-toothed grin grew across sorceress's purple lips. "What brings such a beauty to my dreary corner of the depths?"
"I guess I've never really felt like I belong in the ocean." The mermaid stared at her tail as she spoke. "I mean, I'm not really a fish. I know I'm not a human, but I want to see what it's like to live among them. I heard you can help me."
The witch clicked her tongue in disappointment. "Oh my dear. I've spent plenty of time on the surface, and you have just as much humanity as any of them. You just need to believe you are and you can be more human than any of those on land could hope to be. What you have below your waist makes no difference..." They paused to ponder their next words. "But... if you want to live with the humans, I can help you."
They opened a small jewelry box sitting next to them and pulled out a tiny blue pearl. "At the next full moon, swim onto the shore and sleep with this placed under your tongue. When you wake, you will have legs." They dropped the pearl onto the mermaid's palm.
"Thank you so much!" The mermaid beamed and clutched the pearl to her chest. But as she recalled the crab's words, the smile slowly turned into concern. "But what do I owe you? I heard there's always a price for your magic."
A snarl came over the witch's face before they calmed themselves again. "Vicious rumors my dear. My magic is always given freely. You may use the pearl as you wish and I expect nothing in return."
The mermaid breathed a sigh of relief. "Apologies, your eminence. I just saw your treasures and assumed you would want to take my voice."
The witch swam over to her and stroked her cheek. They gave the mermaid a caring look. "Oh my dear, all of those treasures were given freely and completely unprovoked. Your exquisite voice is yours to keep." They paused once again. Slowly, the witch's smile grew even wider than before. "But after you spend time on the surface, you'll be begging to give it to me."
