The director gave me a smile and pointed with her head over to the tenor side of the line I straddle, indicating that I should sing with them. She had decided to put all the altos on descant, and caught my eye just as this was going into effect. Glancing over the notes, a good quarter of them were below a D3. Not that I could hit those notes, but it felt pretty comfortable to pretend. Some days it feels great to soar around in my whistle register just because that's what my voice is able to do... but some days it catches up with me, that feeling of strangeness and disorientation that tells me something's very off. Hey, if she's gonna actually put me on the tenor part, I'm going to take her up on it. I sneak over in that direction in secret all the time anyways.
It's not the first time she's forgotten that I don't have the same range as Jess. Jess has been around for two decades and has put a lot of work into her voice in that time, but she tends not to jump up to the soprano register - she was once a bass. Perhaps it just gets lost on our poor overbusy director that FTM and MTF spectrum people have entirely different places they're coming from, vocally. It feels strange to be plunked in the same third-gender box as a trans woman, but if I've gotta be in a box, at least it's a better one to take than the conventional two.
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