Member-only story
Living In My Silence
Three weeks without uttering a word
Three years ago, I started to contemplate having surgery on my vocal cords. When I speak, my voice is recognized by everyone as coming from a man. My voice is not very deep, but there is enough bass to be addressed as sir.
When I was young, at around eight, I came across a reel-to-reel recorder that one of my brothers had left behind. I figured out how it worked and was able to record. My sisters and I had fun recording ourselves and listening to how we sounded. I remember how my voice was very close to my sister’s; in other words, I sounded like a girl. I was a late bloomer; I finally went through puberty between my first and second years in high school. I remember being very happy that I could answer the phone and not be gendered as a girl or one of my sisters.
I googled vocal cord surgery in my area and found a plastic surgeon in Boston that performs voice feminization surgery (VFS). Writing this, I find it funny that I want to go back to sounding like my sisters. Three years ago, the surgeon wanted $150 for a consultation. I just wanted information. I wasn’t ready for a consult; there was no sense in spending the money to ask a few preliminary questions. I read through the voice feminization surgery page on their website and found the answers I wanted. Of course, knowing the answers only leads to more questions. The question most important to me then was how much? Finding the answer would cost me $150 and a two-hour drive into Boston. Having insurance through the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) and not wanting to pull monies from our savings to cover the cost of the surgery, which would probably be in the thousands of dollars, I decided to not spend the money on a consult.
After years of cross-dressing in secret and living in denial of this (for lack of a better word) feminine essence, I came out as trans in late 2000 at the age of thirty-eight. Looking into the mirror and saying for the first time out loud, “I am trans,” was liberating. I found and joined a trans support group that met weekly. I met people just like me, some who were only crossdressers like myself and others who were beginning to or had already started their transition. It was because I met these beautiful people I found the courage to walk out of my house for the first time dressed as a woman. Once…
