Month: February 2014

Finding My Voice

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

For the past eight weeks, I have been taking a songwriting class. I’ve written roughly half a dozen songs, most of which I’ve played for my classmates.

On Sunday, for the first time since high school, I am getting up on a stage and singing. For the first time ever, I will be publicly singing something I wrote.

I’ve watched my words performed on stage by other people. I’ve never actually performed something of my own before.

And I am terrified.

When I was in high school, I sang with our youth group worship band a handful of times. Every time I stepped behind a mic, my voice jumped up an octave. Having a high voice bothered me then, too, even though being trans was nowhere on my radar.

My voice is significantly lower now than it was when I started on testosterone almost four months ago. (Case in point.) And I’m more comfortable in myself now than I was in high school. And I’ve performed on a smaller scale in front of my classmates. And the audience will be almost entirely comprised of people in songwriting classes, or their families and friends, so I really don’t need to be worried.

But I am.

I’m afraid of being misgendered. Because my voice is not so low that it doesn’t happen anymore.

I’m afraid that I’ll get up there and forget all the words that I wrote, or how to play the music.

I’m afraid that my voice will get lost in falsetto.

But I’m going to do it anyway. And I guess, in the end, that’s what matters. Right?

My Hips Don’t Lie (I Think)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

(Apologies for the late post today, folks! Thanks to a combination of lots of little weird things not going quite right, my whole week has felt rather off, and I didn’t realize until I was about to pass out last night that I didn’t have a blog written yet. Oops! Anyway, I hope this one makes you chuckle. Enjoy!)

I am not a small human.

I will grant you that I only stand 5’5″ tall, but I am a stocky fellow. I take up space. And I have always (at least since puberty number one) had hips.

Now don’t get me wrong: hips can be useful. They’re great for balancing things like laundry baskets carried in one arm so your other hand is free to unlock and open doors. If I was planning on ever bearing children, I’m sure I would find other instances in which I was thankful for my hips.

But when you’re trying to achieve a more masculine presentation, hips are annoying at best, and dysphoria-inducing at worst. For someone like me, whose chest can be fairly well concealed by a binder, hips turn into one of the bigger reasons I wind up being read as a woman.

Last week, in preparation for our trip to Minnesota, I found myself tackling a mountain of laundry. We live on the second floor of our building; the laundry room is down the stairs, out the door, around the corner, through another door, and down a few more stairs. For someone like yours truly, whose back and knees tend not to love stairs in the first place, laundry is kind of an extra obnoxious experience. But I was determined to get it done. So I packed up a mesh bag full of clothes, flung it over my shoulder, hauled it down the stairs, and started a couple of loads.

Once the laundry was dry, I actually did that thing that I’m told real adults do and folded everything. I then put the laundry in one of our small laundry baskets, picked it up, swing it around under my right arm, and braced it against my right hip.

That was what was supposed to happen, anyway.

Only…I couldn’t find any way to balance the basket without tilting the whole load of freshly washed shirts and socks and a wonky sort of angle in relation to my body, shoving the corner of the basket into my side under my ribcage.

It made getting the laundry back upstairs (through four closed doors, two of which were locked) quite the journey.

I had known for a while that my butt was smaller, but I never, ever, ever expected that my hips would slim down in the least. And my hips are definitely still there. But…they’re not as there as they used to be.

I’m not complaining. But it’s weird to suddenly find yourself unsure of what your body, the body you’ve spent 25 years getting to know, can and cannot do.

The Naked I: Insides Out

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Assuming that things go roughly according to plan, but the time this posts, my partner and I will be very nearly to Minnesota, where we are headed for a long weekend to spend time with family and friends…

…and to celebrate the opening weekend of a show that I have a piece in!

So I’m going to take a break from life updates and plug the show: The Naked I: Insides Out.

The show has been created and is being produced by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities, a wonderful theatre company that focuses specifically on work by women and transgender artists. The following is the show description from the 20% Theatre Company website:

20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is thrilled to present the world premiere of THE NAKED I: INSIDES OUT – the 3rd in a series of NAKED I plays that explore queer and trans* experiences through monologues, short scenes, and spoken word poems. This production will take place at Intermedia Arts February 13-23, 2014 and will feature the work of over 100 LGBTQ artists and allies – including contributing writers, directors, performers, designers, technicians, and more! This show will include 25 pieces chosen out of 119 submissions! 

There are an infinite number of stories to be told, and as a company focused on social change, human rights, and the voice of queer and trans* artists, 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is determined to tell as many of these stories as we can – thus creating/producing a new NAKED I show every few years.

The first Naked I production, The Naked I: Monologues from Beyond the Binary, by Tobias K. Davis, was produced by 20% in 2009. In 2011, 20% put out a call for submissions for a second Naked I production: The Naked I: Wide Open. My partner and I both had pieces in that show, and I ended up doing the layout work for getting the script into a publishable book format. It was an incredible experience, not just for us, but for everyone involved and everyone who came to see the show (which sold out two runs, was in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and toured around the country a bit in 2012).

Last year, when the call for submissions for the next iteration of the Naked I went out, I submitted a handful of pieces, and one of them wound up in the show. (I did the book layout for this script, as well.) The Naked I: Insides Out is every bit as beautiful and important as its predecessors. If you are in/near/able to get to the Twin Cities in the next couple of weekends, I strongly encourage you to check it out. The first couple of performances have sold out already, and I’m sure the others will as well, so if you’re interested, be sure to grab your tickets (sliding scale $5-$25) at that first link I posted. (If you can’t catch the show, all of those links attached to the titles up there will take you to Amazon, where you can pick up a copy of the script. It’s powerful stuff, and well worth the read. Also, I made it look extra pretty.)

We’re going with a bunch of wonderful friends to the sold-out performance this Saturday, and I am so excited. I had a little bit of contact with the director of my piece, but I really wanted to just let go of this rare piece of work that I’m actually pretty proud of and see what happened to it in the hands of the director and actor who are taking it on. I have every confidence that it will be amazing. I am thrilled and humbled and honored to be a part of something so important and poignant and hard and lovely. While a part of me will always be terrified waiting for the reaction of the audience to the words I’ve written, I still can’t wait to share this with the world. It’s an immense privilege to be able to tell my stories, and, as an extension, the stories of the other people like me, and it’s a privilege I hope I never take lightly. Stories have the power to change the world, and this production is full of world-changing stories.

Three Months

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Tomorrow (February 7, 2014) marks three months that I’ve been on testosterone!

It’s been quite a journey. And I’ve finally gotten my first lab results back (a lab visit, a lost test result, a second lab visit, and two weeks later) as of Monday, which has been great. I’m continuing on my initial dosage, since my progress has been good (estrogen is negligibly above the goal level [or was, back in December, and is less than half what it started at], and testosterone is well within the goal range [more than ten times where it started]). It’s nice to have some concrete numbers to back up the changes I’m seeing and feeling day to day.

Things that have changed in the last three months:

  • My voice. Holy shit, my voice. (Pop down two posts for a sound clip comparing November and January: it’s even a bit deeper now.) My voice was the thing that most bothered me prior to starting on T (and was one of the only things that made me dysphoric), and I am loving the changes I’m hearing. I’m much more comfortable answering the phone at work, and although I’ve been singing in a high tenor range for years, it’s gotten a lot more comfortable.
  • My hair. Mostly, there’s more of it. On my stomach, my arms, my legs, my back (not so happy about this recent development), and on my face. Up to this point I mostly just have peach fuzz on my face, but there’s been enough of it that I’ve shaved a few times, and I’m noticing more dark hairs coming in between shaves, particularly on/under my chin.
  • The distribution of my body fat. My butt is smaller. My hips might be, too (though not much…thanks to my skeletal structure I’ll always have wide-ish hips). My stomach is maybe a little bigger. They’re not huge changes, but they’re big enough that I’ve noticed.
  • My appetite. Prior to starting T, it wasn’t uncommon for me to skip meals, either out of distraction or because I simply wasn’t hungry. I joked that I had the metabolism of a stationary boulder. After starting T, I was suddenly hungry ALL THE TIME. It’s evened out a bit (finally…feeding a teenage boy is expensive), but I still am hungry way more often than I used to be.
  • My need for sleep. Whether it means I’m a teenage boy or an old man, I’m not sure, but I’m going to be earlier and waking up later than I was before.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the changes I’m seeing. While I don’t love everything about it (like the handful of back hairs that have shown up, or the fact that I can never seem to get the injections in my right leg to go as smoothly as the ones in my left), I definitely don’t have any regrets about starting down this road. I look forward to seeing what new changes lie ahead!