“I’d like to get you on four more milligrams of estrogen to raise that voice of yours. I will refer you to a speech therapist for vocal feminization, as well,” my doctor prescribed, unsolicited.
Tits, curves, and a soft face from hormone replacement therapy, hair sufficiently mermaidish—but my voice bellows as a bass and cracks when approaching atmospheric altitudes. Mainstream medical approaches to transgender transition expect a transsexual woman, like myself, to relentlessly pursue normative feminization for all regions of her body and behavior. My voice is subterranean and I do not want voice feminization surgery to slice the stalactites of my vocal box until rays of passability wash in. My deep voice feels good.
But the Snapchat voice filters that elevate vocal pitch tempt me as an entertaining experiment in how I could sound. Chipmunk, alien, robot—modes of sounding that chart a path beyond binaries of male and female. And this flight from vocal restraints and assumptions are what excite me most about SOPHIE’s songs.
The Scottish-born, L.A.-based electronic musician’s early tracks, like those from the 2016 quasi-LP PRODUCT, were noted, even criticized, for “appropriating” an impossibly girlish vocal while obscuring her own presumed male identity and power. SOPHIE later specified that she was not concerned with her own visual anonymity, but rather wanted to forefront the labyrinth of meanings and stylistic choices in her sound. She emphasized that her “intentions have been clear” from the beginning of her career. SOPHIE’s use of high-pitched vocals, like those of Cecile Believe (fka Mozart’s Sister) on songs like “Faceshopping,” multiplies the expressive possibilities of her music. Just as slippery as the reality of SOPHIE’s face (“I’m real when I shop my face”), her voice and the voices she samples are of the body and the cloud, living in Adam’s apples and circuit boards alike.
SOPHIE’s stunning new album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, amplifies this transsexual spirit of self-engineering by using sound as artistic flesh for surgical operation. Building on this idea, below are six tracks by transgender women and transfeminine non-binary musicians who have been modulating trans vocality before SOPHIE’s cyborg exclamation, “I could be anything I want.”
Imp Queen: “Amanda Lepore” (2017)
“Amanda Lepore” worships the “perfect body” of the queen of silicone through a looping nasal diction, robotically repeating an all-too-familiar transsexual lust. Through fellow-tgirl DJ Ariel Zetina’s production, Imp Queen’s already squeaky voice, fit only for “America’s Sexiest Four-Year Old,” is sped up, particularly in contrast to SOPHIE’s pitch-shifting effect. A high-pitched “Thank You” periodically breaks in alongside her vocals, presumably a fictitious response by Lepore to Imp Queen’s aspirational chants. Tinny high-hats, staticky plastic squeaks, and syncopated snapping embellish the track, rendering it a high-pitched sound overall. The opening song on Imp Queen’s 2017 EP Magenta Agenda, “Amanda Lepore” could be viewed as a sister song to SOPHIE’s “Faceshopping.” Both celebrate the transsexual ethos of bodily modification: Imp Queen desires a material transformation as extreme as Lepore’s body, while SOPHIE asserts, undoubtedly as a critique of modern-day authenticity, that her presence is actualized through visual “shopping” (in reference to both consumerist consumption as well as Photoshopping).
V3S0L0: “R34L GIRL” (2018)
In “R34L GIRL,” a cyborg Barbie goes full Pinocchio and decides that she “doesn’t want to be a doll anymore.” A robotic Gollum rasp and brassy noise crackles through waves of wailing siren calls, led by walking synthesizers. “R34L GIRL” is a dispatch of desire to be and not to be, a doll trapped in a machine slamming static against the screen until virtuality melts into actuality. V3S0L0 at once critiques as well as rehearses the drive to transcend from an artificially implanted designation (“doll,” or in trans women’s cases, “male”) to a real form of being (“girl”). SOPHIE’s “Immaterial” is, in some ways, a reverberation of V3S0L0’s call, responding with the encouragement that realness and fakeness are intimately interfaced; Barbie, like the “immaterial boys, immaterial girls,” could be anything that she wants.
MONAE: “Cisphobic” (2018)
In this recent track by New York producer MONAE, the algorithm that codes cisgender as the norm experiences a major glitch. Within the first minute, you hear a trans Valley Girl gossiping about a “fucking cissy” she saw at the club, who made her “immediately become extremely uncomfortable.” Then, across a driving house pulse, a digital voice akin to Siri’s sister declares that “cis people scare me.” Musically at home in the very club infested with the horrors of cis people, “Cisphobic” infects the ears of club kids with a tongue-in-cheek virus: that the fear of the other, as it often is applied to trans people, goes both ways, effectively unsettling the idea that trans people are the abnormal ones. MONAE reverses contemporary social justice vocabulary, like “transphobic,” to denaturalize gender difference, particularly as it relates to the cis experience of accepting a gender code that was coercively downloaded at the time of birth.
Macy Rodman: “Untitled (S.F.U.B.)” (2017)
“Untitled (S.F.U.B.)” toys with the resonance of Macy Rodman’s distinctive chainsmoker timbre and the registers of her growling range. The track is a vocal experiment that slides from straight singing, to choked articulation, to digitally doctored vocal glitches and distortions. Rodman reckons with the amnesiac force of desire, where seduction by a “skinny fucked-up boy” (hence, S.F.U.B.) overrides her own sense of identity; her love for a good S.F.U.B. plunges her into a non-identity of her “ass in the air” and not “know[ing] what [her] name is.” Grinded through a voice fluctuating from unadulterated breaths to mechanical static, Rodman wrestles with self-identification versus a desire for the other, the S.F.U.B.
Ms. Boogie: “Morphin Time” (2018)
Besides awaiting its crowning as the year’s best banger, “Morphin Time” is noteworthy because of Ms. Boogie’s recent public transition and the organic modulation of her voice. It is an anthem of sovereign transsexual transformation, where a girl can “morph,” just like the Power Rangers, on her own terms and slay the house down while she’s at it. “I want to be able to stand strong in my nudity on the microphone,” the Brooklyn-based rapper tells me, explaining the self-affirming power derived from her retrained larynx. Ms. Boogie lets us know that nakedness, especially as it applies to the voice, is not as natural as Adam and Eve, but is rather a continuously “morphin” medium produced through personal and digital stylistic decisions.
EDGESLAYER: “More Femme” (2018)
A choral collage that swarms and excavates the very site of femininity, “More Femme” mourns the compulsory performance of this gated gender style while still embracing parts of its practice. Across textured registers of bass and baritone, the New Orleans–based digital artist EDGESLAYER chants, “I can be more feminine,” and bears witness to transphobic assaults “at the store,” “on my way home,” and “when I’m buying blunts.” “More Femme” is a sonic incantation of a transfeminist politic, of balancing the survivalist requirement to be more femme in order to be graced by cisgender love and protection while still holding fast to a practice that is at the center of many transfeminine musicians’ work: “getting deep into their sensuality without boundaries,” as EDGESLAYER tells me.
Correction: An earlier version of this article mentioned the vocal samples SOPHIE uses but did not mention Cecile Believe by name; in light of her contributions to OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, we have updated to include her.
