Gangnam Style (Silently)

My final, final, final surgery was supposed to be in January. Vaginoplasty. That was meant to be it. The last one. The big finish. The end credits.

Except, apparently, it wasn’t the final, final, final surgery after all, because there is now one more final, final, final surgery, and I have just booked the flights for it.

We are not going back to Bangkok this time. This time we are off somewhere even more ridiculous. Gangnam. As in Gangnam Style.

And yes, I am fully aware that I am now going to spend a week wandering around Gangnam with that song playing endlessly in my head like an absolute idiot, except unfortunately I will not be allowed to sing it out loud. Because I am going to South Korea for voice surgery.

I have been toying with this for ages. On, off, on, off, on, off. One week I think, no, this is excessive. Keep training. Do the work. Be sensible. The next week I hear myself speak and think, absolutely not, book the plane.

And I think I have finally accepted the truth. I do not think I can get where I want to get without surgery. And even if I technically can, eventually, through training alone, it is going to take a very long time. And I am 58 this year. I do not have a very long time.

Let me rewind slightly.

When I got back from Bangkok, about three weeks after surgery, I started lessons with Seattle Voice Lab. To be fair to my coach, she says I am doing okay. She says I am very hard on myself. She says I have ridiculously high standards about how this is supposed to sound, and that I get frustrated because I expect things to arrive on schedule, preferably yesterday, preferably already perfect, preferably with no awkward intermediate phase where I sound like a haunted flute.

She is probably right.

But I said to her one day, “Can I be really honest with you? I thought I was going to be fucking awesome at this.” I really did. Arrogantly, I thought I was going to click my fingers and it would all come together.

I have a reasonably good musical ear. I play guitar. I can sing. I can do impressions. I can even do impressions of women. I honestly thought, well, this is not going to be that difficult, is it?

Absolute nightmare.

Voice training is like learning to drive a car, except the car is your own throat and the gearbox is your stupid tongue. At the beginning you are consciously aware of everything. Where is my tongue? Why is my stupid tongue doing that? Why is my breath not doing what I told it to do? Why did the pitch disappear the second I thought about resonance? Why did the resonance disappear the second I thought about breath? Why do I sound like a monotone, breathy thing when I can normally sing, joke, present software, do impressions, and burst into Morrissey in a bar?

And I now have huge respect for every trans woman who has trained her voice and got there. I really do. I just do not think I am going to be one of them. Or at least, I do not think I am going to get there quickly enough, easily enough, or reliably enough for the life I want to live now.

There is also a pattern in my life that I should probably name out loud. The pattern is this:

Can money solve the problem?

Solve it now please.

Here is money.

Make the problem solved.

This is not necessarily a spiritually advanced way to live, but it does have a certain brutal efficiency.

I looked at my face and thought, all the will in the world is not going to feminise this properly without FFS. So I had FFS.

I looked at my breasts and thought, okay, let’s be fair, let’s give hormones a go, let’s see what comes out naturally. And to be fair, I got okay breast growth. But they were never going to be what I wanted. I wanted good boobs. So I got breast implants. And honestly, they are pretty damn good boobs.

So now I look at voice and I see the same thing. All the determination in the world might not solve this to the level I personally need. And if surgery can solve enough of it directly, then surgery starts to look less like vanity and more like strategy.

So I started researching. Obsessively, obviously.

I read papers. I watched before-and-afters. I went through Reddit horror stories. I looked at YouTube clips. I listened to results years later where I could find them. I looked at the difference between surgeons and techniques, because this is one of the things I think people sometimes get wrong. They pick the surgeon first. Then they get whatever technique that surgeon happens to do.

I wanted to pick the technique first.

As far as I can see, there are three broad approaches. There is the older cricothyroid approximation technique, CTA, the original pitch-control approach. That is the old-school version of vocal feminisation surgery. It mainly pulls the pitch upwards. It does not really solve the whole voice.

There is Wendler glottoplasty, which is the more common modern alternative. That seems to be a solid, well-established technique, and plenty of people get good results from it. But again, it is mainly about pitch.

And pitch is not the whole problem. That was the thing I kept coming back to.

I do not actually have a dramatically deep voice. I do not sound like I am about to announce the trailer for an 80s action film after twenty years of steroids, cigars and shouting in bars.

My problem is not just pitch. It is weight. Resonance. Density. That underlying male sound sitting underneath everything. The “male software architect” voice. And that is what I want gone.

Eventually, all roads led to Yeson Voice Center in Gangnam, Seoul. The results I heard were the ones I kept coming back to. Not just higher. Lighter. Softer. Less effortful. Closer to what I want.

There is one more approach out there, the nuclear option, for people with very deep or heavy voices. But I do not think I need the nuclear option. My voice is already reasonably light. It just is not light enough, and it is not mine enough.

And that is the point, really. This is not about wanting to sound like a cartoon princess. It is about wanting the sound that leaves my body to stop contradicting the person everybody is looking at.

Because visually, I pass quite well now. That still feels strange to write. But it is true.

People do not stare at me in the street. People do not look twice. I go into shops, cafés, petrol stations, restaurants, and nobody reacts. Quite a few people have said to me, very directly, that if they saw me walking down the street they would not clock me as transgender.

Then I speak.

And the whole room quietly recalculates.

Not cruelly. It is just that tiny pause. That tiny shift. That tiny moment where someone’s eyes say, oh, right, you’re one of them.

So every time before I speak, I have to decide whether I’m going to break cover, because I will be.

I was in a petrol station recently and the cashier asked if I had got any fuel. I tried to answer with my best Seattle Voice Lab voice. Light. Soft. Careful.

“No.”

But when I speak that way I cannot project properly yet, so they said, “Sorry?” And then I had to say it again.

“No.”

And you see the flicker. The recalibration. The moment they understand twice. Once what you said. And once what you are.

I am not ashamed. I really am not. If somebody clocks me, they clock me. I have survived far worse than a cashier in a petrol station realising I am transgender. But I would prefer not to have that transaction every time I buy a Mars bar.

Then there was the hair salon.

I had booked to get my hair coloured. The owner, a woman, was going to do it for me, but I had to phone up to change the date. The receptionist said they could do Wednesday instead and gave me a man’s name. I said, “Oh, the woman was going to do it for me, the owner.”

And she said, brightly, “It’s okay. James does the men.”

As in:

You are a man, aren’t you?

And I said, “No. I just sound like one.”

I hated that. I hated everything about it. I hated that she was embarrassed. I hated that I was embarrassed. I hated that I had to correct her. I hated that I had to hear myself say it.

No.

I just sound like one.

Then I tried to buy heating oil online and they assumed Stevie meant Stevie Wonder. Which, to be fair, is partly my own fault for choosing such a stupidly ambiguous name. But still.

It is always there.

The voice arrives first. Before the face. Before the body. Before the story. Before the person. The voice gets there first and hands over the wrong paperwork.

People who know me say my voice is fine. And I believe them. Sort of. Because people who know you normalise you. They stop hearing the mismatch. Your face and your voice and your mannerisms and your history all fuse together into one person. They hear Stevie because they know Stevie.

But strangers do not know Stevie. Strangers get a sound. And that sound still says Stephen.

The thing that finally tipped me over the edge was a software demo.

I had recorded a walkthrough of a system I had built for a client. And I was excited about the software, which meant I forgot to concentrate on my voice. I was just doing what I have done for years. Click here. Then this happens. This bit is really cool. Watch what happens when I do this.

And because I was relaxed and competent and interested, the old voice came back completely.

Afterwards, I played the recording. And there he was. Stephen fucking Bennett. Back from the dead. Stephen fucking Bennett with a girl face.

I hated it. I could not unhear it.

I imagined someone watching the video without seeing my face. Just hearing the voice. Male software architect. Male expert. Male presenter. Male.

And then I imagined them being told who I was afterwards. Oh, that is the transgender one at work. God, she still sounds like a man, doesn’t she?

Maybe that is unfair. Maybe nobody would say that. Maybe plenty of people would be kinder than the version of them I invented in my head. But the fact that I could imagine it so clearly told me something.

I cannot live with this. Not like this. Not indefinitely.

I tried. I really did. I tried to tell myself it was fine. I tried to say, well, people who know me are used to it. I tried to say, well, I can be funny with it. I tried to say, well, maybe the voice is just part of me.

And maybe it is.

Maybe this voice has carried me through a lot. It presented software. It made jokes. It did Morrissey in bars. It got me paid. It got me heard. It got me through rooms I had no business surviving. I am not ungrateful to it.

But it is not where I want to live anymore.

So yes.

Flights are booked. I am going to Gangnam. I am going to be surrounded by the spiritual birthplace of one of the most violently catchy songs ever recorded, and I am going there specifically to shut up.

For a while, anyway.

No singing. No Morrissey. No software demos. No cheerful petrol station “no”. Just silence.

Which is funny, really.

After fifty-seven years of trying to find my voice, I am flying halfway across the world to lose it deliberately.

And hopefully, when it comes back, it will sound a little more like me.