There is this idea of one’s voice, that a person has a voice which only they are capable of developing and uttering, but this is different than the mere act of saying words out loud or writing words down—though those are two common mediums for voicing one’s voice. Searching around online for this idea of voice turns up mostly songs or political websites for different causes (in addition to linguistic and/or psychology related results), though the Merriam-Webster dictionary tries define this sense of voice (see 4a & 4b), but fails to capture all that it is: one’s voice is not just an opinion held and uttered nor solely one’s right to expression nor just a rhetorical device / political tool.

I claim that a human being’s voice is that being’s uniqueness as an entity, incarnate. Someone writing this some years ago may have chosen to use the word “soul” or “essence” instead of the phrase “uniqueness as an entity”, but I tabooed those because (1) I don’t think they clearly convey what I’m communicating and (2) they are curiosity stoppers in ways that “uniqueness as an entity” doesn’t seem to be (you can ask about the idiosyncrasies of an entity and how those differ from those of another entity, and so on). One’s voice comprises their identities, their lived experiences, the material composition of theirself, and all the other things that make one particular human being a unique mind and entity despite sharing so much mind and material design with all other humans. Only one person has a particular voice, only that person can voice that voice, only that person can experience their own life experiences, and only that person can write their own story (for a lovely and inspirational song with this message, see Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten”). I take it as a given that it is beneficial for each human being to develop and enrich their own voice, and ask: dear reader, are you growing and nurturing your own voice? Don’t answer that question yet, hold it with you as you read, please, now to what this voicing voice stuff looks like and why I care about it so much via stories from my life.

At the age of 7, I explicitly believed that I had a secret to take to my grave. Back then in 2002 or so, I had no idea that trans people existed and didn’t learn so + the terminology until much later, but I knew culturally that “someone like me”, who I was and how I felt (born male but...

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