A new voice

Holden Madagame is a transgender man. He’s also starting a career an opera singer. But those two have a hard time fitting together. He did a great deal of voice study as a mezzo-soprano before his transition. When he realized he needed to transition he faced a dilemma. What would taking testosterone do to his budding career? Would he have to choose between a career and feeling comfortable in his own body? But he was feeling so bad trapped in the wrong gender he wasn’t singing anyway. A teacher at University of Michigan encouraged him to go for it. So he started the transition. He now has a tenor voice good enough to sing professionally. He had a lot of work to get used to the new voice, though that was helped a lot by what he had already learned – breath control, diction, languages, stagecraft, and how to practice. Someday he’ll be known as Holden the tenor, though for now he is Holden the transgender tenor, a role model for younger transgender singers.