[randolph]

Changing Her Tune: How a Transsexual Woman Claims a New Identity Through Voice
Katharine Stoel Gammon One January evening in downtown San Francisco, the front hall of the Regency Ballroom was filled with people dressed in floor-length gowns. Sequins were particularly popular. A woman in a rhinestone-covered strappy number walked by, even her hair glimmering in sparkles. Other dresses dipped dangerously low in the back, revealing toned muscles, or cascaded in the front to expose buxom cleavage. Tightly laced corsets created slim waistlines and hourglass shapes. Splendidly styled heads with big curls and plentiful hairspray bobbed through the crowded marble corridor. Flashbulbs popped as the most celebrated participants walked into the room, their stiletto heels clacking against the cold stone floor. A buzz suffused the chamber, similar to the sound of a flock of geese collecting near a lake. The event was a black-tie gala, themed ?A Return to Elegance,? which drew a few hundred members of TransGender San Francisco. Each year, its cotillion is a chance for new members of the transgender community to have a ?coming out,? to walk debutante-style across the stage, and to meet other members of the city's transsexual and transgender population.
The women continued to arrive, and a few men as well. Despite the mild San Francisco weather, many wore elegant heavy furs and were already sweating as they dropped them at the coat check. Heavy floral perfume saturated the air. Voices glissando-ed to falsetto and back. The elongated vowels were striking: It's so gooooood to seeeeeee yooooouu! What are you doooooooing these daaays? What a beeeeeeaaaauuuuutiful dress you are wearing!
Some of the gala attendees were clearly in the early stages of male-to-female transition or perhaps transvestites?choosing to live as men and dress as women for pleasure in their personal lives. A young woman moved through the crowd in a tight lacy black cocktail dress and a tiny, feathered pillbox hat. She looked completely ?biological??naturally female, lacking the broad shoulders and big hands that some transsexuals bemoan cannot be altered with surgery. Others stared at her in envy and whispered to each other as she passed.
As the show began, Allison Laureano, the president of TransGender San Francisco, wearing a dress inspired by Lara Turner and a hairstyle reminiscent of Rita Hayworth, took the front stage. After some opening jokes and banter, she introduced the candidates for Miss Transgender 2007. Later a rotund transwoman performer named Tommi Rose sang about a friend who had passed away from cancer years before. ?She once said not to cremate her body because silicon doesn't burn and it would be a bad, bad sight for everyone nearby,? said Rose, wearing a royal blue dress with so much sparkle that the ballroom's walls were bathed in an underwater glow.
Among the attendees, there were those who had undergone sexual reassignment surgery to give them the genitals of their desired gender, those who had changed their faces to be more feminine, and those who had added breasts. Others had their facial hair lasered away or their Adam's apples shaved off. But the one thing that seemed to make the most difference in establishing their new identity was the way they used their voices.
Tommi Rose possessed an amazingly versatile voice; she could reach into her upper registers easily and then smoothly transition back down to a bass to speak to her audience in an intimate-sounding way. Her glittery performance, full of jokes and poignant anecdotes, was observed by hundreds of transwomen and some transmen, munching on pasta salad at linen-covered tables. Alone on the stage under the spotlight, Tommi Rose represented the entire spectrum from man to woman; her voice was an acoustic medley of the struggles transgendered people go through as they move from one way of being in the world to another.