As a transgender opera singer, I often feel that my role in the studio, and on stage, is to challenge ideas and subvert the form. I walk into a room and subvert conventions of gender, simply by existing, so I may as well embrace that mold. One tenet of my identity as an artist and member of the opera community is that, in order to survive, art must evolve and adapt, responding to and challenging contemporary attitudes. Opera is an artform which often looks to the past for reference, whether it be for contextual information for a production, or the musical scores themselves, the dominant portion of which, as we know, are by dead, white men.
There is continued need for evolution and adaptation within our artform to avoid stagnation in outdated ideas and a “stale, pale and male” canon of repertoire. This evolution will be multi-faceted, for example: the abolition of blackface, in such operas as , , and ; the performance of more operas by living composers, as well as deceased and living female composers, BIPOC composers, and LGBTQ+ composers; increasing the accessibility of opera to a wider demographic of audiences, and challenging the notion that opera is for “the elite”; and, the focus of this article, the abolition of the unnecessarily gendered system, at least in its current applications. The system has a chokehold on the inherent gender roles that opera singers are forced into, leaving gender-variant individuals unable to create authentically from their gender experience, and cisgender (non-transgender) individuals unfulfilled in their own limited gender expression. As time will tell, in order to enact structural change, we must apply radical ideas.
