Opera has always thrived on illusion — voices soaring beyond bodies, gender slipping between roles. Castrati, trouser roles, and cross-dressed desire once defined the stage. Yet today, trans and non-binary singers are met with constraint. How did an art form built on transformation forget how to live outside the binary?
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Opera has always had a complicated relationship with gender. From the castrati of the Baroque period to the en travesti, or ‘trouser roles’, of the 18th and 19th centuries, the art form has long toyed with the gap between vocal sound and embodied identity. Yet despite this long history of gender nonconformity on stage, contemporary opera remains remarkably rigid in its expectations. Voice types are still often read as fixed gender markers — and a simple Google image search attests to this: sopranos appear as hyper-feminine divas in ornate gowns; baritones, as bearded, tuxedoed men.
“Most people assume that I’m a mezzo when they meet me,” says Ella Taylor, a non-binary British soprano. “People have a stereotyped view of what a mezzo is, which is someone with short hair. When I start singing, that quickly changes.” Their comment points to a disjunction that feels both striking and strangely outdated. In an era when conversations around trans and non-binary visibility are gaining traction across the wider entertainment industry (see, for instance, the non-binary actor Ella Ramsey’s recent Emmy’s win), why are we still surprised when a voice doesn’t match its presumed visual or gendered expectation in classical music?
Even the Fach system — the widely used German method of categorising operatic voices, dating back to the 19th century — reinforces binary thinking. Though technically ungendered, it is structured around male and female roles, and its application often defaults to gendered assumptions. A popular YouTube video breaking down the Fach leans heavily into gendered metaphors: coloratura sopranos are likened to “tiny Olympic gymnasts,” light lyric sopranos to “ballet dancers.” While these comparisons may help those unfamiliar with opera grasp vocal qualities, they also reinforce the notion that certain sounds must belong to certain bodies.
But what happens when voices don’t comfortably align with – or, outright reject – the gender binary? Why, in an art form with such a rich lineage of queerness and gender fluidity, does it still feel like such a rupture when a trans or non-binary singer steps onto the stage?
A Brief History: Gender Queerness in Baroque Opera
The first international superstars of the European stage were the castrati: male singers forcibly castrated before puberty to retain the high-pitched voice of a boy in an adult male body. I say ‘adult male’ cautiously, as the voice was not the only thing changed by pre-pubescent castration. As well as possessing a powerful soprano range, castrati often developed striking physiques due to disrupted hormone levels that hindered “regular” physical maturation: tall with long limbs, rounded hips and chests, little to no body hair, and soft, unlined skin. They were androgynous both sonically and physically, positing them within a constructed gender that sits uneasily within binary definitions. Musicologist Heather Hadlock identifies the castrati “as a surgically, socially, and culturally constructed ‘third sex’”’ — a reality attested to in a number of Baroque opera manuscripts like Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle, which designates parts for ‘man’, ‘woman’, and ‘castrato’.
The castrati were hugely fashionable on the Baroque stage, when the high voice dominated as the most important and of the highest aesthetic value. Composers wrote phrases that particularly highlighted the spectacular vocal capacities of the castrati. As a result, it was the castrati, and not men, who filled the roles of male heroes on the operatic stage, often representing masculine prestige through characters such as kings, warriors, generals, and gods.
Romantic scenes between two high voices, often a castrato and a female soprano, became a staple of 17th century Italian opera. The physical and vocal presence of castrati singers in these erotic love duets complicate the heterosexual narratives. Gender on the operatic stage became a flimsy matter of surfaces constructed through costumes, makeup and social conventions.
Contemporary non-binary opera singers often cite this period as precedent. CN Lester, a non-binary transmasc mezzo, notes that early opera saw voice types less as identifiers of gender and more as expressive tools. “What’s under the costume doesn’t matter so much as what’s the voice coming out,” they reflect. Indeed, where castrati were not available, female sopranos stood in for and cross-dressed as their masculine roles with ease, and vice versa.
Historical records also show instances where female singers presented as castrati in order to enjoy the level of social prestige and fame that were denied to them otherwise, especially in papal states where women were banned altogether from the public stage until 1797.
Libretti of the time provocatively pointed to the ambiguous status of gender on the stage, and the curious gap between the actor’s and the character’s body. In Sacrati’s 1640s opera La finta pazza, the castrato hero Achilles sings:
Sweet change of nature,
woman who transforms into man,
man who transmutes into woman,
changing name and figure
[…]
How many envy my status,
of being a man and a maiden?
The castrato becomes embodied through these lines, gesturing not only to the plot’s gender play, but acting also as metatheatrical reference to the singer’s own androgyny. The castrato voice testifies to the genderfluid capacity of their body, and more importantly, questions and queers the very gender of the character within the text. Here, “what’s under the costume,” as per Lester’s comment, complements “the voice coming out,” offering Baroque opera the radical potential to showcase and perform gender in non-binary-conforming ways.
What Now, and What Next?
The modern association of high voices with women and low voices with men emerged in the 19th century, alongside a growing demand for gender and vocal range to align neatly within a clearly defined binary. This was also the era in which the hyper-feminine diva replaced the castrato as the star of the operatic stage. While castrati disappeared from the stage, their roles did not: productions of earlier operas redistributed these parts to male countertenors or female mezzo-sopranos. But neither option is a perfect substitute. As scholar Joke Dame points out, no modern singer will be an entirely satisfying replacement until we disentangle the voice from gendered assumptions and stop trying to “assign a sex to the voice.”
She notes that male countertenors are often preferred over mezzo-sopranos for castrato roles not due to vocal timbre, but because of the belief that female sopranos are unable to convincingly enact male heroes, despite the fact that cross-gender casting was commonplace during the Baroque period itself. The voice, in these cases, is still seen as something that must “match” the gender of the body performing it — a principle that continues to govern casting choices.
This issue persists today for trans and non-binary singers. Ella Taylor speaks about how industry professionals often assume they don’t want to perform female roles because of their masculine appearance and non-binary identity — or worse, disregard their identity altogether based on their soprano voice. In one instance, promoters used the biography on their website for promotional materials, but replaced their non-binary pronouns with ‘she/her’. Lucia Lucas, an acclaimed American baritone and trans woman, continues to face casting challenges in roles written for male voices, despite her professional track record. Both experiences reveal the same problem: a refusal to acknowledge voices and bodies as expressive wholes, and an insistence on treating gender-nonconforming singers as saliencies to be corrected or, worse, curiosities to be consumed.
Holden Madagame, a Berlin-based trans tenor, speaks insightfully about this disconnect. Having originally trained as a mezzo-soprano, he later retrained as a tenor following his medical transition. His current voice, he writes, is often framed as exotic, when in reality, it is simply “a useful, standard tenor.” Madagame also draws attention to the hypocrisy within the vocal world, where singing teachers regularly support cis boys through the voice changes that accompany puberty (in itself a testament to the human voice being a changeable thing), yet transmasculine singers undergoing similar hormonal transitions are viewed with suspicion. The issue, again, is not one of vocal capacity, but of gendered thinking.
Today, there is a growing number of trans and non-binary singers in opera, and welcome moves toward broader LGBTQ+ visibility in classical music. But true inclusion demands more than representation. It requires confronting the binary foundations that continue to shape musical pedagogy, casting, and voice classification. Yet opera is, paradoxically, well-positioned to resist such rigidity. From its very inception, opera has thrived on fantasy, gender performance, and fluidity — it is an art form that has always queered the voice.
“I’m trans, but more importantly, I’m a soprano,” says Taylor, who is fast becoming one of the defining voices of a new generation of gender-nonconforming opera singers in Europe. Their statement gestures towards a future in which voice is not a category to be policed, but a space in which identity can resonate freely across history, and beyond binaries.
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