So recently, certain corners of the internet were abuzz about [REDACTED ARTIST] (henceforth RA). I found this strange, because I hadn't heard anything about RA for years. As such, I did some cursory searching.

The most commonly held theory is that RA committed suicide. But numerous rumblings indicate that may not have been the case. It is hard to sort out reality from fiction, as RA apparently had many public-facing identities splintered off from being RA.

What struck me most deeply was that most of the discussion surrounding RA focused on some nasty, nasty transphobia. If what's being talked about is accurate, they were just transitioning when they disappeared - And their crowd of previous friends were quick to paint them as a freak, disingenuous, and a hopelessly awful and disgusting pervert. To this day, apparently there are accusations of RA being a pedophile (though that may be for other, more legitimate reasons? But still, the "trans people are pedophiles" narrative can't really be disentangled from all this).

There was one piece of discussion that really cut me to my core, though, and it goes way beyond just RA: The criticism of RA's voice. Specifically, people who knew RA prior to transition (and saw RA go through transition) were quick to call RA's voice "fake", "weird", "disturbing", and "all an act", because of how different RA's voice sounded. There was a lot of attention paid to how this voice was *inauthentic*. To quote one individual: "Please note that the weird way [RA] was speaking was not [RA's] normal voice and [RA] was doing it for...reasons."

Note that any attempt to change from the baseline is immediately labeled as somehow impure, and implied to harbor ulterior motives.

That hit me right in the heart, because *my* voice is fucking hopeless. Work work is exceptionally difficult, and when it comes to where I'm *starting* from, I'm fifty meters behind the starting line from the get-go. I have struggled with voice training for well over a year, and made middling, if any progress.

But the thing that hurts the most is that it's *easy to identify*. It's simple for someone who's never met me, never heard me talk, listen to me and say, "Why the fuck are you talking like that? That's not your *real* voice", and that hurts. Because I'm sure the rest of me will be just as easy to identify thusly.

It fucking sucks, because I shouldn't care. Nothing about my gender presentation or identity has anything to do with how other people interpret me. It's about how -I- interpret myself. It's about being in control of my own identity and the presentation thereof.

But there's still some small, strong part of my brain that tells me "Your thoughts on yourself do not matter. Reality is forged in shared consensus, and you will never alter that as a single person. Ergo, you *must* care for how other people interpret you, for this is all that matters."

If that's the case - and it feels increasingly like it is - then I'm not really sure I want to keep struggling in this world.