Dear teachers,
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Dear teachers,
Please STOP IT with the "all girls sing this part, all boys sing that part of the song".
You have trans and nonbinary kids in your classes. Yes, you really do. Not all of them want to be out to you or their classmates. Not all of them feel comfortable with just picking a category at random; not all of them feel comfortable with just being quiet.
And they shouldn't have to.
Just find better categories. PLEASE.
@quidcumque it always was about voice types and pitches lol
wtf -
Dear teachers,
Please STOP IT with the "all girls sing this part, all boys sing that part of the song".
You have trans and nonbinary kids in your classes. Yes, you really do. Not all of them want to be out to you or their classmates. Not all of them feel comfortable with just picking a category at random; not all of them feel comfortable with just being quiet.
And they shouldn't have to.
Just find better categories. PLEASE.
@quidcumque high and low is easy. People often enjoy stretching and flexing.
We have women singing tenor and a male soprano in our choir, plenty of enbies around the middle. It is indeed not hard. -
@quidcumque high and low is easy. People often enjoy stretching and flexing.
We have women singing tenor and a male soprano in our choir, plenty of enbies around the middle. It is indeed not hard.@noodlemaz @quidcumque I know more than one trans woman who are now altos without having had to work on their voice very much
I sing anything from mezzo to tenor myself (natural contralto, stretched upwards a lot when the choir had a voice coach, who sadly* moved to the other side of the country)
* not completely sadly, apart from the coaching she and I had such different aims and styles that we didn't get on very well.
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@quidcumque Oh yes. So much. And it could be so easy: "This part is suitable for higher voices, that part for deeper voices. Try out which is easier for you to sing." Because, no matter what gender, people just have different voices.
@Sci_Fi_FanGirl @quidcumque Yes, try everything and find what suits you!
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@noodlemaz @quidcumque I know more than one trans woman who are now altos without having had to work on their voice very much
I sing anything from mezzo to tenor myself (natural contralto, stretched upwards a lot when the choir had a voice coach, who sadly* moved to the other side of the country)
* not completely sadly, apart from the coaching she and I had such different aims and styles that we didn't get on very well.
@noodlemaz @quidcumque Also, when we had a more flexible tenor than the one (and a half) we have now, he and I sometimes swapped parts just for fun. Perhaps Current Tenor will learn to do that too.
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@quidcumque Yep and there is already a well-established solution.
You probably know, but (Western at least) musical scores have had the soprano/mezzosoprano/treble/alto/contralto/countertenor/tenor/bass/contrabass etc. labels for vocal ranges for centuries.
It's almost as if we knew different people have different vocal ranges and these may change (indeed, most trebles eventually break to tenor or bass)…
…for centuries…
…and yet…
@EdtheChem @quidcumque I'm in favour of calling all children's voices 'treble' regardless of gender until they mature. Some will break to tenor or bass, some will stay high, some (like mine) will gradually descend to alto.
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Dear teachers,
Please STOP IT with the "all girls sing this part, all boys sing that part of the song".
You have trans and nonbinary kids in your classes. Yes, you really do. Not all of them want to be out to you or their classmates. Not all of them feel comfortable with just picking a category at random; not all of them feel comfortable with just being quiet.
And they shouldn't have to.
Just find better categories. PLEASE.
@quidcumque as an added bonus, not routinely segregating by gender removes a tool of misogyny.
Yet another example of how making something better for a minority group also happens to improve it for everyone. There really is no argument against it. -
@quidcumque Yep and there is already a well-established solution.
You probably know, but (Western at least) musical scores have had the soprano/mezzosoprano/treble/alto/contralto/countertenor/tenor/bass/contrabass etc. labels for vocal ranges for centuries.
It's almost as if we knew different people have different vocal ranges and these may change (indeed, most trebles eventually break to tenor or bass)…
…for centuries…
…and yet…
@EdtheChem @quidcumque and still when more of one of those labels is addressed in mixed choirs and they are classically assigned to only one gender it's still customary to address those groups as the "women" or "men"
Even though historically all of those have been sung by men.
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Dear teachers,
Please STOP IT with the "all girls sing this part, all boys sing that part of the song".
You have trans and nonbinary kids in your classes. Yes, you really do. Not all of them want to be out to you or their classmates. Not all of them feel comfortable with just picking a category at random; not all of them feel comfortable with just being quiet.
And they shouldn't have to.
Just find better categories. PLEASE.
@quidcumque
soprano alto tenor bass Don't need gender assigned Hi voice, Low voice as well
No reason to make it a gender thing
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@noodlemaz @quidcumque Also, when we had a more flexible tenor than the one (and a half) we have now, he and I sometimes swapped parts just for fun. Perhaps Current Tenor will learn to do that too.
@irina @quidcumque I've been steadily moving up in the world, tone-wise. Was an alto from school, but went to sop 1 after doing the mezzo parts for a while. Singing teacher says 100% a sop, life was a lie
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Dear teachers,
Please STOP IT with the "all girls sing this part, all boys sing that part of the song".
You have trans and nonbinary kids in your classes. Yes, you really do. Not all of them want to be out to you or their classmates. Not all of them feel comfortable with just picking a category at random; not all of them feel comfortable with just being quiet.
And they shouldn't have to.
Just find better categories. PLEASE.
@quidcumque they make “split these names randomly into even sized groups” tools on the internet for teachers already
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@quidcumque as an added bonus, not routinely segregating by gender removes a tool of misogyny.
Yet another example of how making something better for a minority group also happens to improve it for everyone. There really is no argument against it.@jetlagjen YES. This. If someone tries to do this when I'm around, I usually suggest another, sometimes absurd, categorization: "no, not boys against girls, but shirts with writing against shirts without".
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@EdtheChem @quidcumque I'm in favour of calling all children's voices 'treble' regardless of gender until they mature. Some will break to tenor or bass, some will stay high, some (like mine) will gradually descend to alto.
@irina I also think there not that much systematic difference before puberty, is there?
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@quidcumque Oh yes. So much. And it could be so easy: "This part is suitable for higher voices, that part for deeper voices. Try out which is easier for you to sing." Because, no matter what gender, people just have different voices.
@Sci_Fi_FanGirl mostly, it's not even about pitch, just about having two roughly equal-sized groups (for call-and-response or singing in canon). Young kids' voices won't be that different anyway.
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@Sci_Fi_FanGirl mostly, it's not even about pitch, just about having two roughly equal-sized groups (for call-and-response or singing in canon). Young kids' voices won't be that different anyway.
@quidcumque @Sci_Fi_FanGirl isn't that a situation for the good old left and right hand group. Or if they are too young, the window and door group?
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@irina I also think there not that much systematic difference before puberty, is there?
@quidcumque @EdtheChem AMAB kids might have slightly more range, but it's probably not even a statistically significant difference.
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@irina @quidcumque I've been steadily moving up in the world, tone-wise. Was an alto from school, but went to sop 1 after doing the mezzo parts for a while. Singing teacher says 100% a sop, life was a lie
@noodlemaz @quidcumque I have a decent high register but can't keep it up for long (if I have to sing a whole liturgy, hour and a half, at mezzo pitch, I'm *exhausted*, also because most of it is right on a bad register break)
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@quidcumque @Sci_Fi_FanGirl isn't that a situation for the good old left and right hand group. Or if they are too young, the window and door group?
@Zahlenzauberin Canon singing, yes, won't work if you're rehearsing call-and-response things where each group has different lyrics and might not stand in the same place every time. But even then, you can just have the whole group learn the whole song - it's fun to sing different parts of it!
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Dear teachers,
Please STOP IT with the "all girls sing this part, all boys sing that part of the song".
You have trans and nonbinary kids in your classes. Yes, you really do. Not all of them want to be out to you or their classmates. Not all of them feel comfortable with just picking a category at random; not all of them feel comfortable with just being quiet.
And they shouldn't have to.
Just find better categories. PLEASE.
Like soprano, second soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass? They usually dont say it by gender. Never experienced that gender specific call in choir. I was alto.
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Like soprano, second soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass? They usually dont say it by gender. Never experienced that gender specific call in choir. I was alto.
And with young kids I'm guessing the solution is to not pick songs like that cause I remember we didnt sing songs like that.
We sang Sakura, the japanese folk song we sang in English and Japanese. Tingalayo which is from the Caribbean islands but we sang it in English and Spanish. We had this one song where it was left side and right side. And it was Jambo-Hello translated into a lot more languages. XD it was a THING to do multilingual songs for choir!
