Ryan Cassata Photo: Facebook/Ryan Cassata

You may recall the story last year of transgender singer Ryan Cassata, who slammed American Idol in a Facebook post and video for attempting to exploit him as a ratings-boosting "token trans person".

A year later, Cassata is doing fine without the reality TV show's backing. He's about to release an album, and he's still speaking out about his experience as a transgender guy, and the broader issues affecting transgender and genderqueer communities.

In an interview with BuzzFeed, the singer has opened up about his identity and why he's decided against using hormones to help him transition. A significant part of his decision came down to maintaining his singing voice. Although without testosterone his vocal chords won't deepen to sound more 'male', he doesn't want to risk losing the quality his voice has right now. His voice is "something that I take pride in," he says, "and it's something that didn't come easy for me at all. I had to work on it a lot and I don't wanna risk it at all."


But the decision is about more than preserving his voice. It's about accepting his body as it is, and not wanting to change it to fit in with how others define what it means to be a man.

Although it wasn't always that way.

"When I was 16 years old I wanted nothing more than to go on testosterone and to pass as male and to fit into that stereotype," Cassata says in the interview. "And luckily my parents were like, 'You cannot start hormones until you're 18.' So I had two more years to think about it and I spent those two years thinking about it almost every day, like obsessing over it.

"And then I came to the decision that I don't need testosterone in order to be happy, and I don't need testosterone in order to be a man."

Cassata hopes his story will help to bring about more awareness for transgender people who choose not to go through a full physical transition, and people who identify outside the male/female binary.

"I identify as male but I feel like I don't fit into the gender binary," he says. "Sometimes I like to wear stereotypically feminine clothes, and sometimes I wear stereotypically masculine clothes. For most of it I fall in the middle and I don't really feel like I have to act 'male'. I feel that I just need to be myself, and if my gender expression reads more female than male then that's okay. I know who I am, and I don't need other people to know who I am to feel valid."