A Texas high-schooler has been denied a place in the Texas all-state choir.
Not because he can't sing. But because, using his falsetto range, he sings soprano.
And boys can't be sopranos, don't you know.
Somebody better tell Frankie Valli that.
Story is here.
I'm a trained singer. I don't buy this whole 'it'll damage your voice' crap. Plenty of people have made great careers singing in falsetto--and, when I was this young man's age, I could also sing any soprano part in my college chorus by using my falsetto. Not well, mind you--my pitch control in falsetto is a sometimes thing :-)--but I could hit the notes.
Moreover, my natural 'chest' voice, at that age, straddled tenor/alto. I could sing second alto without going into falsetto. (I still can, mostly, though I've lost a couple notes on the top end of my range since then.) There are plenty of successful male singers--Steve Perry of Journey comes to mind--who could sing a choral alto without a hitch.
This goes both ways. One of my friends in my old college chourus, a female alto, could sing tenor quite well. (We had a joke--we kept saying we were going to someday sing "I've Got You Babe" with me doing Cher and her doing Sonny. And we could've <G>.) In fact, sometimes she did sing tenor--we had a shortage of tenors. If there was a tenor-only passage, she chipped in. Evidently, in Texas she wouldn't have been allowed to.
When I was a regular karaoke-goer, there were female altos whose stuff I sang regularly: Chrissie Hynde, some of Linda Rondstadt. There was a women named Oleta Adams who had a hit called "Get Here"--I won a hundred bucks singing that song. And I sang male stuff--and not falsetto, either--that was higher. Steve Perry is higher. The middle eight of my 'big song', the Beatles' "Oh Darling", goes higher than Chrissie Hynde ever did. That's the highest non-falsetto thing I ever sang. And Paul McCartney is a guy.
Even in my band days: we did the Pretenders' "Talk Of The Town" regularly. I had no trouble singing it. "Lights", by Journey, which we also did, is far higher.
This, to me, is just another manifestation of the urge to divide us into male-is-this, female-is-that, in every sphere of life. As a TG person, it pisses me off. And, as a singer with a high voice, this particular manifestation of it pisses me off even more. But the whole phenomenon is stupid and damaging.
Little gender boxes. I HATE little gender boxes.