From the Advocate magazine in partnership with Glad, this is LGBTQ and A.

I'm Jeffrey Masters, and as I recently learned, the history of opera is woven with a surprisingly transgressive relationship to gender.

The earliest known works had female sopranos on the roles of boys, famous composers like Mozart and Strauss, all of them

wrote male characters explicitly created to be played by women, and of course, there were the

Castrotti, men who were castrated before puberty in order to preserve for their high voices.

The castrati were celebrated during their time, even considered superstars, and they would play

both male and female roles. Now despite all that, when it comes to singers and opera who are out

and identify as trans, there are relatively fewer examples to

pull from. When Lucia Lucas was first coming out in 2014, she thought it very well could be

the end of her career. There was no precedent, no rulebook. And while she has since gone on to

make opera history, that was never a guarantee.

Lucia's history-making turn as the title role in Don Giovanni made her the first known trans person to have a principal role in an opera in the States.

And that experience is documented in a new documentary from James Kicklater called The Sound of Identity.

Lucia is here today to talk about all that and more, so let's get to it.

Without further ado, here's Lucia Lucas.

To begin with, I want to go back to when you were first coming out.

Was there any precedent or other openly trans opera singers that you could look at to see how being out might potentially affect your career?

No, actually.

This has sort of been a rulebook that I've written myself over the last five, six years, because there

wasn't. There were some professional singers who previously had careers who then transitioned.

So there was a little bit of an idea what might happen with my voice, which is not much.

And there was a little bit of an idea about how the business might

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