Rose made man : an inside-out opera in one act

Rose Made Man is an ópera comique, a style of French origin, meaning the dramatic work contains spoken dialogue. The opera is a coming of age story of a trans man named Gabriel, but also a coming of gender story since Gabriel was assigned female at birth, but identifies as a boy. Born deaf and thus having never heard his gender clearly spoken by others, he lives in a relative bubble until age ten when he gains his hearing and feels the full force of how his identity unsettles society. The opera follows Gabriel through four significant stages of his life – early childhood, grade school, high school, and early adulthood – corresponding to each of the scenes, where we see his attempt to reconcile both the societal expectations on gender versus his identity and the sound world of his deafness with the overwhelming new sound world after the cochlear implant.