Heather Alexander’s fans believed in magic. They flocked to Renaissance Fairs, sci/fi fantasy conventions, and filk (internet folk music) concerts to hear Alexander’s Celtic-inspired tunes. Her cult following represented communities steeped in fantasy, magic and lore. But in the winter of 2006, even Alexander’s fans couldn’t believe their eyes. That November, after playing a concert, Heather Alexander walked through a gate on stage and disappeared. She was, quite literally, never seen again.

The following spring, word surfaced that Alexander had designated an “heir” to carry on her musical heritage. Alexander James Adams, baring a subtle resemblance to Alexander, debuted with a crackling voice and intimate knowledge of her musical library. “I call myself the Heir,” Adams explains, “because…I was inheriting all of Heather Alexander’s music and her magic and her world. The title was to let people know I was… Heather’s chosen one. Because nobody knew at first what was going on.”

After Heather Alexander’s disappearance, Adams spent four months in isolation before emerging a new man. Billing himself as the Fairy Tale Minstrel and identifying as FTM, Adams now recognizes the fable he created of his own life. “I made a fairy tale girl. That’s who I was.” Terrified transition would cost him his male fans, Adams is happy to report, “I’ve been surprised: I lost very few. Guys were actually very game to take me on as their little brother and show me the ropes. They’re getting great glee out of telling me how to behave.”

In part, Adams credits that reception to a rich storytelling heritage and the unique way he describes his female-to-male experience. “In Irish Celtic stories there’s a fairytale line of the fae. They steal infant children and they leave their own kind in place. Heather was a changeling… a fairy-child. I was a stolen child… [who] lived in fairyland for 44 years. Now I’m here in the mortal world… becoming a real boy.”

The acceptance he’s experienced has deepened Adams’ faith in mankind and magic. “It’s impressed me…how kind and supporting humanity can be. As Heather, I always believed in dreams and fairytales and magic, but when I had to put it to practice for myself I wasn’t actually sure if it was real. And everyone else has proven that it is.”

With a musical career spanning two decades and over a dozen albums as Heather Alexander, Adams is one of the most accomplished musicians to transition mid-career. For female-born singers, hormone treatments can be particularly risky, because testosterone thickens vocal cords, lowers pitch and limits range in a singer’s voice. Even with intensive training, there’s no guarantee that a singer’s success will survive.

“I was really, really worried,” Adams admits. His concerns led him to record a number of tracks and a full range of vowel sounds in his female voice, before beginning testosterone. Happy with his post-transition voice, Adams married it with those recordings to create the unique duets of Winter Tide, the self-described pagan’s 2007 Christmas album.

“I went back and I listened to the tracks and I broke into tears,” Adams acknowledges. “It wasn’t a sadness, it was… the huge awesomeness of these two spirits that I’ve been living with all these years [finally] united in a harmony.”

Although groomed for Nashville at a young age, Adams jokes, “I was writing…songs I felt only my stuffed animals would listen to…about rainbows…and castles and magic and elves.”

Adams found a receptive audience in the musical genre filk, which he sees as reflecting both “wild crazy things out there on the Internet,” and “the old system of entertaining without having a television or a radio.”

Adams hopes his personal story inspires others to “look at the mirror and say, maybe. When we stop saying maybes we just start dying. Each of us is a magical creature. Each of us has all that we need - we just need to believe that. It’s never easily done. But if you want to be a hero that’s what you have to do; you just have to believe.”

Trans author Jacob Anderson-Minshall co-authors the Blind Eye mystery series with his wife, Diane.