Politeness norms seem to keep a lot of folks from discussing or asking their trans friends questions they have, I figured at the very least I could help try to fill the gap. Lemmy has a decent trans population who might be able to provide their perspectives, as well.
Mostly I’m interested in what people are holding back.
The questions I’ve been asked IRL:
- why / how did you pick your name?
- how long have you known?
- how long before you are done transitioning?
- how long do you have to be on HRT?
- is transgender like being transracial?
- what do the surgeries involve?
For the most part, though, I get silence - people don’t want to talk about it, or are afraid to. A lot of times the anxiety is in not knowing how to behave or what would be offensive or not. Some people have been relieved when they learned all they needed to do is see me as my gender, since that became very simple and easy for them.
If there are trans people you know IRL, do you feel you can talk to them about it? Not everyone is as open about it as I am, and questions can be feel rude, so I understand why people would feel hesitant to talk to me, but even when I open the door, people rarely take the opportunity.
I gave some feedback to someone on Mastodon who had been going to voice training. I was kind of curious how that works - what the journey is like. I could definitely tell a difference for them.
Sure, I can talk extensively about that - what are you most curious about?
I should also say, it’s different for men vs women, because testosterone will thicken vocal chords and make the voice more masculine naturally, so trans men on HRT have an advantage this way, though trans men still often have to voice train, learning to pitch lower and trying to open the vocal tract more to have a larger, deeper voice both have to be learned.
(This all assumes puberty blockers were not provided and the transition is happening as an adult, which with the healthcare bans for minors in the U.S. is an unfortunately common reality.)
On the flip side, trans women don’t see any improvement from estrogen to their voice - the vocal chords remain thickened, and their vocal tracts remain larger.
When I socially transitioned I tried to teach myself and voice train by myself, but after months of little progress, I decided to go to a local speech language pathologist (SLP). I continued to teach myself and train on my own, but the speech language pathologist was able to help direct me, and crucially, to demonstrate principles to help me learn.
I learned some of the basics of vocal training in general - how to sustain pitches and strengthen the voice, practicing SOVTEs, and other exercises singers or actors might do.
Voice training is grueling, one of the worst parts of transition. Vocal dysphoria is a nightmare, and in my experience even once my voice passed all the time (i.e. on the phone people hear a woman and I get “miss” and “ma’am”, as well as in person), the voice still sounds wrong to me, and I can’t hear it as a woman’s voice. In that way it’s similar to other kinds of dysphoria - I am much more sensitive, so even once I look like a woman to other people, I still see a man or boy in the mirror.
But with vocal dysphoria, you are constantly exposing yourself to your voice. With other forms of dysphoria, you can get breaks by not looking in the mirror, not having sex, and generally checking out of life - escapism and dissociation can be really effective, but vocal training demands regularly paying attention to your voice, and persistently altering it. It’s psychological torture, and a lot of us struggle to make progress because of it. Some even use it as a form of self-harm.
It took 8 months of weekly visits to a SLP and daily, full-time training (i.e. every day I had exercises and I was intentional with my voice, and basically was voice training 24/7, always paying attention and changing my voice) before I saw a shift. The progress for me felt like a major shift all at once, a lot more of the work was cognitive than I expected, more about the ability for my mind to recognize what I’m supposed to be doing. In a way it felt like I suddenly just realized I always knew how to sound like a woman and it just clicked. The time it takes varies, generally voice training is a life-long effort and it never ends. My vocal dysphoria is some of the worst dysphoria I suffer on a daily basis, and some day it would be nice for me to train with the goal of helping alleviate my dysphoria, but up to now I have been more pragmatic and focused on having a voice that other people hear as natural and female. Here is a voice clip I uploaded 4 months ago - to me this voice reminds me of a gay man’s voice, I can’t hear a woman. :-/
Anyway, let me know what further details you might be interested in 😊
Listening to that voice clip I think you sound very femme, and not just in your voice itself but your speech patterns. Like if you removed all tone hints from your voice and made me guess guy/girl I’d guess girl with no hesitation even tho I can’t pinpoint exactly why - is that something you taught yourself consciously, or is it just kinda a natural product of being a woman in western culture?
Also you said in the voice clip you wanted impressions, not sure if you still care given that was four months ago but I hear your voice as a woman in her 20s, maybe early 30s? I’m not great at guessing ages even when I’m standing in front of someone tho, so take that with a grain of salt lol
Anyway thank you for doing this Q&A, I always love to see new perspectives on the trans experience!
Your voice sounds great! The pitch, resonance, and inflection all seem pretty much perfect. There is a certain tambre that trained voices tend to have, its there but its really subtle, and I think I can only pick up on it because I’m working on voice training. You sound young, probably 20s or 30s and convincingly a woman.
I don’t think anyone can accurately assess their own voice. Despite the work I’ve done myself I still hear a man in recordings, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why. I should reach out for help, but I’m not ready yet.
To me you don’t sound like a gay man in that clip, but like a woman. I think your hard work is paying off.
This is just a fact I learned along the way, not so much personal experience, but I thought it was super interesting to learn that apparently one of the biggest differences between masc and femme voices isn’t just pitch but more constant variation in pitch.
Afab folks are typically less monotone and use pitch more excessively throughout their speech which I thought was really neat. Unrelatedly, I also heard Hank green explain the physiology of voice recently and how your voice can “break” or what the difference between your “head voice” and “chest voice” is, and the reason amab folks vary pitch less seems almost certainly (edit: I don’t actually know what the fuck I’m talking about, this is just me processing information together, I have no idea if it’s actually correct, take with an ocean of salt) a product of different vocal cord physiology after experiencing puberty (your vocal cords change in a way that makes it harder. Those same changes are what’s responsible for your voice breaking more often, as you struggle to control the now sharper difference between lower and higher pitches you can create. Where afab and prepuberty folks can more easily manage a smooth gradient in pitch), which is also really interesting!
If anyone wants a video on the vocal cords explanation stuff I can link to it, it was from hank’s “ask Hank anything” with Jacob Collier
I think this is a link to the video you are talking about: https://youtu.be/Q0_W4SWHeWY?t=1652
A few distinctions:
“head voice” vs “chest voice” is more of a distinction about resonance and the way the voices sound, mostly related to the “size” quality of a voice, a smaller voice is usually more “in the head” sounding (think Mickey Mouse), and a larger voice is usually more “in the chest” sounding (think of a giant saying “fee fi fo fum”), but in terms of physiology the main difference is not chest vs head, but more that the space the sound travels through is larger or smaller - like if a glass is more or less full.
Falsetto is its own distinction from head vs chest voice, and Hank’s explanation is about pitch rather than resonance. Higher pitches pull the folds tighter, while lower pitches are more loose. This is why vocal fry (a common facet of female voices) is often a problem for transfeminine voices, because it gives an impression of a weighty and lower pitched voice.
Generally with falsetto the pitch is high, but trans women shouldn’t aim to use falsetto because it is usually unsustainably high, sounds unnatural, and could cause injury through straining. Instead, when the goal is a female voice, it is more important for a voice to sound small and light (about size and weight) than high in pitch, which luckily can both be achieved without straining.
Variations in pitch are more common in feminine voices, but this is connected to how expressive women are - a pitch sliding up and down, and being elongated, is often conveying emotions. As I understood it, this difference is mostly cultural, so this is the first time I’ve heard someone say the reasons for monotone voices in men might be physiological - I am immediately skeptical, but intrigued. As a clear counter-example, gay men have the physiology of male vocal folds, but they are commonly found to have pitch variations similar to women. Still, breaks are more common and men can experience physiologically limited pitch ranges, and I certainly struggle with this myself - my desire to be expressive is undermined by the limitations of my voice, I just can’t go as high as my mind thinks my voice should be able to go.
EDIT: finished the video you recommended. So, Future Hank was talking about the break that can happen between vocal registers. In voice training this becomes important because you generally want to pitch up slightly (it’s important for feminine voice training to not fall too far below a particular pitch, namely 180 Hz, or around F3 on a piano), and moving between M1 and M2 can often cause a break in the voice (though it hasn’t been much of an issue for me). Not sure what to make of his claim that voice breaks are more common in boys because of puberty causing a very sudden change in vocal fold length - I wonder if that means it would stabilize and as adults men don’t have breaks as much?
Super interesting, thank you for taking the time to teach me a bunch of things!
To my personal understanding from being amab (though I did transition at 16, but never went through voice training and these days am more masc aligned) and also my understanding from the video- yes men generally stop having voice cracks post puberty with rare exceptions like when intensely emotional or something, not because there isn’t still a sharp transition, but because they learn to control their newly changed vocal cords, developing an intuitive understanding of that transition and avoid it because it’s generally thought of as embarrassing for your voice to break.
Voice breaks are a puberty specific experience that is often thought of as a awkward and embarrassing transition into a new “adult” masculine voice
(Forgive me if I’m explaining the obvious or misunderstanding, I’m super tired and not entirely sure I’m reading your comment correctly at the part you seem to be asking about this. Regardless, I hope you have a lovely day :)
For me, it looked like doing voice training. It was largely self guided, watching videos here and there. This was in the time when trans instructional videos were far less common than they are now, so it was a bit hit and miss. But, I got my voice to a point where people didn’t know how to gender me by voice alone, and looked for other cues and clues.
Ultimately, I ended up getting vocal surgery to shorten the length of my vocal cords.