Feminizing Our Voices Out & About - Share Your Thoughts!

I'm trans.  My male voice is a source of dysphoria.  Having a more feminine voice is a priority.

I've been working with a very good voice therapist for the better part of a year, and it has helped significantly.  When my voice is 'on', I'm pretty happy with the way I sound.  More on that in a bit.

My voice is not perfect by any measure.  But it's much closer to what I'm aiming for. 

I started out with a fairly deep male voice.  In almost a year, I've raised my base frequency from 120 Hz to 160 Hz.  160 Hz is considered the 'low end' of the female range.

However, pitch is only part of the equation.  Resonance is equally important, if not more so.  Manipulating resonance is a highly complex skill to learn.  There is also intonation (emphasis or deemphasis on certain syllables), breathing technique, throat muscle control, volume control, and diction.

I mentioned earlier about when my voice is 'on'.  That has been the single biggest challenge.  My voice therapist tells me that many patients struggle with the mental aspect of using their preferred voice.  Essentially, you've been conditioned to speak in a male voice for decades, and it's difficult to turn that off.  Social situations exacerbate the challenge.  When you are talking to someone you've known since before you started transitioning/changing your voice, it's second nature to revert to your guy voice.  It takes conscious effort to consistently use your feminine voice.  With practice, it eventually becomes your new 'second nature'.

Without a doubt, changing your voice is a marathon.  Many patients need several years of therapy.  That said, even a few months can provide meaningful improvements.

Liz xx

My voice is a deep, croaky, loud farmers voice. One that has decades of learning to yell authoritively at recalcitrant working dogs. 

Some of the videos and advice I have seen are the breathy / wheezy / whispery concoctions which I find very annoying. And off putting. (Hey  just stating how I feel about it.) 

After watching BGT, AGT, and the variety of other versions such as The Voice. I have discovered that voices come in all varieties.  And many sis woman have deep voices. And many men have naturally high voices. (Some guys are so high i think they have a vice on their neither regions.) 

There are many women with low voices but (with a few exceptions, my fog-horn neighbour being one) they still mostly look like women without effort. It's like all things cross-dressing, to appear to be a woman we have try to be better than a woman. We can raise our voices but it is but a part of presenting as female.

As Liz says, a big problem men have is the resonance in the chest—there is quite a chasm in there for the sound to bounce around. Controlling the resonance is a big part of hiding the male voice which is why the breathy thing that Peta doesn't like is one of the few aids we have.

I try to let a little bit of breath out of my nose as I speak. Too much and you start to sound like an exaggerated Marilyn Monroe, too little and you sound as if there's a strangled duck trying to get out of your chest.

It's all a compromise when you are trying to be someone you're not.

I have too deep a voice to easily change it, so I don't worry about it. I do try and speak with a quiet voice, but that is about it for changes. I do not go out of my way to talk, but I do not avoid conversation either. The way I figure it, up close I do not pass well anyway, so if I am within ear shot of somebody, they already know. Too be honest, nobody cares. Even people who have seen me at a distance, and I may pass, certainly know when up close and I have had some nice conversations. People just take it in stride. If somebody doesn't want to talk to me because I am en femme, that is their choice, but it just has not been an issue.

For those who do want to femininze their voice, please do, and I hope it goes well, but for most of us I do not feel it is a big deal.

I've had a voice coach come to group meetings. There isn't a lot you can do in a single session but there is still a lot to learn.

For the short conversations you might have with a cashier, I find the following works well.

First, from my normal speaking tone, I go up half an octave. For those not musical, take the pitch you do your flat talking on, and use it as a base note and sing do-re-mi-fa-sol. This is the pitch I will talk at en femme. It's not so high that it sounds falsetto, and there is enough range if I want to change the pitch from there.

Second, as a male, my throat tends to buzz. If you open your throat (like they tell singers to do) the buzz just about goes away. The higher note makes this easier two.

Third, as @lizk says, resonance is more important than pitch. Resonance is about how the sound bounces around inside you before coming out your mouth, and about the higher frequency overtones. If a man and a woman sing something at the exact same pitch, you can tell which is the man's voice and which is the woman's, even though the pitch is the same. This is because of resonance.

A man tends to have a larger space in his head. The voice sounds bolder, bigger. A woman tends to have a smaller space, and it sounds more petite. But to paraphrase T'Pau, "The space is the space. What can be done?"

Some people say to talk softer. The probelm with that is when you can't be heard and have to raise your voice, the masculine will come back immediately. If you talk too soft into a drivetrhough window, then raise it, you're going to sound like a man. So the talk soft, whisper, wheeze techniquues are not the best.

As I taught @rebeccabaxter, you do have a smaller space, and that's your nasal cavities. It requires a certain amount of practice, but you should push about half to 2/3 of the air into the nasal cavity. Your voice will sound smaller because the nasal cavity is smaller than the oral cavity. And youi can still get volume without reverting to a masculine voice.

There are more advanced techniques you can work on if you get the hang of these basics. Men tend to talk staccato, a sharp break between each word; women talk legato (literally tied together), smooth and continuous, elongated vowels. Women talk clearly, men tend to slur words. Women will emphasize words by change of pitch, men by change of volume. Women tend to talk more with thei hands. There's also word choice. A woman might say in a restaurant "I'd like ..." (polite) where a man will almost always say "I want ..." (more of a command). Women will talk about and around a subject, men tend to "problem solve." I'm sure there are many more.

But I'd stick to the first three (slightly higher pitch, open the throat, nasal resonance) for starters. These will get you through the quick short conversations you need when in a store.

Alison is right. Since following her advice from some months ago, I don't have to really bother about my voice much any more as it is as good as it's ever going to be. Having got the best voice I'll ever manage, I try to concentrate on other things: eye contact, hand gestures, being animated. Close up, people will know I'm not female anyway, therefore the ideal for me is to just try to put over a feminine persona so that the person I'm talking to doesn't feel uncomfortable. I try to make it easier for them to think of me as a woman even though I'm not one and they know that.

It's all a question of distraction, diversion and obfuscation. You'd think a black and white zebra in field of dust would be quite obvious, but all that stripiness serves to fool the lion, just as your voice, hair, makeup, jewellery, perfume, clothing, walk and mannerisms all combine to fool the public (up to a point).

Seems it might be easier to wear a zebra outfit, I suppose, but that wouldn't be as much fun...and we don't have that many lions round here.

Above all these things, try to be confident; that's a biggie.

Becca