Language in Society 46, 339–370.
doi:10.1017/S0047404517000070

Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and therelationship between fundamental frequency and /s/
LAL ZIMMAN
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
ABSTRACT

Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists havenot paid sufﬁcient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through whichphonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice.
This article argues that gender differences in the voice—including those inﬂuenced by physiology—are best understood as elements of sociolinguisticstyle rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speakers in
the early stages of masculinizing hormone therapy, the analysis demonstrates
the complex interrelationship of the gendered meanings attributable to characteristics like fundamental frequency and /s/. Trans speakers challengesystems for categorizing voices as female or male, which assume that different aspects of the gendered voice will pattern together in normative ways. Yeta voice’s gender is not a unidimensional feature, but a cluster of features thattake on meaning only in context with one another, leaving them open for recombination and change through stylistic bricolage. (Transgender, style,gender, voice, pitch, sibilants)

INTRODUCTION

Gender differentiation in the voice is of critical importance to sociolinguists, whohave built theories about ‘female’ and ‘male’ voices into our most basic methods forsociophonetic analysis. Phoneticians, and even many sociolinguists, often look tobiology to explain these differences, even where evidence for social inﬂuences isplentiful. Some sociolinguists, especially those whose work focuses on language,
gender, and sexuality (as early as Sachs 1975), have seen gender socialization
early in life as an alternative account for gender differences in the voice. Whatthese perspectives tend to share, however, is a structural, deterministic understanding of the gendered voice, in which sex and/or early gender socialization lock in
gender differences that persist across the lifespan. In the last two decades, sociophoneticians have increasingly turned toward investigations of gender non-normativity
in the voice (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2007; Podesva 2007; Stuart-Smith 2007; Levon
2007, 2014; Zimman 2013; Pharao, Maegaard, Spindler, & Kristiansen 2014), suggesting a greater degree of variation in the gendered voice than heteronormative discourses would suggest. Gay men—or in some cases men whose are perceived as© Cambridge University Press, 2017 0047-4045/17 $15.00

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LAL ZIMMAN

gay-sounding—have been the focus of numerous studies and have been described
selectively appropriating and recombining phonetic elements associated with normative femininity and masculinity in order to index their sexual orientation (e.g.
Gaudio 1994; Munson 2007). This set of insights has been crucial in the development of sociophonetic research on sexuality, yet the force of its critique has yet to
impact the study of phonetic expressions of gender, particularly when it comes tofeatures like fundamental frequency, the acoustic correlate of vocal pitch.
Transgender people are a group of speakers who have great potential to complexify our ideas about gender and the voice, but who have yet to receive in-depth attention from sociolinguists. In this article, I argue that trans voices demand aretheorization of phonetic gender differentiation in order to account for the full diversity of the gendered voice. One illuminating way to approach gender diversity is
to bring variation in the gendered voice under the rubric of sociolinguistic style, atheoretical construct that recognizes the inherent variability of language as well as
the capacity for speakers to combine and recombine linguistic features in order toconstruct social meaning. I argue that rather than taking for granted that broad
gender differences in the voice arise directly from physiology, sociolinguists
must critically examine the relationship between biology, gender socialization
early in life, and identities embodied throughout the lifespan. Although there is asmall body of literature on the voices of transgender people, it has mostly been
carried out by speech-language pathologists who are primarily interested in discovering how speech therapists might help trans people feminize (or, much less often,
masculinize) their voices. Bringing the tools of sociolinguistics to bear on transvoices promises a far greater range of insights on the boundaries between‘female’ and ‘male’ voices, the ways gendered phonetic styles might change overthe lifetime, and the interaction between physiology and social practice. As analternative to biological (or social) determinism, this article argues that sociolinguists must tease apart the meaning of a phrase like ‘(fe)male voice’ if we hopeto account for a fuller range of potential gendered styles employed by both transgender and cisgender (i.e. nontransgender) speakers.
The voice acts as a critical mediator of gender perceptions, making it hugely important to transgender people who are pursuing a transition from one gender role toanother. Those whose voices mark them as audibly transgender often ﬁnd thatspeaking is the act that prevents them from having their self-identiﬁed gender recognized and afﬁrmed by others. The voice is thus as much of a focus in the lives oftrans people as it is for sociolinguists. Trans women in particular often seek out linguistic feminization techniques in order to bring their voices closer to normative
standards for women’s speech. Trans men, by contrast, often make use of testosterone therapy, which has a dramatic effect on vocal pitch, much as it does during atypical male puberty. The little research that has been published on the voicesof transmasculine people comes primarily from speech-language pathologists(van Borsel, de Cuypere, Rubens, & Destareke 2000; Adler & van Borsel
2006; Damrose 2009), scholars and instructors of drama and vocal performance
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE(McNamara 2007; Constansis 2008), with the exception of linguistic work by Papp
(2011), Zimman (2012, 2013, 2015), and Podesva & Van Hofwegen (2016). The
paucity of this research is partly attributable to the assumption among health practitioners, researchers, and community members alike, that the effects of testosteroneon the larynx make other kinds of vocal masculinization unnecessary (see also
Kulick 1999). As a result, trans men and trans women tend to have very different
kinds of awareness about gender and the voice and different attitudes toward
self-consciously changing their voices (Zimman 2016). In the present analysis, I
focus on the phonetic changes that trans men and other transmasculine people experience during the ﬁrst one to two years of testosterone therapy, much as Papp
(2011) and Zimman (2012) document. Hormonal changes clearly exert aninﬂuence on the pitch range used by these speakers, but I argue that the interpretation of these changes requires consideration of the other features that cluster together to constitute a speaker’s sociolinguistic style(s). The challenges that arise inattempting to categorize trans voices as female or male highlights the folly of treating gender as a binary opposition—or even a unidimensional continuum. We
cannot assume that the features that constitute a gendered voice will cluster together
in only one of two predictable ways, with women doing one set of things and men
doing another. Transgender speakers bring into sharp relief how variable the gendered voice can be, but the insights extend to cisgender speakers as well. The goalof this paper, then, is not to provide a generalizable account of a representative
sample of trans voices, nor to make any comparative claims about how transgenderspeakers differ from their cisgender counterparts. Rather, its aim is to complexify
our understanding of what it means to have a female or male voice at all. Transvoices demand a reframing of the gendered voice as a ﬂuid set of multidimensional
styles rather than a static property determined by speaker sex. Viewing gender as aform of style sheds light not only on the way voices become gendered, but also thebroader theorization of how language is imbued with social meaning.
The analysis presented here is based on two years of ethnographic participantobservation in transmasculine communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Transmasculine is an umbrella label that includes transgender men (i.e. those assigned
to a female gender role at birth who self-identify as men) as well as other individuals
who were female-assigned but who do not identify as women, including some nonbinary individuals (i.e. those who do not identify as strictly female or male). The
study involved recording a group of ten transmasculine people over the course of ayear during their ﬁrst months of hormone therapy in order to document how their fundamental frequency (or F0) was changing, as well as conducting participant observation to situate those changes ethnographically and stylistically. In addition to F0,
the broader project (documented in Zimman 2012) also looks at changes in vowel
formants and the frequency proﬁle for /s/; in this article, I focus only on F0 and /s/.
These features were selected because they pair one aspect of the voice that is clearlyinﬂuenced by biology (pitch) with another whose variation is driven by articulatory
rather than anatomical difference (/s/). Together, they represent an opportunity toLanguage in Society 46:3 (2017)341

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LAL ZIMMAN

consider how social and physiological forces interact. While the changes in F0
alone paint one picture of how masculine or feminine these speakers sound, the incorporation of /s/ into the analysis shifts this picture considerably such that the interpretation of either of these features depends on the other. Approaches to semiotic
style that treat social meaning as produced through stylistic bricolage (as in Eckert
2004) are ideal for unpacking the various ways that gender is indexed phonetically,leading to the conclusion that gender itself is a form of sociolinguistic style.
LITERATURE REVIEW

Style and indexical meaning
Style has been an integral part of sociolinguistic theory since its earliest days, when
it served as a framework for investigating intraspeaker variation and linking the individual to the community in work like Labov’s classic study of New York City
(1966/2006, 1972). In the intervening decades, style has been theorized about ina variety of ways, often with a focus on how to account for shifts in individuals’
ways of speaking across contexts (Schilling-Estes 2002 for a review). Styles havebeen characterized as bundles of linguistic features that are grouped together inmeaningful ways (Eckert & Rickford 2001; Coupland 2003; Eckert 2004; also
Agha 2005). That is, styles are not simply groupings of variables, but groupingsthat are based on a coherent logic that both draws on and transforms previous
uses of those variables. Importantly, the assignment of social meaning happensat the level of the style rather than the individual linguistic variable, despite the tendency among some sociolinguists to search for a one-to-one correspondence
between features and social meaning (Eckert 2004). For early variationist sociolinguists, the meaning of style had to do with formality and informality, which in turn
mapped onto standard and vernacular and, by extension, the stratiﬁcation of socioeconomic classes. In contemporary research, more emphasis is placed on the wide
range of meanings style can produce in the process of constructing discursive
stances, personae, and identities. As a result, style has come to ﬁgure prominently
in the theorization of sociolinguistic meaning, and it is this aspect of style that is of
critical importance for the present discussion.
Indexicality features prominently in the contemporary theorization of style.
Because social meaning is attributed to styles rather than features, the indexical
meaning of a linguistic feature cannot be determined outside of its indexical
context. This has led to the theorization of the indexical ﬁeld (Eckert 2008), a
ﬂuid assemblage of potential meanings that may attach to a particular linguistic variable. Eckert’s primary example, the released /t/, has been associated with various
temporary stances (e.g. as emphatic, formal, polite, angry), more perduring qualities (e.g. as elegant, educated, articulate, prissy) and social types (e.g. as British,a school teacher, a nerd girl, a gay diva) (Eckert 2008:469). Given that speakers
do not invoke all of these meanings simultaneously and with the same intensity,342

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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

it is the presence of other socially meaningful indexes—linguistic or otherwise—that works to select from the potential meanings the indexical ﬁeld allows (seealso Coupland 2003). The process of combining socially meaningful signs into
coherent styles has been identiﬁed as a kind of bricolage (Eckert 2004, following
the work of Levi-Strauss 1966 and Hebdige 1979) in which speakers draw on disparate linguistic resources and use them to construct something that exceeds themeaning of its individual components.1
Stylistic bricolage has been particularly informative in studies of sexuality andthe voice aiming to identify the phonetic characteristics that tend to appear in thevoices of men who either identify as gay or whose voices are perceived as ‘gaysounding’. This has proven a challenging task, as many of the acoustic featuresthat correlate with perceived sexuality in one study turn out to be nonsigniﬁcant
for another (Zimman 2013:4–6). A few researchers have designed experimentsthat more carefully tease apart the contribution of individual variables as well as
their relationship to one another. Levon (2007) examines the relationshipbetween two acoustic measures that are also relevant for this article: pitch range
and the duration of /s/. The experiment used digitally manipulated speech fromone gay speaker and one straight speaker in order to test whether changing a speaker’s pitch range and/or altering the duration of /s/ might inﬂuence the way listeners
judge their sexuality. While decreasing the pitch range of the gay-sounding speakerin this study made him more likely to be identiﬁed as straight, the straight-sounding
speaker’s gayness ratings were not signiﬁcantly affected by changes in pitch range.
Levon ﬁnds that it is the COMBINATION of a long /s/ duration and a large pitch rangethat consistently resulted in higher gayness ratings. Campbell-Kibler (2011) presents another experiment that also uses a matched guise method, in this case including three features that have been associated with perceived gayness among malespeakers: a fronted or retracted /s/, a higher or lower fundamental frequency, andthe use of the velar or alveolar variant of (ING) (see also Campbell-Kibler2007). While the correlation between gayness and a fronted /s/ was stable acrossCampbell-Kibler’s (2011) speakers and guises, there were also more contextual associations, like the one between an /s/ fronting paired with the use of velar (ING),
which together worked to evoke an image of the ‘smart, effeminate gay man’. It
could not be said that the use of the velar form of (ING), on its own, indexes
gayness, but it can index a certain kind of gay identity when paired with other variables like a high frequency (or fronted) /s/. Each of these experiments provides
strong evidence that voices are heard as ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ not because of the presence or absence of any one linguistic variable, but based on the particular combination of phonetic variables a speaker employs. In other words, indexing
sexuality with the voice is a matter of identifying sociolinguistic STYLES (as in
Podesva, Roberts, & Campbell-Kibler 2002), not individual variables.
Pharao et al. (2014) present another example of an experiment concerned withthe variable perception of /s/ that underscores the critical importance of intersectionality. Most of the research on perceived sexuality among men either focuses
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LAL ZIMMAN

on the voices of white speakers or leaves the ethnoracial identities of speakers unspeciﬁed. As a result, little has been said among sociophoneticians about the connections between sexuality, race, and immigration status that have been so widely
discussed by queer theorists (e.g. Duggan 2003; Massad 2007; Puar 2007). Pharao
and his colleagues discuss a fronted /s/ that can be found in two types of speech in
Copenhagen. A fronted /s/ in modern Copenhagen Danish (a racially unmarked
variety) is associated with the perception of men as gay, as it is in the varieties ofEnglish discussed above. However, it is also found in a variety known as ‘street language’ that can index a tough masculinity associated with immigrant youth. Rather
than perceiving all speech containing a fronted /s/ as equally gay, listeners’ associations were sensitive to the variety in which the sibilant occurred (see also Levon 2014
on stereotypes as cognitive mechanisms guiding the selection of indexical meaning).
While the sociophonetic study of sexuality has been greatly advanced by the incorporation of bricolage as a theoretical tool, the study of basic gender differentiationin the voice has not yet been approached from this perspective. Gender differences infundamental frequency and formant frequencies continue to be naturalized and taken
for granted, often based purely on the researcher’s own perceptions of speakers’
genders. These assumptions have concrete implications for basic phonetic methods
like formant extraction and vowel normalization, which generally treat women andmen as relatively homogenous, nonoverlapping groups distinguished by physiology.
The central goal of this article, then, is to demonstrate that the gendered voice, andindeed gender itself, is constituted through sociolinguistic style.
The acoustic variables
The acoustic analysis to follow focuses on two variables: fundamental frequency(or F0) and the realization of /s/. These features make ideal candidates for thetype of analysis presented here because each has a different relationship to sex(i.e. bodily characteristics) and gender (i.e. learned practices). Differences inwomen’s and men’s potential F0 range are clearly constrained by the size of thelarynx, while the gendered patterns for /s/ point toward an articulatory source(e.g. Munson 2007; Stuart-Smith 2007; Fuchs & Toda 2010; Zimman 2013;
Podesva & Van Hofwegen 2016).
When it comes to F0, the bulk of the gender difference found in adults arises
during puberty (Lee, Potamianos, & Narayanan 1999; Whiteside 2001), at which
point young people of all genders typically undergo a lowering of fundamental frequency (e.g. Hollien & Paul 1969; Hollien, Green, & Massey 1994; Evans, Neave,
Wakelin, & Hamilton 2008). High levels of testosterone generally have a profoundeffect on the size of the larynx (Titze 1989), as transgender men make particularly
clear (van Borsel et al. 2000; Papp 2011; Zimman 2012). Among adult speakers ofAmerican English, average speaking fundamental frequency is often placed ataround 100–120 Hz for men and 200–220 Hz for women (e.g. Fitch & Holbrook
1970; Linke 1973; Stoicheff 1981; Traunmüller & Eriksson 1995; Simpson 2009).
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

At the same time, there is strong evidence for the inﬂuence of social forces evenin cases like pitch, where biology is also clearly at play. Differences in the F0 of
women and men has been shown to vary across time (e.g. Hollien & Shipp1972; Yuasa 2008), across cultures and languages (e.g. Majewski, Hollien, & Zalewski 1972; Loveday 1981), and across social groups who speak different varietiesof the ‘same’ language (e.g. Szakay 2006). The estimates for American Englishspeaking women’s and men’s mean F0 just cited, for instance, are lower thanthose found in studies on demographically similar speakers conducted during the1950s and 1960s (see Yuasa 2008 for more); this has been interpreted as evidenceof a generational shift in norms for gendered speaking styles. Yuasa (2008) compares the downward trend in the F0 of American English speakers to the situation
among Japanese speakers, who do not seem to be undergoing this type of shift. In
her comparison, she also highlights the culture-speciﬁc patterns in men’s andwomen’s use of vocal pitch across these—admittedly homogenized—groups.
Speakers of Japanese, according to Yuasa (also Loveday 1981), maintain greater
distance between women’s and men’s habitual F0 range, with women using ahigher F0 than American English-speaking women, and men using a lower F0than American English-speaking men. Given that pitch can differ across culturesand languages, it is unsurprising that it can also be used differently across socialgroups understood as speaking the same language. For instance, Szakay (2006)
documents differences in Maori (indigenous) and pakeha (white) New Zealanders
and ﬁnds that the former group displays a signiﬁcantly higher mean pitch range thanthe latter. Furthermore, prepubescent children have been found in some studies(Hasek, Singh, & Murry 1980; Ingrisano, Weismer, & Schuckers 1980; Ferrand& Bloom 1996) to make use of different pitch ranges and intonational contours
based on assigned gender as early as age seven. Though some authors have speculated on a biological cause for these differences in children, the evidence as awhole shows that children learn many gendered articulatory patterns from ayoung age (e.g. Busby & Plant 1995; Flipsen, Shrilberg, Weismer, Karlsson, &McSweeny 1999; Whiteside & Marshall 2001) despite lack of dimorphism in the
vocal tract (Fitch & Giedd 1999). Ferrand & Bloom (1996), for example, ﬁndthat prepubescent boys’ lowering of F0 occurs simultaneously with changes in
the intonational contours they employ. Although physiology is clearly important,it seems that at least part of the observed gender differences in F0 derives fromsocially learned habits.
Sibilant consonants—particularly /s/—have also been linked to gender across anumber of studies, but in this case the evidence points toward a more purely articulatory cause. Variation in gendered qualities of /s/ derives in large part from thesize of the space between a speaker’s tongue and the teeth. The closer the tongue
is to the teeth, the higher the frequency of /s/. The bulk of the friction producedin the articulation of /s/ in English occurs in a high frequency range, generally
above 4,000 Hz (Shadle 1990, 1991), although women are widely reported to
produce this sound at a higher frequency than men (Schwartz 1968; Flipsen et al.
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LAL ZIMMAN

1999; Heffernan 2004; Stuart-Smith 2007; Fuchs & Toda 2010)—or, more precisely, with relatively greater amplitude in the high frequencies—but this pattern is notwithout exception. The frequency proﬁle of /s/ can be measured in a number ofways. Two of the most widely used methods are peak frequency, which identiﬁes
the frequency with the highest amplitude, and center of gravity (COG), which calculates a weighted mean for the full spectrum of frequencies. A review of studies on
this subject by Flipsen and colleagues (1999) suggests that women’s mean or peakfrequency for /s/ tends to fall roughly between 6,500 and 8,100 Hz, while men’s has
been said to range from around 4,000 to 7,100 Hz.
The overall picture of variation in /s/ makes a weak case for a correlation between/s/ production and sexual dimorphism. It is well known that /s/ is sensitive to articulatory differences (Shadle 1991), yet analyses of this feature provide anotherexample of researchers’ desire to attribute gender differences in acoustic output
to a binary model of biological sex. Several phoneticians have speculated that differences in vocal tract length might lead to gender-based patterns in the acoustics of/s/ (e.g. Flipsen et al. 1999:668). However, sex differentiation in the vocal anatomy
is known to exist mainly in the posterior region—particularly the pharynx andlarynx—whereas the frequency proﬁle of /s/ is determined primarily by the sizeof the ‘front cavity’, a term for the aforementioned space between the tongue andthe teeth (Shadle 1991). There has been speculation that the front cavity might
differ anatomically by sex, or that other anatomical inﬂuences may be at work,
such as the size and shape of the palate (Fuchs & Toda 2010), but comparisonsof anatomical measures designed to test this relationship have failed to ﬁnd statistically signiﬁcant differences in the palates of women and men; measures designed tocapture place of articulation were far more successful in predicting genderdifferences.
Variation in the placement of the tongue during the production of the sound provides by far the best explanation for the differences in this sound, not only acrossspeaker gender, but also language, dialect, sexuality, age, and class, as in workby Heffernan (2004) comparing Japanese and English, Gordon, Barthmaier &Sands (2002) on seven unrelated languages, Stuart-Smith (2007) on class andage in Glasgow, Campbell-Kibler (2011) on the American South, and Munson(2007) on men’s sexuality. The most signiﬁcant ﬁndings for the present analysis
are the association between high frequency /s/ and gay men and the complex patterns of gendered /s/ in Glasgow. In studies of men’s (perceived) sexuality, /s/
has been more consistently linked with the percept of a gay male speaker thanany other feature (see Zimman 2013 for a review and more on the connection
between trans men and ‘gay sounding’ voices). Even more powerfully, StuartSmith (2007) shows that, in Glasgow, gender differences in /s/ are class- andage-speciﬁc. While the expected gender differences occur among middle-classspeakers for both adults and adolescents of thirteen to fourteen years of age,
Stuart-Smith found that the working-class girls in the younger age group produced
the same kind of low frequency /s/ that was typical of the adult male speakers. Since
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

working-class girls are clearly more similar physically to middle-class girls thanthey are to adult men of any class, we can conclude that socially driven articulatory
differences are responsible for this noteworthy ﬁnding. Studies like these remind us
that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are far from homogenous categories, and that intersectional identities can produce quite different constellations of gender-linked linguisticfeatures. Taken together, this research points to the primacy of articulation in the
production of gender differences in /s/, to the extent that any physical differencesthat might exist can be overridden by socially mediated identity work.
In the interest of exploring the diversity of sociolinguistic styles among one
group of transgender speakers, this article pairs an analysis of fundamental
frequency with an analysis of /s/ in order to provide a view on the process ofbricolage, in which features from disparate sources work together to constituteholistic gendered styles. Before presenting the data, some background on thecommunity of study and analytic methods would be informative.
RESEARCH CONTEXT AND METHODSThe ethnography
Like a growing segment of sociophonetic research, the analysis presented here isdrawn from ethnographic ﬁeldwork, which I carried out with a group of transgenderspeakers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2010 to 2012. From an ethnographic
perspective, language is fundamentally social and can never be separated from thesocially meaningful contexts in which it occurs. One goal of linguistic ethnographers, then, is to discover how context produces, and is produced by, the social
and linguistic practices observed in interaction. Ethnography has played a majorrole in the development of sociocultural linguistics from its earliest days (e.g.
Hymes 1962), and has been particularly inﬂuential in the ﬁeld of language andgender, and as part of the ‘third wave’ of sociolinguistic research (Eckert 2012).
The last two decades in particular have seen a rise in the popularity of ethnographic
methods among sociophoneticians (e.g. Eckert 2000; Podesva 2007, 2011;
Mendoza-Denton 2008, 2011; Becker 2009; Drager 2009; Hall-Lew 2009). The
study of gender differentiation in the voice, however, has most often been carriedout by phoneticians working in scientiﬁc traditions, generally with data collectedin laboratory conditions without much discussion of how the interactional
aspects of that context might produce certain kinds of ﬁndings. Where ethnographers tend to focus on the situated, irreproducible nature of social interactions, phoneticians put more value on the scientiﬁc method, experimental replicability, andeliminating ‘bias’. One way these differences manifest is in the genre of speech
data used for analysis. While phoneticians value speech recorded under relatively
controlled conditions, ethnographers prefer to capture the speech of everyday life
with minimal intrusion or manipulation on the part of the researcher (though
always with the recognition that the effect of the researcher cannot be escaped).
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LAL ZIMMAN

Of course, it is one of the foundational observations of sociolinguistics that people
tend to speak differently in more formal or self-conscious contexts (Labov 1972).
Given this context, it may be a surprise that the analysis presented here employs
read speech. The usefulness of read speech for isolating changes over time are clear,but such an analysis must come with caveats. Most importantly, I do not treat theﬁndings of this analysis as representative or generalizable to other speaking contexts. Instead, I frame the self-conscious aspect of read speech as a potential opportunity for participants to produce a kind of self-conscious gendered performance.
As speakers who are acutely attuned to the potential for masculinity and femininity
to be conveyed linguistically, trans people who are in the early stages of a genderrole transition make for poor ‘naïve speakers’ even in the most conversational contexts. With the gendered characteristics of the voice weighing heavily on theirminds, and their knowledge that they were participating in a study by a linguist
seeking participants just starting hormones, it was obvious to participants that
their changing voices were the focus. This is not to imply that all of the speakers
documented here are consciously manipulating their speech in similar ways—orat all—but rather to suggest that the self-conscious aspects of read speech can be
as much a source of insight as a limitation (see Gafter 2016).
The study and its participants
A challenge facing any ethnographic or sociolinguistic inquiry is how the community of study should be deﬁned. The practice of delimiting a group of speakers as acommunity on the basis of shared demographic characteristics or overtly claimed
identities has been thoroughly interrogated in both sociolinguistics generally andthe study of language and sexuality in particular (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet
1992; Kulick 2000; Bucholtz & Hall 2004). There are two alternatives to the
speech community model (Gumperz 1968/2001) that are useful for this study.
The ﬁrst is the community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992), which
conceptualizes group-level social relationships in terms of culturally meaningfulactivity. The participants in this study did not constitute a single community of practice (or CoP), and not every participant in this study knew one another. Instead,these speakers participated in an overlapping set of CoPs. Eckert & McConnellGinet’s (2007) revisitation of the framework pushes sociocultural linguists toconnect these micro-scale communities to macro-scale social categories. Though
it was developed for the study of nationalism, Anderson’s (1983) notion of theimagined community is one way to conceptualize the sense of community thatcan be shared by people who have never met. Valentine (2007) focuses on the imagining of ‘the transgender community’—a construct to which all of the speakers inthis study oriented as well.
The goal of recruitment for this study was to record people as close as possible totheir ﬁrst injection of testosterone in order to capture the ensuing changes. Becauseof the difﬁculty of ﬁnding people at exactly the right moment in their transitions, I
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

also included some speakers who had already been on testosterone for a few
months, and in one case a full year. The study included ﬁfteen regular participantsin all, ten of whom were able to participate in a full year of audio recordings—theother ﬁve left the Bay Area permanently or for extended periods of time. The tenlong-term participants were recorded approximately once each month over thecourse of a year, and at each meeting performed a reading of Fairbanks’ (1960)
Rainbow Passage as well as being recorded during some other kind of speech activity, such as an interview or semi-structured conversation with the researcher(as in Alim 2004) or an interaction between the participant and their friends,
partners, or family members.
Table 1 contains demographic information for the ten speakers in this study whowere recorded for a full year. As the table indicates, speakers ranged in age fromtwenty-two to forty-six years, though all but two participants—whom I call
Adam2 (age thirty eight) and Mack (age forty six)—were in their twenties. Nine
self-deﬁned as white, while one, Carl, described himself as a Filipino person ofcolor. Seven out of the ten participants grew up in the Bay Area, while the otherthree came from the New York City suburbs (Adam), Spain (Pol, who acquired
English natively from his English mother), and eastern Massachusetts (James).3
Class, which was assigned based on a combination of familial background andcurrent profession, showed greater variability within this group, ranging fromworking to upper classes. Table 1 also includes information about participants’gender identities (i.e. the categories they claim for themselves) and gender presentations (i.e. how they present their genders semiotically through resources like
clothing, hair, bodily hexis, etc.). The words used for both of these columns are selected from participants’ self-descriptions and ﬂeshed out by ethnographic observation. The gender identities participants claim cover several distinct groupings: men
who see themselves as fundamentally part of the same category as cis men; transmen, who prefer to have their trans status marked and acknowledged when they describe their gender identity; genderqueer or nonbinary individuals who situatethemselves outside of the female/male binary; and trans boys, a label adopted bysome of these participants who identify primarily with masculinity but are not comfortable describing themselves as men (see Zimman 2012, 2015 for discussion).
The ﬁnal column of Table 1 includes the sexuality of participants, including boththe identity label speakers use (i.e. as either queer or straight for this sample)
and the genders to which they are attracted (since queer does not easily map onto
speciﬁc forms of desire—some apply the label to their attraction to women,
while others identify as queer because of their interest in men and/or nonbinary
genders).
The participants in my ﬁeldwork are not representative of the transmasculine
community as a whole—particularly in the dimensions of race and age—yet
even in the small sample of individuals I worked with for the course of a year, it
is clear that there is a great deal of variety in the forms of masculinities enacted
in trans communities. Despite the range of gender identities and expressions,
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350
SpeakerAge

Race/ethnicity

Class

Place of origin

Adam

38

White

Pol

23

Tony

Gender identity (& presentation)

Sexuality (& genders desired)

NYC suburbs

Trans man (“conventional”)

Queer (women)

White

Upper
middleWorking

Genderqueer, trans boy (“dandy”)

Queer (many different genders)

28

White

MiddleSpain (UKEnglish)
Bay Area

Trans man (“typical guy”)

Elvis

23

MiddleBay Area

Devin

24

White,
JewishWhite

MiddleBay Area

Genderqueer, transgender, but prefers no labels (“sensitiveguy”)
Genderqueer, transgender, prefers no labels (“queer”)

Carl
Kyle

22
24

FilipinoWhite

MiddleWorking

Bay Area
Bay Area

James

26

White

Upper

Massachusetts

Mack

46

White

Bay Area

Dave

23

White

Lower
middleUpper
middleTrans man (“nerdy kid”)
Trans man (blend of queer, outdoorsy & feminist
masculinities)
Transmasculine, genderqueer, trans boy (“queer, dykey,
faggy, femme, boyish, ﬂaming, colorful, sparkly, &glittery, genderqueer”)
Man, trans man (“regular straight guy”)

Queer (women & some transmen)
Queer (mostly gender normative
men & women)
Queer (initially all genders, later
mainly men)
Queer (women)
Queer (mainly women, more
recently also men)
Queer (many genders, esp.
femme queer people & queer
cis men)
Straight (women)

Bay AreaMan, trans man (“fem”, “queeny”)

Queer, kinky (all genders, esp.
butch men)

LAL ZIMMAN

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TABLE 1. Participants’ self-reported identities.

GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE
TABLE 2. Testosterone doses.
Speaker

Time on T atﬁrst recording

Starting weekly
testosterone dose

Dose at lastrecording

Total T duringﬁrst year4

Adam
Pol
Tony
Elvis
Devin
Carl
Kyle
James
Mack
Dave

0 weeks
0 weeks
0 weeks
3 weeks
8 weeks
10 weeks
13 weeks
25 weeks
46 weeks
65 weeks

50 mg
25 mg
25 mg
25 mg
100 mg
75 mg
100 mg
40 mg
60 mg
100 mg

50 mg
25 mg
100 mg
60 mg
60 mg
75 mg
100 mg
50 mg
84 mg
90 mg

2,600 mg
1,300 mg
3,550 mg
2,239 mg
4,940 mg
3,900 mg
5,200 mg
2,170 mg
3,480 mg5,000 mgwhat all of the speakers had in common was their choice to make use of injectable
testosterone as a means of bodily masculinization, which is the most common
medical intervention pursued by transmasculine people. Table 2 indicates how
long each speaker had been on testosterone at our ﬁrst meeting as well as his
initial and ﬁnal doses of testosterone (or T, as it’s known in the community).
Several speakers began at a ‘low dose’ of 25–50 milligrams of testosterone every
week, working up to the typical ‘full dose’ of 100 mg per week or 200 mg biweekly.
Some took a full dose from the very beginning of their hormone therapy; others preferred to remain at a low dose or to build up their dosage very slowly. Importantly,
though, a person’s dosage does not directly determine the actual testosterone levelsin the bloodstream, so one trans person may ﬁnd 100 mg per week provides ideal
testosterone levels while others may need a higher or lower dose to reach thesame range.
Acoustic methods
As noted, the analysis in this article is based on read speech in the form of repeatedreadings of the Rainbow Passage (see the appendix) on a more or less monthly basis
over the course of approximately one year. A Fostex ﬁeld recorder and AudioTechnica headset microphone were used to make all recordings in as quiet aspace as the ﬁeldwork allowed. All aspects of data collection and analysis werecarried out by the author.
There are two sets of phonetic measurements to discuss for the purposes of thisanalysis: fundamental frequency (or F0) and the sibilant consonant /s/. Each production of the Rainbow Passage was divided into intonational phrases (IPs), eachof which was measured for maximum, minimum, and mean F0. Praat’s pitch settings were set to 75 Hz at the low end, which meant that some stretches ofcreaky voice quality were included in the means.5 For this reason, minimum F0
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LAL ZIMMANTABLE 3. Number of recordings and tokens analyzed.
SpeakerNumber ofrecordings

Number of IPs(19 per recording)Tokens of /s/(14 per recording)

Adam
Pol
Tony
Elvis
Devin
Carl
Kyle
James
Mack
Dave

12
9
11
9
13
10
13
8
12
11

228
171
209
171
247
190
247
152
228
209

168
126
154
126
182
140
182
112
168
154

was not included in the present analysis, as speakers’ minimums primarily reﬂect
the extent to which they used creaky voice quality, a matter left for future investigation. Without considering speakers’ minimum F0, maximum F0 and the difference between them become less informative, so for the purposes of this analysis
only mean F0 is considered.
For analysis of /s/, fourteen word-initial tokens were selected from the Rainbow
Passage and ﬁltered below 1,000 Hz to mitigate some low-frequency backgroundnoise (see methodological notes in Stuart-Smith 2007) and rule out the possibility
that changes in the back cavity would affect measures of /s/. Spectral slices weregenerated from the middle of each token to capture a fuller frequency proﬁlethan a single point can provide. Following authors like Stuart-Smith (2007) andMunson (2007), a moments analysis was used to measure the distribution of frequencies in each spectrum, though for the purposes of the present analysis,
center of gravity is used as the indicator of /s/ frequency because it is themeasure most consistently linked to gender, whereas skew is more often linked
to gay men’s speech (Munson 2007; see Zimman 2012 for more on modeling
COG and skew in this group).
The dataset thus includes measurements for nineteen IPs and fourteen tokens of/s/ per recording. There are between eight and thirteen recordings of the Rainbow
Passage available for each of the ten speakers analyzed on a longitudinal basis.
Table 3 has the total number of recordings, IPs, and tokens of /s/ analyzed foreach speaker. While nineteen and fourteen are not particularly large numbers oftokens for each recording, bear in mind that these tokens are produced in consistentphonological, discursive, and intonational contexts.
Linear mixed effects regressions were used to model the relationship between
the acoustic measures and the number of weeks speakers had been on testosterone.
First, linear regressions were performed on all data for each acoustic variable inorder to determine whether, for these speakers as a group, a correlation exists
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

FIGURE 1. Mean F0 by weeks on testosterone.

between F0 or /s/ and time on testosterone. Because various individual factors may
inﬂuence the way F0 changes, this was followed up by separate analyses for eachindividual speaker to determine the degree of inter-speaker variability when it
came to change over time. In each regression, the dependent variable was the acoustic measure (mean F0 or COG of /s/) while time on testosterone was included as aﬁxed-effect variable. A random-effect variable was also included: for analysis of
F0, the random variable was IP, while for /s/ the random variable was the wordin which the token appeared. In the analyses of all speakers grouped together,
speaker is also included as a random-effect variable.
RESULTS

Three sets of results are of interest for this article: the change in fundamental frequency experienced by speakers in this sample, their realization of /s/, and the relationship between these two measures.
Results of fundamental frequency analysis
To begin with the results for all ten of the speakers analyzed here as a group, there isa highly signiﬁcant negative relationship between mean F0 and the number ofweeks a speaker has been on testosterone (B = −0.4362, p , 0.001). As awhole, speakers who have been on testosterone longer have lower mean F0s thanthose who have been on testosterone for less time. Figure 1 illustrates this relationship in a scatterplot with a regression line.
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LAL ZIMMANTABLE 4. Changes over time in F0.
SpeakerFirst recording: Mean
F0 & time on T

Final recording:
Mean F0 & time on T

Difference

Regression
coefﬁcient

Regression
p value

Adam
Pol
Tony
Elvis
Devin
Carl
Kyle
James
Mack
Dave

165 Hz (0 weeks)
171 Hz (0 weeks)
162 Hz (0 weeks)
146 Hz (3 weeks)
169 Hz (8 weeks)
171 Hz (10 weeks)
151 Hz (13 weeks)
133 Hz (25 weeks)
204 Hz (46 weeks)
115 Hz (65 weeks)

129 Hz (55 weeks)
127 Hz (54 weeks)
115 Hz (54 weeks)
124 Hz (71 weeks)
113 Hz (65 weeks)
155 Hz (73 weeks)
113 Hz (72 weeks)
124 Hz (87 weeks)
176 Hz (138 weeks)
109 Hz (113 weeks)

36 Hz
44 Hz
47 Hz
22 Hz
56 Hz
16 Hz
38 Hz
9 Hz
28 Hz
6 Hz

−0.3370−1.088−0.9161−0.2915−0.9831−0.2434−0.5314−0.1847−0.1407n.s.

p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***
p , 0.001***n.s.

Looking at the data as a whole, however, hides important differences acrossspeakers in this study. Most notably, the high-frequency tokens in the range of
40 to 140 weeks in Figure 1 were produced by a single speaker—Mack—who
was recorded during his second year on testosterone. Table 4 contains results foreach individual speaker. Each row provides a speaker’s mean F0 for his ﬁrst andﬁnal recordings of the Rainbow Passage and how many weeks he had been on testosterone when those recordings were made. Also included are coefﬁcients that represent the direction and size of the correlation and p values that indicate its statisticalsigniﬁcance. Speakers are ordered in this table according to the amount of time they
had been on testosterone when they were ﬁrst recorded. As the table indicates, all
but one speaker—Dave—underwent a signiﬁcant downward change in F0 overthe course of participation in this study. Importantly, though, Dave had been on testosterone longer than anyone else in this study ( just over one year at the time of our
ﬁrst recording) and also had the lowest mean F0, which was already 115 Hz during
our ﬁrst recording. He had clearly already gone through signiﬁcant pitch changes
before I began recording his voice, which he described as being “high soprano”
before his transition.
Figure 2 visualizes the data by speaker. Here, each empty triangle represents themean F0 for the ﬁrst recording made by each speaker, while each ﬁlled circle represents the mean at the ﬁnal recording.
Though the pattern of downward change is consistent across speakers, there arealso clear differences in the rate at which the changes occurred and the amount ofchange that took place. For example, James had been on testosterone for twenty-ﬁve
weeks when I began recording him, but his voice had already dropped to an average
F0 of 133 Hz. After only three weeks on hormones, Elvis was already at an averageof 146 Hz. Yet Mack’s last recording, which took place after two years on T and had
an F0 mean of 176 Hz, left him with an ending mean F0 that was higher than any
other participant’s starting fundamental frequency. Physical size might be an
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

FIGURE 2. Mean F0 by speaker at ﬁrst and last recording.

attractive explanation for these differences, but in fact Mack was one of the tallest
and overall largest participant in the study, while Dave was quite petite. There is also
clear variation in how long speakers’ voices continue to change. While the change
in James’ F0 was statistically signiﬁcant, the raw change between his ﬁrst and lastrecording was only 9 Hz, suggesting that his pitch had plateaued by the end of ourwork together. Mack, by contrast, had already been on testosterone for almost a year
when I began recording him, yet he had a drop from 204 Hz to 176 Hz during his
second year of hormone therapy. Mack contrasts most clearly with Dave, who did
not see signiﬁcant changes in F0 during his second year on testosterone. In addition
to rate and trajectory of pitch changes, the raw amount of change each speaker saw
varied signiﬁcantly. The starkest comparison on this front is between Devin andCarl, who had similar mean F0 values during our ﬁrst recording of 169 Hz and
171 Hz, respectively. Devin is the speaker who saw the biggest drop in mean F0,
taking him to an average of 113 Hz, while Carl’s pitch only fell 16 Hz, down to
155 Hz. Though we do not know what these speakers’ F0 would have been had I
been able to record them before they began testosterone, they clearly occupied different pitch ranges after one year on hormones.
Most speakers eventually reached a mean under approximately 130 Hz, with the
exceptions of Carl (whose ﬁnal mean F0 was 155 Hz), and Mack (whose ﬁnal mean
was 176 Hz). Pol, though he eventually reached a mean of 127 Hz, also remained in
the higher ranges (above approximately 160 Hz) for longer than most participants.
There are a few factors that might help to explain some of the variability we ﬁnd inthese speakers’ starting fundamental frequency, ending fundamental frequency,
and the paths that connect them. I brieﬂy mention below four potential factors toLanguage in Society 46:3 (2017)

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LAL ZIMMAN

draw attention to the way that both physiological and social factors seem to exert aneffect on F0 among these speakers, but full consideration of the causes behind F0change are beyond the scope of this article. These factors are age, regional dialect,ethnoracial identity, and testosterone dose.
Age may have an important effect on the degree of change trans speakers on testosterone experience. Within trans communities, it is often said that younger people
have an easier time with gender role transitions, and part of this ease is ascribed tothe physiological effects of aging. This could be a factor in explaining why Mack, as
the oldest speaker in the sample (age forty-six), has seen less pitch change than theyounger participants. It’s worth noting, however, that Adam (age thirty-eight) andanother speaker who did not complete a full year of recordings, Ethan (age fortyeight), reached the same range as the study’s younger participants in only a few
months time. Furthermore, Mack proved able to produce much lower pitchedspeech than he habitually used, but he was self-conscious about this deeper
voice because it did not feel entirely authentic (see Zimman 2012 for details). If
age is a factor in limiting some speakers’ vocal changes, then, physiology neednot be the only or primary cause of those limitations. Perhaps speakers who havespent several decades living in a female gender role and employing a femalesounding voice have ingrained articulatory habits that are less easily changed
than those of younger speakers, who have had less time to build up a genderedhabitus.
The second factor worth further investigation is dialect. All but one of the speakers in this study were from the United States, and among those, most were from the
San Francisco Bay Area. The clearest exception to the dialectal trend is Pol, atwenty-three-year-old white, working class, queer trans boy who grew up in
Spain and is natively bilingual in Spanish and British English, learned at homefrom his Cornwall-born mother. Although Pol did eventually land in a normative
male pitch range, with an average mean F0 of 127 Hz, his progression was
slower than most of the other participants. Pol also reported being perceived as awoman, both in person and over the phone, for longer than most of the other speakers in the study. Even toward the end of his participation, when his vocal pitch had
reached a low point, he described being read as female much more often than hewould like. It is not necessarily the case that dialect directly constrains the pitch
range that speakers employ, but Pol’s soft-spoken British accent may haveplayed into the perception of his gender in the US, especially given American ideologies about the supposed ‘effeminacy’ of British and European men.
A third factor worth further investigation is ethnoracial identity. The fact that all
but one of the speakers in this sample self-identiﬁed as white makes it difﬁcult tofully explore the implications of race and its effect on gendered styles, but it isnotable that the one person of color in the study also stands out as occupying a different pitch range than the white speakers. This individual is Carl, a twenty-oneyear-old Filipino American recent college graduate who grew up in the Bay Area
in a middle-class immigrant family; Carl describes himself as simultaneously
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

straight (based on his attraction to women) and queer (based on his identity as atrans person), and I discuss his gender presentation at greater length below. In addition to being the only person of color to participate in the longitudinal element of
the project, Carl’s pitch was signiﬁcantly higher than any other participant’s, save
Mack. But with so little sociolinguistic research available on Filipino Americans,and so little research about patterns of gendered phonetic measures among peopleof color, it is difﬁcult to assess whether Carl’s pitch range is typical among Filipino
American men. Because of the limitations of this sample of ten, my current extensions of this research are focused speciﬁcally on trans people of color.
Finally, the particular dose of testosterone taken by speakers seems to be of importance. A standard ‘full dose’ of testosterone is approximately 100 mg per week,
but many transmasculine people begin hormone therapy at a lower dose of 25–50
mg per week. Some continue at this low dose, like Pol (25 mg/week) and Adam
(50 mg/week), while others increase their dose over time, like James, Mack, andTony. Still others begin hormone therapy at a full dose, meaning they experiencea more rapid shift toward a normatively male endocrine balance. Devin, thespeaker with the largest change in F0 over the course of his participation in thisstudy, was among those to begin at a full weekly dose of 100 mg. At the sametime, dosage cannot explain this variance by itself, as several speakers with low
doses (e.g. James) nevertheless had large changes in F0.
Hormone levels provide a particularly striking example of the ways physiology
and social forces interact. The effect of hormones like testosterone and estrogen areoften seen as a matter of biological predetermination. Yet trans people highlight thefact that even elements such as hormone levels are sensitive to social context, sincetrans people’s choices about whether to go on hormones, and at what dose, are inﬂuenced by social factors such as an individual’s gender identity, life circumstance,and desired transition path. Nor are synthetic hormones particular to trans people’s
healthcare; indeed, many cis people make use of products that inﬂuence their socalled sex hormones such as birth control, fertility treatments, postmenopausal
hormone replacement therapy, testosterone replacement for older men, and evenhair-loss combatants like Rogaine. Synthetic hormones aside, biologists have documented the effect social behaviors have on the levels of hormones a person’s body
produces (e.g. Bernhardt, Dabbs, Fielden, & Lutter 1998).
Larger scale investigations of transgender speakers should take these factors into
account, and with a large enough sample size it may be possible to tease apart thecontribution of age, dialect, race, and hormone exposure. However, what none ofthese accounts would be able to capture, as long as F0 is examined in isolation,is the critical importance of the stylistic elements with which F0 co-occurs.
Results of sibilant analysis
Though it might be tempting to talk about a speaker’s amount of change or ending
point in F0 as an indicator of how masculine or feminine these speakers’ voices are,Language in Society 46:3 (2017)357

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LAL ZIMMAN

FIGURE 3. Center of gravity for /s/ by weeks on testosterone.

it would also miss the important fact that pitch is only one marker of gender among
many. It is for this reason that I now turn to an analysis of /s/ as another sociophonetic index that differs from fundamental frequency in ways described above in part
because gender differences in sibilants do not have the same kind of physiologicalinﬂuence that exists for F0. As with fundamental frequency, here I present thechanges occurring in some speakers’ productions of /s/ before underscoring thegreat inter-speaker variability to be found for this consonant.
First, the results of the regression performed across all ten speakers indicates that
there is a correlation between center of gravity for /s/ and the amount of time spenton testosterone (B = –2.761, p , 0.01). However, this relationship is clearly much
weaker than that discovered between F0 and time on testosterone, as Figure 3 illustrates. This group-based analysis also obscures what is revealed in a by-speaker
analysis, which is that only a few participants in this study experienced a change
in /s/.
As with Table 4, Table 5 shows the starting and ending means for the center ofgravity of /s/ as well as coefﬁcients and p values from the regression analysis.
Unlike the seemingly universal downward changes in pitch spurred by testosterone
for these speakers, only a few participants showed signiﬁcant, but small, changes incenter of gravity. Three saw a decrease in center of gravity: Adam (who went from6,867 Hz to 6,481 Hz), Tony (who went from 6,159 Hz to 5,734 Hz), and Devin(who went from 9,459 Hz to 8,779 Hz). More strikingly, however, one speaker actually saw an increase in center of gravity: Carl (who went from an average of
6,522 Hz to 6,877 Hz). Most immediately, the variability in these ﬁndings aligns
better with articulatory, rather than anatomical, accounts of gender differences in /s/,358

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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE
TABLE 5. Changes over time in center of gravity for /s/.
SpeakerFirst recording: COG& time on T

Final recording: COG& time on T

Difference

Regression
coefﬁcient

Regression
p value

Adam
Pol
Tony
Elvis
Devin
Carl
Kyle
James
Mack
Dave

6,867 Hz (0 weeks)
7,983 Hz (0 weeks)
6,159 Hz (0 weeks)
7,878 Hz (3 weeks)
9,459 Hz (8 weeks)
6,522 Hz (10 weeks)
6,777 Hz (13 weeks)
7,907 Hz (25 weeks)
5,788 Hz (46 weeks)
9,014 Hz (65 weeks)

6,481 Hz (55 weeks)
8,151 Hz (54 weeks)
5,734 Hz (54 weeks)
8,174 Hz (71 weeks)
8,779 Hz (65 weeks)
6,877 Hz (73 weeks)
6,616 Hz (72 weeks)
7,717 Hz (87 weeks)
5,933 Hz (138 weeks)
8,960 Hz (113 weeks)−386 Hz168 Hz−425 Hz
296 Hz−680 Hz
355 Hz−161 Hz−190 Hz145 Hz−54 Hz−2.401n.s.
−10.11n.s.
−9.803
6.343
n.s.
n.s.
n.s.
n.s.

p , 0.01**
n.s.
p , 0.01**
n.s.
p , 0.001***
p , 0.01**
n.s.
n.s.
n.s.
n.s.

particularly since testosterone would not cause speakers to produce /s/ in a morenormatively ‘feminine’ way, as Carl did. As I have discussed in greater depth elsewhere (Zimman 2012, 2016), several participants in my study talked about feelingmore comfortable incorporating certain traditionally feminine characteristics into
their gender expression once they starting being perceived as men. Carl offered
one of the most concrete examples of this process. When I ﬁrst met him, Carl
had an unremarkably masculine gender presentation that often took the form ofslightly baggy jeans and t-shirts featuring pop-culture references such as videogame characters. As his transition progressed, however, he spoke openly about
feeling increasingly comfortable expressing more ‘fem’ characteristics in both
dress and mannerisms. Carl found that being almost universally perceived as
male (despite his relatively high-pitched voice) allowed him greater freedom inthe kinds of masculinities he could enact without risk of undermining recognitionof his core gender identity as a trans man. Toward the end of my ﬁeldwork, Carl had
started letting his hair grow longer and was experimenting with a wider range ofclothing styles—ﬁtted cut-off jeans stopping just below the knee, for example—
than the more conventional masculine look he preferred when we ﬁrst met.
Instead of looking like a relatively gender-normative adolescent boy, Carl began
looking more like a queer, somewhat bohemian young man who is largely unconcerned with hegemonic norms for men’s self-presentation. At the very same timethat Carl showed a signiﬁcant increase in center of gravity—approximately
halfway through our year of recordings—he also showed a slight increase in F0.
All in all, these changes are relatively small compared to those seen in F0, andthe more important aspect of /s/ for this discussion is not how its articulation
changed over time for these speakers, but on how much variability there is inthese speakers’ centers of gravity for /s/. Figure 4 breaks down center of gravity
by speaker, ordered from lowest to highest mean COG, and shows that the ten individuals in this study cover an enormous range of possible frequencies for /s/, as
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LAL ZIMMAN

FIGURE 4. Center of gravity for [s] by speaker.

low as 4,300 Hz and as high as 11,000 Hz. According to Flipsen et al.’s (1999)
review of the literature, the COG of /s/ for English-speaking men has been reported
throughout the range of 4,000–7,000 Hz, while for women the values range from6,500–8,100 Hz; the speakers in this study cover that entire range.
To make sense of the way /s/ varies across this population of speakers, it is
helpful to invoke these speakers’ local understanding of gender. Speciﬁcally, weneed to separate gender identity and gender presentation, and to treat these separate
concepts as distinct from gender assignment and sexuality (Zimman 2015). Gender
identity is a phrase used in transgender communities to refer to the gender categories
one claims for oneself, including identities like woman and man, but also distinctions between the difference mentioned earlier between identifying as a man versus
a trans man, or between identifying as a trans man versus a trans boy. The speakers
with the lowest center of gravity all identiﬁed as either men or trans men, including
Mack, Carl, Adam, Tony, and Kyle. The speakers who described themselves as
genderqueer or some other nonbinary gender identity all appear on the right ofthe chart: Elvis, James, Pol, and Devin. Gender identity alone, however, does not
explain this spread, because Dave identiﬁes strongly as a man yet has the second
highest mean COG. This is why we must distinguish gender identity, as aclaimed category, from the semiotic expression of femininity or masculinity
known as gender presentation or expression. These are separate constructs fortrans people in recognition that some men—including trans men—are not terribly
masculine while some women—including trans women—are more butch thanfemme. Dave illustrates this disjuncture as a man who maintains what he describes
as a fem gender expression constituted in part by his preference for bright,
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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

ﬂamboyant, form-ﬁtting clothing (often designed to be worn by women), as well as
his vocal and gestural habits, which he describes as queeny and faggy. Dave is small
in frame and stands just an inch or two over ﬁve feet, but is consistently perceived as
male, undoubtedly due in part to his facial hair and low-pitched voice. He gives off a
distinctly queer masculinity, however, in part through his voice. He makes ample
use of falsetto voice quality, exhibits wild excursions in pitch range that contributeto his engaging and expressive interactional style, and, as Figure 4 indicates, has
one of the highest frequency productions of /s/ among these speakers. See
Zimman (2012, 2015) for an extended account of the role of gender expression
and sexual orientation in the full sample of participants in this study.
Connecting features: The relationship between fundamental
frequency and /s/
The temptation to categorize the femininity or masculinity of a transgender person’s
voice according to fundamental frequency alone conceals the view of gender’scomplexities by analyzing a larger set of resources for constructing gender differentiation in the voice. It would be easy to conclude that some speakers in thisstudy have been more successful than others when it comes to changes in pitch,but including /s/ in this characterization reveals that gender is not a unidimensional
scale with femininity on one end of a continuum and masculinity on the other.
Instead, gender is constituted by numerous overlapping and sometimes even conﬂicting sets of practices that can be combined and recombined in a huge variety ofways. Both gender and the gendered voice are in this sense produced through stylistic bricolage, and a gender-role transition is one of the most dramatic recontextualizations a person can experience. Transgender people talk about thisrecontextualizing process, at least with respect to nonlinguistic practices: for instance, a man who fawns over small children, takes up a lot of physical space on
public transportation, compliments a woman’s shoes, or playfully shoves a friend
will be seen quite differently from a woman who does the same. When a transperson’s gender identity is recognized publically, as is the case for the trans speakers in this study who saw substantial lowering of vocal pitch, this also allows formore ﬂexibility in gender presentation. In other words, transmasculine people
who are categorized as physiologically male can engage in feminine activities—
in some cases up to and including wearing ‘women’s clothing’—without being perceived as female. Several speakers in this study spoke explicitly about feeling more
comfortable (re)incorporating elements of feminine gender presentation that they
had previously rejected because they threatened to undermine the gender perception
they desired. Wanting a male-sounding voice was the most common reason myparticipants gave for pursuing testosterone therapy to begin with, but desire for a
prototypically masculine voice was less common. Even when I asked straightidentiﬁed speakers like Mack and Ethan how they would feel if they were perceived
as gay or feminine men, their responses stressed that they would not be too
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LAL ZIMMANTABLE 6. Speakers’ grand means and rankings for F0 and center of gravity for /s/.
Ranking for F0 (grand mean)

Speaker

Ranking for COG (grand mean)

1 (114 Hz)
2 (127 Hz)
3 (129 Hz)
4 (132 Hz)
5 (134 Hz)
6 (136 Hz)
7 (144 Hz)
8 (155 Hz)
9 (158 Hz)
10 (182 Hz)

Dave
Devin
James
Elvis
Kyle
Tony
Adam
Pol
Carl
Mack

9 (8,905 Hz)
10 (9,188 Hz)
7 (8,196 Hz)
6 (8,128 Hz)
5 (6,819 Hz)
4 (6,727 Hz)
3 (6,705 Hz)
8 (8,264 Hz)
2 (6,579 Hz)
1 (5,921 Hz)

bothered, so long as they were perceived as men of some sort. Queer-identiﬁed
participants, by contrast, often expressed a strong preference NOT to sound or act
like heteronormative men.
If having a male-sounding voice allows speakers to avoid working to masculinize other aspects of their linguistic styles, as Zimman (2016) argues, it is not
because pitch simply overrides other gender differences in the voice. In fact, apilot perceptual experiment on the perceived gender of these speakers suggeststhat both formant frequencies and the center of gravity for /s/ mediate the categorization of speaker gender based on pitch. Pitch is unquestionably important in its
own right, but the salience of a major change in fundamental frequency comes inpart from the way it recontextualizes other aspects of a person’s sociolinguisticstyle. In this way, the gendered voice is constructed through the same processesof stylistic bricolage we see at work in other domains of linguistic variation.
With the development of a low-pitched voice, a high frequency /s/ can go from indexing a kind of hetero- and cisnormative femininity to indexing a gay or queer
male identity (as in Zimman 2013). Although analyzing two features is only
scratching at the surface of how multidimensional styles are formulated, the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s/ provides a striking complication
to attempts at characterizing the femininity or masculinity of a voice.
In order to see how variation in fundamental frequency compares to variation incenter of gravity for /s/ among these speakers, Table 6 presents a ranking for each ofthese variables: the speaker with the lowest mean frequency has a rank of one andthe speaker with the highest mean frequency has a rank of ten. Speakers are listed
here from lowest to highest mean F0, with a rank indicated in the left column. The
ranking for center of gravity is listed in the right column. These numbers are grandmeans that include all tokens from all recordings in order to give a holistic sense ofeach speaker’s voices at the time of their participation. My argument here is not thatthe ranking in F0 CAUSES speakers to produce /s/ in the way they do, nor that theserankings are anything but relative to this group of speakers and therefore not362

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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

necessarily generalizable, but what they show is that F0 and other markers of gender
do not NECESSARILY pattern together in normative ways. To reduce the gender of thevoice to a single dimension would be to neglect the larger indexical picture, whichis that there is a great deal of variation within gender groups, not just between them.
Just as the meaning of style relies on a holistic picture of a person’s speech, so too
does the meaning of gender.
The most striking aspect of Table 6 is the near perfect reversal of the rankorder. The speakers with the highest fundamental frequency (Carl and Mack)
are also the speakers with the lowest frequency /s/, while those with thehighest frequency /s/ (Dave and Devin) have the lowest F0. Clearly not all speakers show an opposition between these features—Pol does not, nor does Kyle, andElvis and Tony are marginal cases—and, of course, this pattern exists speciﬁcallywithin the context of this group of speakers. But if we had analyzed F0 alone andconcluded that Mack has the most feminine voice while Dave has the most masculine voice, we would fail to discover that Dave’s voice is extremely queeny, in
his words, while Mack’s is decidedly masculine despite its high pitch. These are
only two features, and the introduction of additional measures like formant frequencies, voice quality, and so forth, would further complexify this picture.
But even when we consider only mean F0 and /s/, it becomes far more
difﬁcult to describe any of these speakers’ voices as more or less masculine
than the others. Yet, it is through consideration of the features together that wecan begin to understand the logic behind these styles. Even as variation in /s/aligns with speakers’ multi-layered relationships with gender identity, gender presentation, and sexuality, those particular indexical meanings are facilitated by thepresence of a low fundamental frequency.
Turning back to the notion of style, bricolage helps to explain how the recontextualization of indexical meaning takes place. Both normative femininity and queer
or non-normative masculinities co-exist on the indexical ﬁeld for a high-frequency /s/, but it is the linguistic and social context of the variable that activates one of thosemeanings over the other. Of course, these are not arbitrary features. Normatively
speaking, a person’s embodied sex characteristics determine how they may be gendered, making the body a gatekeeper for the interpretation of gendered social practices. In more trans-afﬁrming contexts, such as those found within trans communities,
bodily normativity does not regulate access to gender afﬁrmation; in this sense, ideology plays an important role in indexical conﬁgurations.
CONCLUSION

Sociolinguists often frame widespread gender differences in the voice differently
from other kinds of sociophonetic variation. In spite of the ﬁeld’s commitment touncovering the social logic of linguistic difference, the process by which voices
are assigned female or male by analysts remains saturated with biological essentialism. Even in the case of gender’s close ally—sexuality—we may talk about voices
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LAL ZIMMAN

as SOUNDING gay, but rarely do we describe voices as BEING gay. To describe a
voice as female or male, by contrast, is an attribution process that usuallyoccurs without reﬂection. As a result of the naturalization of binary gender differences in the voice, we know a great deal about the way binary gender categories correlate with phonetic linguistic variables (particularly those related toregional and class-based variation) but relatively little about variation in the phonetic indexes that most directly index gender, like pitch. Transgender voices challenge us to bring greater reﬂexivity to this process and examine our criteria forsexing or gendering a voice.
The biological essentialism that characterizes many linguists’ discourses about
gender and the voice naturalizes a system where the sexing of a voice is determinedby the sexing of the individual who produces it. One important lesson of queer andpoststructuralist gender theory, however, is that biological sex is itself a social construct, and transgender embodiment has played a major role in supporting this argument. If female and male voices are distinguished on the basis of laryngeal
size, for instance, the challenge comes in demarcating the exact boundary
between these categories or determining whether it is possible to have a voicethat is neither female or male. If, by this logic, certain larynges are too small to
be considered male, or too large to be considered female, does that mean some cisgender men (not to mention prepubescent boys) have female voices and some cisgender women have male voices, if their laryngeal size falls short or exceeds thenormative boundary? More likely, voices are designated female or male on thebasis of the (perceived) IDENTITY of the speaker, such that (fe)male voice operates
as a kind of circular shorthand for ‘a voice belonging to a (fe)male person’,which is then conﬂated with a voice that displays a normatively gendered pitch
range, formant frequencies, and so on. The merging of sex and gender can passby unnoticed in many studies when only cisgender speakers are considered, yet
the result of this merger is far murkier theoretical waters regarding the causes
and implications of gender differences in the voice.
Even where biological processes are clearly at play, as they are for transmasculine people on testosterone, social factors always have some role in mediating therelationship between embodiment, linguistic practice, and gendered meaning. To
assume that the masculinization of transmasculine people’s voices is caused by testosterone alone is to miss out on the complexity of their sociolinguistic styles, inwhich pitch is only one element among many. This article has focused on thegreater depth of understanding that can be achieved by strategically examining
two characteristics of the gendered voice, but gendered styles are most fruitfully examined as constellations of linguistic features that are assigned meaning holistically. Transgender speakers illuminate better than few others how the construction ofgender takes place, but the model of gender as style also provides a deeper, moreintersectional account of gendered variation among cisgender speakers as well.
However normative or exceptional a speaker’s identity, treating gender as asingle dimension provides a ﬂat, if not plainly unrepresentative, picture of the364

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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE

gendered meanings the voice takes on. Despite its rampant naturalization, genderfundamentally operates like other facets of identity: constructed through aprocess of bricolage that draws on both material and symbolic resources, emerging
contextually in concert with multiple intersecting identities, and remaining open tochange in the ongoing process of articulating the self.

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LAL ZIMMANAPPENDIX: RAINBOW PASSAGE (FAIRBANKS
1960)

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The
rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of along round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon.
There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one
ever ﬁnds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he islooking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Throughout the centuries people
have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal ﬂoods.
The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. The
Norsemen considered the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to theirhome in the sky. Others have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. Aristotle thoughtthat the rainbow was caused by reﬂection of the sun’s rays by the rain. Since then physicists
have found that it is not reﬂection, but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbows.
Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow
depends considerably upon the size of the drops, and the width of the colored band increases
as the size of the drops increases. The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effectof super-imposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of
the ﬁrst, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green
light when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red
and yellow, with little or no green or blue.

NOTES
1

A common misconception about bricolage as a theory of style that arose during the review of thisarticle is that it necessarily involves speakers being consciously aware of the ways they combine linguistic features into holistic styles. Bricolage did arise as part of a shift away from older, more mechanistic
perspectives on sociolinguistic style (see Eckert & Rickford 2001 for a range of examples); however, thetheory itself does not require intentionality on the part of the speaker. Bricolage can draw from biologically inﬂuenced as well as socially learned variables, as my analyses makes clear (see also Zimman2013). The core function of the concept of bricolage is to help us understand how meaning is constructed,
not to make claims about the degree to which speakers are conscious of the process. See Zimman (2016)
for a discussion of agency and intentionality among the same set of speakers discussed here.
2
All names are pseudonyms chosen in consultation with participants.
3
One anonymous reviewer inquired as to whether variation in age or speaker dialect might explainsome of the variation in /s/ among these speakers. However, I am unaware of any literature linking
the particular regions these speakers are from (the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Massachusetts,
and Cornwall-inﬂuenced British English) to differences in /s/ of the sort documented by Stuart-Smith(2007) and Campbell-Kibler (2011).
4
In the case of Mack and Dave, the amount of testosterone is derived from the second year of hormone
therapy rather than the ﬁrst.
5
The choice to either include or exclude portions of talk produced with creaky phonation is a difﬁcult
one. Because creak is characteristically produced with a low frequency (often well under 100 Hz), thesemeans may be lower than the speakers’ mean F0 in modal voice quality. By contrast, excluding creak
could be seen as producing artiﬁcially higher means. The correct answer depends on whether listeners
perceive creaky voice quality as low pitched or whether it is perceived as fundamentally different
from modal speech.

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GENDER AS STYLISTIC BRICOLAGE
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(Received 13 February 2016; revision received 23 July 2016;
accepted 13 September 2016; final revision received 28 December 2016)
Address for correspondence:
Lal Zimman
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of Linguistics, Mail Code 3100
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100
zimman@linguistics.ucsb.edu

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