Received: 20 October 2017

Accepted: 1 April 2018

DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12284

ARTICLETransgender voices: Insights on identity,
embodiment, and the gender of the voice
Lal Zimman
University of California, Santa Barbara,
USA.

Abstract
The voice is a highly salient cue in the perception of

Correspondence
Lal Zimman, Linguistics, University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara,
CA 93106‐3100.
Email: zimman@linguistics.ucsb.edu

gender and an important analytic factor in bothphonetic and sociophonetic analysis. Although we havea wealth of knowledge about the social construction ofgender through language, gender differences in thevoice are frequently treated as natural, direct productsof sex differentiation. This article focuses on threemajor areas of insight from studies of transgenderpeople's voices that build on previous evidence thateven biologically influenced features of the genderedvoice, like pitch, are shaped by sociocultural practice:the identification of features that distinguish voices
perceived as female from those perceived as male; theexamination of the degree to which the genderedcharacteristics of the voice can change; and the theorization of where gender differences in the voice comefrom. Inclusion of trans speakers in the sociophonetic
study of the gendered voice requires linguists to be
more cautious in the categorization of voices as female
or male on the basis of speakers' perceived sex.

1 | INTRODUCTION
The last decade has shown a rapid expansion of interest in and awareness of transgenderpeople's experiences, both within and outside academia. Trans people have long played asignificant role in the social sciences because of the way they make the process of acquiring agender—a process that everyone goes through—more visible (e.g., Garfinkel, 1967). However,linguists have been relatively slow to incorporate these lessons into the study of language. This

Lang Linguist Compass. 2018;e12284.
https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12284

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article focuses on one particularly important aspect of language when it comes to transgenderspeakers: the gendered characteristics of the voice.
Vocal cues are often a key factor in the process of categorizing someone's gender, making
the voice an enormously important aspect of gender presentation, particularly for those who
are transitioning from one gender role, identity, or presentation to another. This has createddemand among some trans people—particularly trans women, for reasons to be discussed
below—for speech therapy focused on feminizing (or, less often, masculinizing) the voice. Gender differences in the voice are also of great importance to linguists and researchers in allied
fields because of the way speaker gender is used to determine, for instance, what kinds of settings should be used in acoustic analysis. Additionally, studying gender and the voice focuses
on a site in which the body and cultural processes of socialization and identity construction
come into contact with one another. This places the voice at the center of debates about theextent to which gender is a biological versus sociocultural phenomenon. In this sense, the studyof trans speakers is not merely addressing the historical exclusion of a highly marginalizedgroup from research in our field but also provides critical insights on our overall understandingof gender differences in the voice. When we limit ourselves to the study of normative speakers—
whose embodiment, socialization experiences, and self‐articulated gender identities “match” inthe expected ways—it is very difficult to tease apart the influence of each of these factors. Analysts are left to speculate about the source of the differences they discover, and such speculations
often reinforce the privileging of dominant social groups, such as cisgender people (i.e., those
who are not transgender), men, heterosexuals, and White/colonial cultures. By including
those whose bodies, life histories, and identities diverge from the norm in various ways, we
can ask questions about the influence of each of these forces, bringing us closer to an understanding of why gender differences in the voice exist in the first place.
This article takes a critical perspective on the practice of categorizing voices as “female” or“male” through a focus on transgender speakers. It begins with a brief overview of received
wisdom on gender and the voice, which highlights some of the erasures and amplifications thatmake the picture seem simpler than it truly is. There is also substantial reason to question thenaturalization of gender differences in the voice, even before bringing trans speakers into
the mix. We can then turn to research on trans voices from both speech pathologists andsociophoneticians organized around a set of three key concerns that drive existing literaturein this area: the identification of phonetic features associated with gender, the exploration of
the malleability of those features, and the origin(s) of gender differences in the voice.

2 | RECEIV E D WI S D OM ON G E NDE R A ND THE V O I C EGender differences in the voice form the backdrop for much research in phonetics broadly andin sociophonetics in particular; they are also of interest to scholars of language, gender, andsexuality. However, these two groups of researchers tend to see gender differently, which leads
them to conduct research and interpret findings in different ways. Among researchers who
specialize in language, gender, and sexuality, gender is seen as a social construct, that is, aproduct of social practice that differs over time and across cultures. Constructivists recognizethat widespread beliefs about gender—including those held by academics—are not universal
pictures of “reality,” but rather a reflection of a particular cultural framework. Cross‐culturaldifferences in gender norms for women and men provide strong evidence for the constructivist
viewpoint, as do differences in the way gender is enacted across different communities withinZIMMAN3 of 16the “same” culture, particularly as it intersects with race and ethnicity, class, sexuality, andother domains of identity. Gender is potentially fluid and non‐binary from this perspective
and can be changed and subverted—though not limitlessly—through speakers' exercise ofagency. This research often distinguishes between sex, in reference to bodily characteristics,
and gender, in reference to social practices, though both are recognized as social constructs(as in Butler, 1993; Zimman & Hall, 2009; Zimman, 2014). Constructivists tend to see linguistic
differences between women, men, or any other gender group as socially learned rather thananatomically determined, at least in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary.
Research that is focused on gender differences in the voice, however, often takes a moredeterminist perspective, in which physiology determines vocal output. Biological sex is frequently the first‐line explanation for any difference between women's and men's voices, evenwhen the same results could be interpreted through a constructivist lens. The concepts of sex
and gender are often not distinguished, and typically, only two gender categories are recognizeddespite the fact that human sexual variation encompasses both bodies and identities that falloutside that binary. Yet researchers typically categorize their participants' gender identities
based on their own perceptions and assumptions about participants' bodies. Female and maletend to be treated as homogenous categories, such that intersections with other aspects of identity are rarely considered, and White, middle‐class speakers are often treated as representative of
women and men in general. For determinists, gender differences in the voice are likely rooted inbiological difference rather than socially constructed, at least in the absence of strong evidence
to the contrary.
As we will see, trans voices can help shed light on the usefulness of these competing frameworks. Before getting to that point, a brief review of research on gender and the voice is necessary.

2.1 | Determinist perspectives on the voice
The tendency toward biological determinism in research on widely observed gender differencesin the voice is driven by the recognition that physiological differences between speakers canhave a strong effect on the kinds of voices they are able to produce. Although there are several
grounds on which to challenge the determinist view, this research forms a backdrop against
which trans voices can be understood and which trans voices are poised to challenge.
For linguists and non‐linguists alike, pitch is the most intuitive and salient gender differencein the voice. The primary acoustic measure that reflects a speaker's pitch is fundamental
frequency, or F0, which represents the speed at which the vocal folds vibrate. Vocal fold vibration speed depends in part on the mass of the folds, with larger vocal folds producing slower
vibration than smaller folds, resulting in a lower F0. This means that the F0 range a speaker
can produce is constrained by vocal fold size. The size of the larynx is highly sensitive to testosterone (e.g., Evans, Neave, Wakelin, & Hamilton, 2008), resulting in significant laryngeal
growth during typical male puberty (Hollien, Green, & Massey, 1994) or later in life for transpeople who take exogenous testosterone (Azul, 2015; Azul, Nygren, Södersten, &Neuschaefer‐Rube, 2016 for reviews). Among speakers of American English, average speaking
fundamental frequency is generally placed at around 100–120 Hz for men and 200–220 Hz for
women (Fitch & Holbrook, 1970; Linke, 1973; Simpson, 2009; Snidecor, 1951; Stoicheff, 1981;
Traunmüller & Eriksson, 1995). Determinist approaches tend to see differences in women's
and men's F0 as emanating directly, at times exclusively, from sex‐based differences in the sizeof the larynx (e.g., Ohala, 1984 for a particularly determinist account).

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Though less consciously salient to most speakers, vowel formant frequencies are anotherarea where women and men typically differ. Formant frequencies, which roughly map onto
the concept of vocal resonance, reflect the length of the vocal tract, with longer vocal tracts producing lower resonating frequencies. Because the size of the vocal tract is implicated in formant
frequencies, and because women tend to have higher formant frequencies than men, many linguists have supposed that body size is the best explanation for gender differences in formants.
However, others have found that height and weight make poor predictors when speakers of
the same sex are compared (e.g., Barreda, 2016; Gonzalez & Oliver, 2005), suggesting that theobserved physiological differences are driven not by body size but by an increase in the sizeof the pharynx that accompanies testosterone‐driven laryngeal growth.
The articulation of consonants has also been studied from a determinist perspective.
Recently, sibilant consonants have been a particularly popular area of study amongsociophoneticians interested in gender and sexuality. Studies of voiceless fricatives have drawn
connections between femininity and a fronted, high frequency /s/ in multiple languages, including English (e.g., Holmes‐Elliott & Levon, 2017; Levon, 2007; Munson, McDonald, DeBoe, &White, 2006; Stuart‐Smith, 2007; Zimman, 2015, 2017b), Danish (Pharao & Maegaard, 2017;
Pharao, Maegaard, Møller, & Kristiansen, 2014), Mandarin (Li, 2017), and Japanese (Heffernan,2004). Some studies have suggested that these patterns are rooted in sex differences in the front
part of the vocal tract, where /s/ is produced. Fuchs and Toda (2010), for instance, use articulatory measures to directly test whether women and men differ anatomically in ways that could
explain the observed gender differences in /s/ (i.e., in the palate or alveolar ridge). Despite a lackof statistically significant results, and despite finding more significant differences between
English and German speakers than between women and men in either population, the authors
stunningly conclude that both social and anatomical factors play a role in causing gender differences in /s/. Studies of gender differences in voice onset time1 suggest that women make a bigger contrast between voiced and voiceless stops (Robb, Gilbert & Lerman, 2005), which
Whiteside and Marshall (2001) have argued is linked to different phases in cisgender women's
hormonal cycles.2
Perhaps because we know individuals can do a great deal to alter their prosody, suprasegmental features like intonation, voice quality, duration, rhythm, and amplitude have less often
been attributed to physiological differences between the sexes and more often recognized as anelement of sociolinguistic style. However, there have been a few exceptions. One is the argument that women make greater use of breathy voice quality than men due to differences inairflow and/or vocal fold thickness (e.g., Klatt & Klatt, 1990). Another is the idea that womenmake use of a wider pitch range or more distinctive vowels because their voices are “naturally”
more difficult to hear or parse auditorily (e.g,. Diehl, Lindblom, Hoemeke, & Fahey, 1996; Ryalls& Lieberman, 1982; see also Henton, 1989 on the question of whether women's pitch range
exceeds men's).3 Notably, many differences reported between women's and men's voices areclosely linked to clear speech (Bradlow, Torretta, & Pisoni, 1996).
1

Voice onset time is a feature of stop consonants that represents the amount of time that passes between the release of
the stop and the start of vocal fold vibration. Voiceless stops have a longer voice onset time than voiced stops.

2

This supposition could be profitably tested with trans populations, which include both those male‐identified people whohave a cycle similar to cisgender women's as well as those male‐assigned individuals who make use of estrogen and/or
progesterone therapy, but without cycling in precisely the same way as cis women.

3Note the rather tortured logic here: women's voices are naturally harder to understand than men's, and that's why weobserve them producing speech that is easier to understand than men's.

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2.2 | Constructivist challenges
Despite the wealth of research promoting a determinist perspective on gender and the voice,there is considerable evidence to support a constructivist view. These can be summarized in
the following four lessons:
1 The lesson of linguistic diversity: Different languages and cultures index gender phoneticallyin different ways;
2 The lesson of socialization: Many gender differences in the voice are acquired in childhood;
3 The lesson of intersectionality: Members of the “same” culture and speakers of the “same”
language may index gender differently based on other identities they embody;
4 The lesson of agency: Speakers have the ability to consciously manipulate the genderedcharacteristics of their voices.
First, gender differences in the voice vary across languages and cultures, even when it comesto characteristics that clearly have some basis in physiology, such as F0. For example, Japanese‐
speaking women have been shown to make use of a higher F0 than American English‐speaking
women, while Japanese men use a lower F0 than their American counterparts (Loveday, 1981;
Yuasa, 2008). Although /s/ has been linked to gender in several languages, this connection is
not universal; Gordon, Barthmaier, and Sands (2002) compared seven unrelated languages,
most of them indigenous, and find gender differences in /s/ for only one (Chickasaw). And evenas certain voice qualities are linked to women or men among speakers of some varieties, theopposite association may exist in others. When linguists began studying creaky phonation in
English from a sociolinguistic perspective, it was men who were said to make the most use of
creak among British English speakers (Henton & Bladon, 1988), whereas in the United States
today, it is young women who are most strongly associated with creak.
Another strong piece of evidence for the constructivist approach is the existence of genderdifferences among prepubertal children. Such differences have been reported for F0 (Hasek,
Singh, & Murry, 1980; Ingrisano, Weismer, & Schuckers, 1980; Ferrand & Bloom, 1996) andfor formant frequencies (Busby & Plant, 1995; Lee, Potamianos, & Narayanan, 1999; Perry,
Ohde, & Ashmead, 2001). With Fitch and Giedd (1999) confirming that children's vocal tracts
do not significantly differ by sex before puberty, these differences are best explained as part ofthe language acquisition and socialization process. Lending further support to a constructivist
interpretation, Ferrand and Bloom (1996) also identify gender differences in intonation patterns
emerging at the same age that differences in mean F0 appear. Gender differences in /s/ appear
in childhood as well, as Flipsen, Shrilberg, Weismer, Karlsson, and McSweeny (1999) demonstrate, though they use their findings to posit a determinist interpretation in which unattested
anatomical differences in prepubescent children explain gender differences in /s/.
The concept of intersectionality recognizes that each aspect of a person's identity is necessarily inflected by their other identities, such that gender can never be examined alone but must be
understood as intersecting with age, class, race and ethnicity, and other elements of the self
(Crenshaw, 1989). This concept helps explain why even individuals who speak the samelanguage and identify with the same gender category may nevertheless index their genderdifferently. Evidence of intersectionality is especially plentiful in the case of gender differencesin /s/. Men who are gay, or perceived as gay by listeners, have been shown to produce a higher
frequency /s/ when compared to other men (Munson et al., 2006). Stuart‐Smith (2007) finds thatgender differences in /s/ intersect with class in Glasgow, with young working‐class women6 of 16ZIMMANproducing a low‐frequency /s/ comparable to adult men's /s/ productions, while middle‐classgirls patterned with adult women. Pharao et al. (2014) examine the intersection of sexuality
and immigration among speakers of Danish and show how ideologies about gay men as Whiteand Danish, and about immigrants as socially and sexually repressive, makes listeners less likely
to associate a fronted /s/ with gayness when they believe they are hearing an immigrant
speaker.
Finally, there is evidence that speakers may be able to exert control over at least some
aspects of the gendered voice. For instance, the fact that children can produce higher or lower
formant frequencies depending on their assigned gender suggests that they manipulate—i.e.,raise or lower—their larynxes in order to make their vocal tracts longer or shorter than theymight otherwise be. Evidence about adults' ability to exercise conscious control over genderdifferences in the voice comes primarily from studies of trans voices, which is the focus of thenext section.
Clearly, biology exerts an influence over the gendered voice, particularly when it comes tothe size of the larynx. However, even as a person's potential pitch range is constrained by their
vocal anatomy, sexual biology alone does not determine which part of that range a speaker willuse. There is plentiful evidence that gender differences in the voice are acquired early in life indifferent ways depending on the norms of a speaker's various communities and how they orient
themselves to those norms. However, as we shall see in the next section, there is also considerable evidence of flexibility beyond those early socialization experiences.

3 | RESEARCH ON TRANS VOIC ES
As the preceding discussion suggests, one of the primary concerns of scholars interested in thegendered voice is the determination of what role biology and socialization play in the production of phonetic gender differences. Differences are often thought to be rooted in biologicalsex, but gender normative cisgender speakers clearly engage in social practices that enhance
anatomical tendencies. Some of these practices may be acquired during childhood, or they
may be taken on in adolescence or adulthood as part of a speaker's identity work. However,
because all of these factors are typically aligned in the expected ways (i.e., female‐assigned bodies go with socialization as a girl and a female gender identity), it is difficult to pry these factors
apart. One of the great benefits of centering transgender speakers is that they are uniquely
poised to shed light on these questions. Trans bodies may (or may not) start out as normatively
female or male, but they are also often modified with hormones, surgery, and other technologies. Trans people typically receive gender socialization based on their assigned sex, but they
may or may not respond to that socialization in the normative way. And, of course, trans identities push back against the expectation that certain bodies, or certain socialization experiences,
will result in certain kinds of gender identities and expressions.
Before turning to the literature on trans voices, a note about disciplinarity is useful. The
majority of research on trans voices has been carried out by speech‐language pathologists, inlarge part because some trans people seek out speech therapy to change their voices. While thisliterature offers a number of useful insights, it also often reflects problematic ideologies abouttrans identity. As Zimman (2012a) describes in greater detail, the speech pathology literature
on gender and the voice tends to be determinist, assuming that gender differences are primarily
or exclusively biological in origin. This leads to an interpretation of trans women as having“male voices” and thus needing training to approximate the “naturally” feminine voices ofZIMMAN

7 of 16cisgender women. Discussions of trans men, by contrast, tend to emphasize the effects of testosterone on the larynx, leading to less research on this population among speech pathologists(though see Adler & Van Borsel, 2006). The literature speech pathologists typically use tocharacterize what a “female voice” or “male voice” should sound like is decidedly non‐intersectional, often relying on data taken from gender normative middle‐class White young people (ifrace, class, and gender normativity are even mentioned) and assuming trans people want toemulate these particular forms of femininity or masculinity. Though deeply problematic insome cases, this literature forms the largest body of knowledge produced on trans voices.
Happily, research in recent years has begun to show greater sensitivity to trans people's own
concerns and desires (e.g., Davies & Goldberg, 2006; Davies, Papp, & Antoni, 2015;
Azul et al., 2016).
The remainder of this section is organized around three core insights offered by the studyof trans voices. These include the identification of gender differences in the voice, the examination of their flexibility, and the consideration of their source in the body and/or social
practice.

3.1 | What are the features of the gendered voice?
One issue that is of great interest to both speech pathologists and linguists is the identificationof phonetic cues that distinguish voices perceived as female from voices perceived as male.
Pitch has been the focus of much of the research in this area, including attempts to identify
a crossover point—that is, the fundamental frequency at which voices stop being perceived as
female and begin being perceived as male or vice versa (Gelfer & Mikos, 2005; Gelfer & Schofield, 2000; Günzburger, 1995; Hancock, Colton, & Douglas, 2014; Spencer, 1988; Wolfe,
Ratusnik, Smith, & Northrop, 1990). Although some studies have identified the range of150–165 Hz as a potential crossover point for trans women (Spencer, 1988; Wolfe et al.,
1990; Gelfer & Schofield, 2000), there are notable exceptions. Günzburger (1995) reports thatcertain trans women in her study were perceived as female despite having F0 means as low as
119–128 Hz. Inversely, Gelfer and Schofield (2000) report that speakers may be perceived as
male even with an F0 as high as 181 Hz. These exceptional cases indicate that, despite thesalience of fundamental frequency, other features of the voice likely contribute to its perception as female or male.
Reporting on a longitudinal study of trans men and other trans masculine individuals,4Zimman (2017a) focuses on the importance of considering multiple phonetic features whencharacterizing the gendered voice. While F0 may be the easiest way to categorize a voice asfemale/feminine or male/masculine, the analysis of F0 together with /s/ in this piece underscores that the gendered features of the voice do not always bundle together in normative ways.
As is the case with sociolinguistic style more generally, speakers have the ability to combine andrecombine stylistic variables in ways that reflect and constitute their complex, intersectional
identities. Zimman (2012b, in prep.) describes a parallel perceptual experiment showing thattrans speakers' crossover points vary enormously, with some speakers perceived as female evenwith a mean F0 of 110 Hz and others perceived as male even with a mean F0 of 190 Hz. He findsthat both vowel formants and /s/ are significant predictors of how low a trans masculine
person's mean F0 has to be before their voice will be categorized as male.
4

That is, those who were assigned female at birth and self‐identify as masculine or male.

8 of 16ZIMMANThe acoustic properties of /s/ have been the focus of sociophonetic studies of trans voices aswell. In other work on /s/ among the same trans speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area
(Zimman, 2012a, 2017b) and with a larger set of speakers in Portland, Oregon (Zimman, underreview), the focus is variability in the production of /s/ and the argument that a finer‐grained
theory of gender is needed to distinguish not only gender and sex but also gender assignment(the category one is placed in at birth), gender identity (the category one aligns oneself with),gender role (one's socially recognized category), and gender presentation (how one displays gender semiotically). In studies by Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2016) and Hazenberg (2016), transwomen and trans men are placed on a continuum in relation to cisgender speakers to illustrate
a gender continuum. In contrast to the findings from Zimman's work in major, politically progressive cities with large queer and trans communities, these other researchers find that transspeakers produced /s/ in ways that were more consistently similar to others of the same gender
identity (i.e., trans women were similar to cis women and trans men to cis men). Podesva and
Van Hofwegen in particular link these findings to the relatively conservative, rural sociocultural
setting in which their speakers live. Ultimately, however, the trans women and men collectively
fell somewhere between cisgender women and men, illustrating the non‐binary nature of thegendered voice.
Prosodic features like intonation, rhythm, and voice quality are often strongly linked to gender in the popular imagination, though these associations are not always borne out in the
research. Wolfe et al. (1990) compared the frequency of upward, downward, and level
intonational contours among trans women, cis women, and cis men and found that transwomen who were perceived as female used a higher number of fluctuations in pitch than thoseperceived as male. Hancock et al. (2014) similarly conclude that trans women with a larger proportion of upward intonational contours and a larger pitch range were more likely to be perceived as female. This was true despite the fact that there was no gender difference in theintonation of the cisgender women and men recorded as control groups for the study.
Günzburger (1993) reports that trans feminine speakers who were asked to produce two typesof voices—one “female” and the other “male”—tended to read more slowly and at a lower
amplitude in their “female” voice. Gelfer and Schofield (2000) find no significant correlations
between perceived gender and types of intonational contours or formant frequencies, though
they do identify a non‐significant trend toward speakers perceived as women having a larger
pitch range than those perceived as men. Certain voice qualities have also been studied inrelation to trans voices. Becker, ud Dowla Khan, and Zimman's (2014, 2017) work on creaky
voice among speakers in Portland, Oregon, uses a stratified sample of young adults with avariety of gender identities. In keeping with other studies, they find that cisgender womenmake greater use of creaky voice than cisgender men. However, they also find certain transgender groups also make ample use of creak, particularly transgender men who were not on
testosterone (though see Zimman, 2012a, 2013 regarding creak among different sets of transmen on testosterone). Rather than offering a single meaning of creak as feminine or masculine, the authors suggest that different groups may be using creak as part of different strategies, such as accessing a lower pitch range in the case of trans men whose voices areotherwise relatively high pitched.
Attention to features of the gendered voice other than F0 pushes us to consider what wemean when we categorize a voice as “female” or “male.” We know that phonetic indexes ofgender are not limited to pitch, but trans people underscore the importance of the array offeatures that produce a gendered voice and complicate attempts to characterize voices asunambiguously gendered.

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3.2 | How flexible is the gendered voice?
Because so much of the research on trans voices is done by speech pathologists, trans speakers'
ability to change the gendered properties of their voices has been a major focus. Numerous articles by speech pathologists and practicing speech therapists have described individuals who
received vocal feminization therapy, either as explorations of how much change is possible oras evaluations of specific tools or techniques. It is clear that not all speakers experience the samekind of changes, with or without speech therapy, but such changes are demonstrably possible.
Mount and Salmon (1988) report an increase in mean F0 from 110 Hz to 210 Hz in a 63‐year‐
old trans woman. Gelfer and Tice (2013) find that the trans women in their study had a higher
mean F0 than the cis women used as controls immediately after undergoing vocal training,
though these changes levelled off in the long term, placing the trans speakers somewhere
between the cis women and cis men to whom they were compared. Despite the assumption
in older work that formant frequencies could not be altered because they are determined by
the length of the vocal tract (Coleman, 1983), several studies have shown that formants canbe changed by raising or lowering the larynx (Carew, Dacakis, & Oates, 2007; Davies & Goldberg, 2006; Gelfer, 1999). Carew et al. (2007) report that participants in their study significantly
raised the first three formants—F1, F2, and F3—and that most participants were rated by listeners as significantly more feminine after training that focused on resonance.
Research on changes in the voices of trans women tends to focus on the ways speech therapy
can assist in vocal feminization. Studies of change in trans men's voices, by contrast, tend to
focus on the marked lowering of pitch brought about by testosterone. Studies that track thesechanges consistently find that fundamental frequency lowers significantly during the firstyear(s) of testosterone therapy (Adler & Van Borsel, 2006; Cosyns et al., 2014; Damrose, 2009;
Nygren, Nordenskjöld, Arver, & Södersten, 2016; Papp, 2011; Van Borsel, De Cuypere, Rubens,& Destaerke, 2000; Zimman, 2012a). Here, too, studies often find variability in how much vocal
change occurs, but the general trend is for trans men to reach a pitch range comparable to thatof cisgender men (Cosyns et al., 2014; Nygren, et al., 2016). Physiology is generally thought tobe directly responsible for these changes, but some of these studies suggest that factors like age,sexuality, gender identity, and race or ethnicity should be investigated more thoroughly in order
to see how anatomical changes interact with social processes.
Changes in other gendered characteristics of the voice have been investigated less extensively among trans men. As an exception, Zimman's (2012a) longitudinal study documentschanges in /s/ among a few trans masculine speakers, with a much less consistent pattern thanthat found for F0: toward a higher frequency for some and lower frequency for others. The
former is explained in part through reference to speakers' metalinguistic commentary, in whichthose who adopted a higher frequency /s/ reported feeling less need to constrain their genderpresentation because physical changes had led others to perceive them as unambiguously male.
Speakers with a lower‐frequency /s/, on the other hand, may be influenced by new socialpressures or by ongoing shifts in gender identity or expression. In either case, speakers areclearly shifting their articulatory strategies as part of their transition. This need not be a conscious process, however; the trans masculine speakers in this study reported being completely
unaware of gender differences in /s/.
The question of malleability of gendered vocal characteristics is, of course, particularly interesting to speech therapists. For those of us who are not in fields that seek methods for changing
trans people's voices, however, these observations offer a form of evidence about the source ofgender differentiation, which is the focus of the next section.

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3.3 | Where do gender differences come from?
The fact that speakers can learn to alter the perceived gender of their voice—including featuresthat are known to be influenced by physiology like F0—undermines the assumption that vocal
anatomy is the direct, determining cause of gender differences in the voice. This question is notalways an explicit focus in research on trans voices, but such studies typically at least indirectly
shed light on the source of phonetic gender differentiation.
From the earliest days of language and gender research, feminist linguists have pointed togender socialization as the source of female and male voices (Brend, 1975; McConnell‐Ginet,
1983; Sachs, 1975). This idea was presented as an important alternative to biologicaldeterminism, but trans speakers demonstrate clearly that early life socialization cannot be
the only social force shaping the gendered voice. The identities that people come to occupy,
which may shift over time, must also be taken into consideration. Zimman (2017b, underreview) addresses the supposition that gender differences in /s/ are caused by some combination of sex‐based differences in the vocal anatomy (as in Flipsen et al., 1999; Fuchs & Toda,2010) and childhood gender socialization. Focusing on the diversity of /s/ productions
among trans masculine speakers, Zimman (2017b) argues that gender should be understoodas a constellation of elements, each of which must be considered separately. Gender identity
was a major explanatory factor for how high‐ or low‐frequency a speaker's /s/ would be,with speakers who identified as simply men producing a more normatively masculine /s/than those who identified specifically as trans men, who were more normative stillthan female‐assigned speakers who identified as genderqueer or non‐binary. Exceptions tothis trend can be explained in terms of gender expression (i.e., how gender is expressed outwardly), with more feminine trans men producing /s/ like those of the non‐binary speakers.
Similar patterns were presented in Zimman's (under review) comparison of trans women,trans men, and non‐binary individuals, with the additional factor of gender role and history
emerging due to the inclusion of a few trans women with quite low frequency /s/ who had
spent their adult lives presenting as gender normative straight men before coming to identify
as women.
Trans voices also highlight the importance of social stereotypes and language ideologies inshaping gender differences in the voice. Regardless of whether women actually make more
use of high rising terminal than men, for instance, the fact that this intonational contour isassociated with femininity may be enough for listeners to use it as a cue for gendering a voice,particularly if its gender is otherwise ambiguous. Hancock et al. (2014) offer a particularly
strong example of this phenomenon by showing that trans women who use more rising intonation were more likely to be perceived as women even though the cisgender women in the study
did not actually make more use of this contour than the cisgender men. Hazenberg's (2012)
examination of high rising terminal among Canadian trans people similarly shows that whileboth trans women and men may hold negative attitudes toward rising intonation on non‐questions, its association with femininity gives it a potentially positive function for trans women.
Zimman (2016) also considers how trans men's ideologies about the voice—and specificallytheir agency over their own voices—shapes the phonetic styles they acquire. Like speech therapists, trans masculine speakers on testosterone tend to put emphasis on the physiologicalchanges they undergo and may even stigmatize the process of consciously trying to sound moremasculine. This leads many trans men who take testosterone to pay little attention to genderedelements of the voice other than pitch, even as trans women often become highly attuned to resonance, voice quality, and segments like /s/.

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As trans men's changing bodies emphasize particularly clearly, sexual physiology itself ismore fluid than most discussions of biological sex would suggest (see also Zimman, 2014).
Transgender people are able to radically alter their bodies, suggesting that the biological basis
for assigning a voice a sex may be more tenuous than ordinarily thought. But it is important
to note that cisgender people, too, undergo profound bodily change throughout their lifetimes.
This is true in puberty, as well as during the aging process, and is further reflected in choices
individuals make about hormonal birth control; hormone replacement therapy after menopause
or to treat the new diagnosis of “low T” (low testosterone) in older men; and even pregnancy
and exercise. Social practices influence our bodies: certain behaviors are known to change
individuals' testosterone levels (Bernhardt, Dabbs Jr, Fielden, & Lutter, 1998) and menstrual
cycles are well known to be influenced by others' cycles. To the extent the body shapes vocal
production, all of these changes have the potential to bring about changes in the voice as well.
This body of work underscores one of the greatest insights to be gained from studying transvoices. When physiology, socialization experiences, and gender identity are all the same, it isdifficult to tease apart the influence of each of these factors and easy to reinforce biologicaldeterminism that is frequently used to delegitimize trans identities. With trans people, however,it becomes possible to test our hypotheses about potential links between anatomy and the voice,as well as the strength of those links. It is of great importance, then, that researchers carefully
distinguish between different aspects of sex and gender rather than collapsing them into moreintuitive, less reflexive categories—even where cisgender speakers are concerned (as inZimman, 2013).

4 | CONCLUSION
Gender differences in the voice are a linchpin of much phonetic and sociolinguistic research.
Although a great deal has been written about the phonetics of gender, there remains much that
we do not yet know. The linguistic study of trans voices not only serves to correct the historicalexclusion of a marginalized community of speakers but also offers new and unique insights thatwould be more difficult to discover, if not impossible, through the study of more gender normative populations. Trans speakers reveal how many unchecked assumptions have been woven
into the accepted wisdom about how and why women's and men's voices differ. This researchshould motivate us to be more skeptical of claims about gender and the voice, particularly when
they take a determinist perspective.
Trans people emphasize that the body matters, but that its matter is far more complex thantends to be imagined when the focus is on cisgender people. It is insufficient to say that one's
larynx directly determines the gender of the voice because speakers generally use only a small
range of the voices they are able to produce. With the incorporation of trans voices, bodily
sex remains important but can no longer be seen as static, asocial, homogenous, or deterministic. The lessons offered by trans speakers are rarely particular to trans people; they reveal muchabout how the construction of the voice proceeds, making it crucial to incorporate lessons fromtrans voices into our studies of cisgender women and men as well.
Trans voices should push us to reconsider the very concept of the gendered voice. In light of theevidence discussed here, what does it mean to have a “female voice” or a “male voice”? Does itmean expressing all elements of the voice in accordance with norms for a particular gender category? If so, this would suggest that not all cis women have female voices and not all cis men havemale voices. If not, which precise characteristics determine the gendering of a voice, and where is12 of 16

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the boundary between the possible categories? If F0 must be at a certain level, for instance, do prepubescent boys have female voices? In practice, “(fe)male voice” is used as shorthand for “the voiceof a person deemed to be (fe)male”—a circular description of questionable usefulness that rests on
researchers' assumptions about their speakers. To the extent we accept that gender is not a simple,
natural binary, we must also recognize that the gendered voice is complex, multidimensional, andsocially constructed. With rapidly increasing engagement with trans voices among sociocultural
linguists, future research promises not only more inclusive and culturally sensitive treatment oftrans voices but also new answers to key questions in our field.
ORCID
Lal Zimman

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3961-1357

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Lal Zimman is an assistant professor of Linguistics and affiliated faculty in Feminist Studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also general editor of Oxford University
Press's Series in Language, Gender, and Sexuality. His research is broadly focused on the linguistic practices of transgender speakers, in which he employs a range of qualitative andquantitative methodologies. He has published on the homonormativity of the coming out
narrative genre (Gender & Language, 2009), the construction of biological sex in trans men's
use of gendered body part terminology (Queer Excursions, 2014, Oxford; Journal of Homosexuality, 2014), the complex role of embodiment in the acoustic characteristics of the voice(Language in Society, 2017; Linguistics 2017), and trans language activism (Journal of Language and Discrimination, 2017). In 2014, he published a co‐edited volume, Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality with Oxford University Press.

How to cite this article: Zimman L. Transgender voices: Insights on identity,
embodiment, and the gender of the voice. Lang Linguist Compass. 2018;e12284. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12284