Finding My Voice, Literally
By: Amy J. Ko
Tags: Self, LGBTQ, Voices, Transgender, Identity

Finding My Voice, Literally

As a trans woman it’s taken work to change my voice, but becoming myself is worth it

Photo: LaylaBird/Getty Images

I’ve never liked my voice. As a child, when I heard myself in recordings, I’d think I sounded like I was trying to be someone I wasn’t (partly because I was). When my voice broke at puberty, I came to detest it even more. The deeper it got, the more I felt like my voice was an unfaithful facsimile — it identified me, but it also misrepresented me. It was too deep. It was full of masculine affectations that I’d absorbed from other people to fit in. It was full of eagerness for acceptance, masking fear and insecurity. In so many ways, it felt inauthentic, forced, and fragile.

In adulthood, I stopped paying attention to what I hated about my voice, and started paying attention to how to use it. I learned that volume, silence, intonation, and tone were powerful channels for non-verbal communication. As a teacher and speaker, I learned to stimulate curiosity with pauses, to create confidence with baritone, and to get attention with projection. My voice, as much as I hated it, became a tool to command audiences, to demonstrate listening, and to pretend to be a man. It was still inauthentic, forced, and fragile, but in a useful way.

Maybe changing my voice isn’t really about changing anything, it’s about choosing.

Because of my tenuous relationship with my voice, nothing scared me more about coming out as trans than transitioning my voice. My mind raced with questions every day. Should I change my voice? Can I change my voice? If I don’t, will people be distracted by the disconnect between my visual presentation and my spoken one? If I do, will people recognize me? Will I recognize myself? Will it be a good voice? Will it out me? Will I lose my ability to give a great talk? Will I lose authority because of sexist gender norms about pitch and authority? And if I do change my voice, how do I change it, given the impossible triple bind of sounding like a woman, but avoiding both vocal fry and upturn? And my wife loves my voice; if I change it, will she stop loving me?

For a time, I thought maybe my desire to change my voice was just about not standing out. I contemplated keeping my male voice, and adopting a more genderqueer presentation. But every time I thought about this, not only did it not feel like me (I want my ideas to stand out, not me), but it also made me remember how false my male voice was to begin with. It made me wonder how false everyone’s voices are: part biology, part social construction, and always evolving in response to the words, phrases, tone, and pitch of the people around us. Maybe changing my voice isn’t really about changing anything, it’s about choosing.

Voices are malleable, much like how a swimmer’s stroke or a runner’s run is malleable.

Of course, choosing is easier than it sounds. Vocal cord surgeries can only affect pitch, which is actually a small part of how people gender voices. Most of how we perceive gender in voices comes from other things: intonation, resonance, enunciation, rhythm, accent, word choice, and even topic. These are things we rarely notice when we’re talking, and that we pick up from the people around us throughout our entire lives. Because I was conditioned to behave and present like a boy for most of my life, I picked up most of the speech patterns of boys and men; learning to speak like a woman just means learning new speech patterns.

Of course, I didn’t know a lot about this before I decided to choose my voice. The internet taught me a little (mostly bad advice), but I learned some stunning things from my wonderful vocal therapist Rebecca von Duering at Kaiser Permanente. First, voices are malleable, much like how a swimmer’s stroke or a runner’s run is malleable. I hadn’t thought about my voice as a group of muscles that could be trained, conditioned, and coordinated in new ways, but they are. Second, she taught me that the gendered aspect of our voices is just as much about what we say as how we say it. It’s horribly sexist, but in Western countries people read hesitation, uncertainty, and inquisitive upturns as female. Rebecca told me unequivocally that these were norms I didn’t have to follow, but that learning them would empower me to choose when or if to follow them.

For about six months, I visited Rebecca weekly, learning to retrain my muscles and mind. I strengthened my ability to speak with resonance from my face, rather than my chest. I learned new ways of structuring my mouth and positioning my tongue to limit how much I use the lower, deeper end of my vocal chords. I learned new patterns of intonation, accent, and rhythm. I’d practice in therapy, and by myself at home. I felt more fake than I ever had using my male voice, which was dispiriting. But I learned to think about my practice more like an actor learning a new accent, soon to be performed on camera during a 40-day shoot. It didn’t feel like my voice yet, but it felt like a voice, and one I was creating for myself.

More than anything, I learned to use my voice with agency. I remember sitting in a Kaiser waiting area for a voice appointment one morning. I was eating a breakfast sandwich, reading email, and a young man walked up to me and sat down a little too close. He said some silly pick up line, and I looked at him, my mouth full of eggs and bread, and pointed. He said, “Take your time little lady, you can talk to me.” While I chewed, I asked myself: What voice do I want right now? One that invites more attention or one that scares him away? I blurted out in my most masculine voice, “Can I help you?” He jumped back, eyes wide, and said, “Wait, you a dude?” to which I replied, “Not really.” Rather than feeling dysphoric, I felt powerful. I can scare away male attention when I need to (at least in the safety of a medical clinic surrounded by security guards), and then immediately switch back to my preferred voice.

Since coming out, my feelings about my voice have changed. Rather than hiding my practice, and feeling fake, I want to use my new voice. Every day, all the time. Like any other physical skill, it started off feeling very effortful, forced, and unreliable. But after six weeks of practice in everyday life, it feels less like practice and more like it’s just my voice. I don’t love it yet, and I really have no idea how it’s being gendered by other people, but I don’t have to think about it before I start speaking, and most of the time I don’t feel like I’m faking or forcing anything. And as much as I occasionally hear elements of my old voice, I feel the muscle memory for it slipping away.

I just have a new way of using old parts.

My new voice still fails me regularly. After a long day of talking, or sinus troubles, or dehydration, my voice gets rougher, deeper, hoarser. And sometimes, even when my voice is great, I can hear my old voice in my speech. These moments trigger a lot of dysphoria, because it brings back memories of the voice I used to have, and how hard I worked to hide behind it. But in some ways, I recognize that this is how all womens’ voices are: occasionally more masculine, occasionally overused, and occasionally a horrible mess from a cold or flu. My voice needs care and attention to be healthy and ready for use, just like my old voice did, and just like anyone else’s. I just have a new way of using old parts.

And despite a lot of progress, I still feel like I’m at the beginning, especially professionally. I’ve begun to notice how many of the women in my professional life, perhaps unknowingly, force their pitch downward, trying to claim some of the unearned authority that comes with a deeper voice. I think about the same strange games women in politics have to play with their voices to be read as authoritative, but still feminine, lest they be labeled angry or bitchy. I realize that as soon as I feel confident and consistent about using my new voice every day, I’ll have to start learning a new set of rules about how to use my voice effectively as a teacher, a speaker, a collaborator, and a leader in a gendered, sexist world.

For now though, I’m going to keep working on resonance, avoiding dark vowels, and replacing the old voice in my head with my new one. And every day, rather than feeling like I’m finding my voice, I feel like I’m choosing it.