Everyone wants to find their own voice. Trans people are no different
The voice is just another form of expression like hair, makeup or clothes
This column is an opinion by Renée Yoxon, a gender-affirming voice coach in Montreal's Parc-Extension neighbourhood. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
When I tell people what I do for a living, I always get the same reaction: "I had no idea that that was a thing!"
I work as a gender-affirming voice teacher. I help people modify their speaking voice to better align with their gender presentation. My services are usually, but not exclusively, sought out by transgender people.
Many people think of the voice as something rigidly biological — something that you're born with.
But if you measured biological components of voices (like vocal tract size or vocal fold mass) from any population, you would see two overlapping peaks. One peak would include the average experience of those who have undergone a testosterone puberty in their adolescence, with those who have not largely falling under the other peak.
Sounds complicated, right? It would be easier to say, "men have one type of voice and women have another," but like many other human traits, that doesn't reflect the biological reality of the world we live in.
Vast vocal potential
First, there are lots of people who will be on the tails or sit between those peaks, or who will have one characteristic under one peak and one under the other. And second, the way we use our voice is a highly learned behaviour.
We tend to pick the vocal traits and characteristics of those around us. Accents are an obvious example of this. No matter where your parents are from, if you grow up in Ireland, you will very likely develop an Irish accent. Accents are acquired. We can observe this in adulthood when a person might travel abroad and return home with a slight hint of the local accent.
In my work, I call the voice that you learned in infancy your "habituated voice."
Because using your voice is a learned behaviour, it has a large potential to shift and change throughout your life. You can actually observe this within yourself over the course of a single day: you likely wake up with one voice and then change it as you talk to your pet, your boss, your child, your best friend; or as you go through different emotions. Think about the way your voice changes when you express sadness, surprise or anger.
All of these natural alterations reflect the vast vocal potential that already exists inside you. You may not know this, but you do have a choice when it comes to your speaking voice.
WATCH | How to adjust your speaking voice:
My goal as a gender-affirming voice teacher is to reframe the voice as simply another mode of expression, like hair, makeup and clothes. While there is still much stigma around unmitigated gender expression through hair, makeup and clothing — especially when a person is using these to express femininity when femininity is not expected — the modification of voice carries a particularly unexamined stigma.
There is a persistent belief that the habituated voice (the voice acquired in childhood) is a person's real voice, and anything else is fake. However, it is my belief that it is not inauthentic to re-habituate your voice for any reason. One of the privileges of autonomy and personhood is that you should be able to choose your clothing, your hair, your makeup — and your voice.
I've come across a wide variety of reasons why a person might want to modify their speaking voice. For a lot of trans people, the voice is a source of persistent gender dysphoria. Learning to speak in a new way can alleviate the distress that can come from speaking with a voice that does not feel like your own. There are also trans people who are happy with their speaking voice the way it is but decide to learn to speak differently in certain situations where their voice might compromise their safety.
I've also met cisgender people (people who continue to identify as the gender they were assigned at birth) who are happy with their voice but decide to learn to speak differently so that they can feel safer in certain situations, for example, a gay man with an acquired "gay accent" who lives in a country with anti-gay legislation. And there are cisgender people who feel their voice doesn't align adequately with their gender presentation: cis men who want to sound more masculine and cis women who want to sound more feminine.
I've taught cisgender women who want to sound more masculine so they will be taken more seriously in their jobs. I've taught cis and trans folks of all genders who want to speak more loudly, more softly, more clearly, more slowly, more quickly — or any combination of these characteristics.
The list is truly endless because each individual contains a world of vocal possibility and the creative choices for expression are vast. Voice is one of the primary ways that we express ourselves; how we speak tells the world who we are. Voice work is an essential education for all of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
