According to Nytimes news. In her 30s, Sophie Marat, now 42, used to record herself reading poetry aloud, then play it back to hear if she sounded like a woman. Ms. Marat, who is transgender, had spent years trying to remake her voice in private by speaking in a higher pitch but ultimately felt that her efforts were hopeless.
“I was feeling like changing my voice to match my gender identity was almost impossible,” she said. “It was terrible.”
Ms. Marat’s transition from male to female has been a gradual evolution. She had come out to friends and family back home in Mexico, then began to wear skirts to work as a software engineer in Manhattan. Still, her confidence would falter with everyday tasks like ordering takeout. “It was really painful to speak on the phone,” she said, “because they would reply, ‘O.K., sir.’”
That was before she started her weekly sessions with a voice therapist at New York University’s speech-language-hearing clinic, one of a growing number of programs that cater to transgender clients seeking to retrain their voices.
Just as some transgender women and men choose to take hormones or have surgery, or choose neither, some seek to feminize or masculinize their voices. Many say they want a voice that matches their appearance or that the change allows them to escape unwanted attention. There’s also a growing recognition among health professionals who have transgender patients that altering one’s voice can improve quality of life and reduce distress.
“This isn’t just a sidebar,” said Sandy Hirsch, a Seattle-based speech language pathologist who was a co-author of the pioneering textbook on transgender voice and communication therapy. “It’s an integral part of care for transgender people as they transition.”
Transgender men who take testosterone permanently thicken their vocal folds, which tends to deepen the pitch of their voice. But transgender women who take hormones — a mix of estrogen and androgen-reducing drugs, for example — typically hear no change in their voices. As a result, transgender women are more likely to work with voice therapists, though transgender men can benefit as well, as some struggle with pitch instability and voice fatigue.
A lot of what transgender women learn in voice therapy is how to safely use their vocal anatomy to create a higher pitch and oral resonance without straining, so their new voices are ultimately sustainable. “We’re asking them to do an Olympic athletic feat,” said Heather Krug, who has worked with transgender clients for four years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “If they are going to get pitch into a feminine range, they need to have nicely conditioned vocal cords so they don’t get injuries.”
Feminizing a voice, however, involves far more than just achieving a consistently higher pitch. Perhaps the most critical, experts say, is a quality called “forward resonance,” in which a speaker feels vibrations closer to the front of the vocal tract, toward the nose and lips.
Research has shown that “a higher pitch and more forward oral resonance corresponds to a voice consistently perceived as female,” said Adrienne B. Hancock, an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at George Washington University.
Unlike pitch, which can be readily measured using phone apps, such as Pitch Perfect, resonance can’t be objectively pinpointed. “You need a human ear,” and the speaker has to learn to feel the difference, Dr. Hancock said.
While do-it-yourself YouTube videos from transgender women are available, sessions with a voice specialist can improve forward resonance and soften an elevated pitch, so someone doesn’t sound like Minnie Mouse, Dr. Hancock said.
Another voice quality to consider is intonation. While men tend to speak in a monotone fashion, women generally have more highs and lows, something Ms. Marat mastered during about a year of group and one-on-one lessons and practice at N.Y.U.
Her fundamental pitch is consistently elevated in the feminine range at about 185 hertz, up from 147 hertz. Still, if Ms. Marat speaks for too long, she gets out of breath, and she feels she speaks too softly.
On Tuesdays, Ms. Marat works with Sam Jaffe, a graduate student at N.Y.U., to get her vocal cords into better shape so she can raise her pitch and volume to where she wants it without becoming breathless. “Voice modification therapy is kind of analogous to going to the gym for your voice,” Mr. Jaffe explained.
But while therapists help clients gain technical skill, it’s up to each patient to “own” his or her new voice and figure out what sounds right for them, said Leah Helou, the director of the transgender voice program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“It’s not my job to make someone into an image of a lady as I see fit,” Dr. Helou said. “The danger when they come to me is they think, ‘She’s going to tell me what I need to do to pass.’”
Speech and language therapists have been working with transgender clients as far back as the ’70s, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the first textbook was published. In the past decade, the number of speech pathologists and voice clinicians learning to work with transgender clients has grown exponentially.
This April, Ms. Hirsch, Dr. Helou and Christie Block, a speech language pathologist in Manhattan, joined forces to expand a two-day training program for voice therapists interested in transgender work. The weekend workshop, which started in 2007 with 25 voice therapists, has grown to roughly 85 clinicians this year, Ms. Hirsch said, with roughly half participating via webinar.
A Facebook group for speech language therapists and other professionals to discuss transgender care now has about 100 clinicians in the referral database from the United States and about 50 more from abroad, according to Dr. Helou, one of the moderators. Roughly 60 began working with transgender clients only in the last five years.
Speech language pathologists are also seeing a growing number of transgender people in their 20s and 30s, and even adolescents.
In 2012, when Cynthia Simonetti, a speech language pathologist, became an instructor at the University of New Mexico, most patients were older, many on the verge of retirement from their jobs. “They were at a point in their lives where they just felt they needed to be true to themselves,” she said. But now, she’s as apt to see new college graduates.
Since 2015, Northwestern University and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago have held a coed voice training session exclusively for transgender adolescents and young adults.
Posters advertising the group on campus proclaim, “Be heard for who you are!” The age cutoff is 24, and so far, the youngest participant was 12, said Nathan Waller, a group supervisor and a clinical instructor in Northwestern’s department of communication sciences and disorders. For most, “they are the only trans kid in their school,” he said, so “we make it casual and provide information and practice.”
Voice modification can take six to 12 months or longer, with home practice required to achieve the stamina needed for sustaining a new voice throughout a tête-à-tête conversation or a work presentation.
Darlene Monda, the clinic supervisor who started the N.Y.U. group three years ago, said some participants haven’t told their friends they’re transgender yet or started the process of physical transition. But “they want to start working on their voice, so when the time comes, they are ready to transition and have this piece underway,” she said.
Others are already out, she said, and they “don’t want to present visually female, open their mouths, and have people staring at them, like ‘You’re not really a woman.
Source: nytimes
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