Get you up to speed: ‘Trans voice therapy allowed my dad to finally hear the real me’ | News World

What remains unclear — It is not specified how many trans individuals in the UK are currently on waiting lists for voice and communication therapy through NHS services.

Trans voice therapy helps individual connect authentically with their father

Trans dysphoria is the mental and emotional anguish caused by your voice and gender identity not aligning (Picture: WTX/Getty Images)

Opal always hated the sound of her voice. Speaking on the phone, hailing a cab or ordering a drink – all of it was nerve-wracking.

But there was just one person that she wanted to hear her after coming out as trans – her father, who was suffering from hearing loss.

So Opal spent weeks doing vocal warm-ups, reading menus aloud and speaking in character voices to move her pitch to a range he could hear.

‘To be able to talk to my dad, in public, and not have to choose between being heard and being gendered correctly?

‘That made all the practice it took to get a voice I love worth it,’ she tells WTX.

Opal did this by undergoing trans voice training five years ago. Sometimes called speech therapy, it’s a non-surgical way for a trans person to fine-tune their voice via vocal exercises.

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Trans people say the therapy helped their voice align with their gender identity (Picture: Getty Images)

It’s similar to vocal training, used to treat stuttering, muscle tension and throat cancer recovery.

Opal is now a coach at the trans voice coaching and training service that supported her, Undead Voice.

Around 85% of trans people suffer from voice dysphoria, according to the company.

The condition is the discomfort felt when your voice doesn’t sync with your gender identity, explains Undead Voice founder Nicole Gress.

‘You have to use your voice every day to build connection, to be understood, to exist in the world,’ the speech-language pathologist adds.

‘Someone might be in a conversation trying to stay present, while also thinking, “How do I sound right now? What are they hearing?”’

In the UK, NHS gender-affirming healthcare services may offer voice and communication therapy, but waiting lists can stretch years.

Private surgeries that can make voices sound more feminine, such as vocal tract surgery, meanwhile, cost thousands of pounds.

Only 7% of trans people in the US have access to voice training, with health insurance rarely covering it.

What does trans speech therapy involve?

Gress, who lives in San Francisco, California, says their programme focuses on the ‘five pillars of voice transition’:

Weight, how booming our voice is.
Tilt, the emotional tone, from anger and sadness to joy and empathy.
Resonance, the ‘level of brightness and darkness in your tone’, as Undead Voice puts it to avoid gendered words.
Pitch, how high or low our voice feels.
Dynamics, making the voice ‘unique’.

‘I lost the “me” in my voice’

But these don’t work for everyone, as Undead Voice patient Rosalie discovered.

A lot of her hobbies involve speaking, like singing or the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

And her job, too. As a scheduler, she makes 100 phone calls a day to people who sometimes assume she’s a man.

‘Being misgendered on the phone over and over was truly soul-crushing,’ Rosalie tells WTX.

At the time, she was undergoing hormone replacement therapy, which involved taking oestrogen to develop feminine physical traits, like breasts.

Very few trans Americans have access to speech training (Picture: Getty Images)

The hormone, however, has little impact on how people sound.

Rosalie tried to copy how trans YouTubers talk, only to find she lost the ‘me’ in her voice.

But it was also YouTube where Rosalie found Undead Voice.

‘Now almost everyone tends to assume I’m a cis woman – even folks in the trans community,’ she says.

‘I find I have to drop my voice sometimes and let them know, “Hey no, it’s ok – I’m trans, too!”‘

‘Voices don’t have gender, people do’

The sound of our voice is created by cords vibrating in our throats, which can evolve over the course of a lifetime and can also be impacted by our body, upbringing and culture.

As we know, hormones make voices drop during puberty, as does menopause, while we talk higher or lower depending on if we’re chatting to a friend or a boss.

Some trans patients worried that, because of their voice, they wouldn’t ‘pass’, or be perceived as their true gender (Picture: Getty Images North America)

‘Voices don’t have gender, people do,’ says Nicole.

‘What we perceive as gender in a voice comes from a set of cues that we’ve been trained to interpret in certain ways.’

What Opal and Rosalie changed is what voice trainers call a ‘reflexive’ voice – the sound that comes out naturally when you speak.

Through training, they formed a different voice that, over time, became their reflexive one. However, as voice coaching doesn’t surgically alter the vocal cords, trans people can switch between their ‘dead voice’ – how they used to sound – and their new one.

For Daneilla, another trans woman, undergoing speech training meant realising that her previous voice wasn’t a ‘defect’.

Her hormone replacement therapy provider emailed her to say it was offering treatment with Undead Voice.

‘I’ve been on HRT long enough now that I really don’t see the prior person anymore,’ Daniella says.

‘So getting my voice to align with what I feel on the inside – and now see on the outside – has helped create a sense of near completion in my transition journey.’

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