Was just casually checking out some videos from this voice coach lady… when suddenly I find out she’s trans too! Kinda makes me feel inspired, with progress like that.
Zheanna is great. For anyone looking to get started her voice feminization for absolute beginners video is great. For anyone just getting started my biggest recommendation would be don’t try to make a fem voice with these exercises, just try to hit the individual targets. And whatever you do, DON’T STRAIN!
Further reminders. Stop drinking caffeine, alcohol, smoking and remember to drink water.
Wait, why no caffeine or alcohol? I thought only smoking harmed your voice?
I don’t know about caffeine (though it will dehydrate you), but everything you swallow touches the muscles involved in speaking, and I know when I’ve been drinking my voice gets hoarse as heck. When I used to drink heavily I called my mother once and she asked if I’d started smoking.
This is really cool stuff. I never knew how amazing the human body and mind is when discipline meets consistency.
This woman sounds like she was never born a man; her dead-voice is very masculine and her new voice is very impressive.
She wasn’t born a man. Trans women don’t “become” women. They stop hiding the fact they are
She was assigned male at birth, but whether she was born a man or a woman or neither is something only she can say.
Both “biological sex” and “legal gender” are considerably more nebulous than you’re assuming.
Let’s say you define “biological sex” by genotype, seems unambiguous enough, right? It’s a pretty good bet someone is 46,XX or 46,XY based on sex assigned at birth, but generally people don’t actually know for sure.
Likewise, in many jurisdictions, you don’t have a legal gender, you have a collection of gender markers. Ironically, trans people are often the only people who actually have an explicit declaration of their gender by a court or other legal mechanism. For cis people, the fact that it’s a fractured mess generally doesn’t matter.
So, this take is based entirely on thinking that a person is their body, rather than their brain. Cut off a person’s arm, and they’re still the same person. Cut out part of someone’s brain and they’re not.
Some people have poor eyesight, and we have ways to fix that. Some people have curved spines, and we have ways to fix that. Some peoples’ bodies develop the wrong genitals, which leads to developing with the wrong hormones, and we have ways to fix that.
People like BaroqueInMind are body focused: they think the person is what they can visibly see, not who they are inside, and I think that’s just the result of a society that stigmatizes caring about mental health, but also a limitation of the human experience: we can’t tell what’s going on inside someone’s mind, all we can see is how they present on the outside, and most people don’t have the tools required to think about people any other way.
To break it down though, if you took me and a friend, and put our brains in each-other’s bodies, which one would be me? My old body with my friend’s brain, or my friend’s body with my brain? To me, I am my mind, and to people like BaroqueInMind, I am my body. It should be easy to convince them otherwise, but people can be very stubborn when their beliefs are challenged.
Why are you entering the LGBTQ community and challenging a queer person? Your post is six words long. This doesn’t garner a discussion. This shows no understanding of what modern science thinks. You’re responding to everyone asserting a statement which is frequently used by transphobic individuals. Why are you here? What do you wish to accomplish?
Different people use different words about their transition, and I think you’re imposing your own experience onto others. To say that trans women categorically weren’t men in the past totally invalidates how I have always described my transition. I don’t share your experience, and I don’t describe my past self the way you seem to think I should.
I was comfortable with my gender, and I don’t think it was invalid for me to have identified as a boy. That’s not who I am now, but that doesn’t invalidate my identity for the first 16 years of my life. And I think if speaking, behaving, or filling the social role of a male doesn’t make it valid to say that I used to be a boy, then that feels invalidating to everything I thought made me a woman. :/
But I think all of this is heavily philosophical and subjective, so I’m not saying your feelings are wrong either. But to say that the only way for trans people to be is the way you perceive them to be is not just silly, it runs the risk of invalidating everyone else who doesn’t share your feelings on the matter. Our identities are our own to express, not yours.
Different people use different words about their transition, and I think you’re imposing your own experience onto others.
If a gender diverse person tells me that their gender changed, then their gender changed.
If a cis person is assuming that a person’s gender has changed just because they transitioned, I’m going to correct them, because when held in ignorance, that’s a position that is generally based on harmful ideas about the trans experience. And if they’re interested in discussing it further, we can have a discussion of the nuance of how it all works.
Letting a cis person assume that all trans people’s gender changes when they transition does more harm than good IMO.
But to say that the only way for trans people to be is the way you perceive them to be
I am quite explicitly not saying this. If your gender changed, it changed :)
Wait, you were looking for voice coaching from someone you thought was a cis woman?
Is that a thing?
Yes? Lol, I’m a little perplexed that you’re perplexed by that?
But I guess it’s a little niche. And not specifically focused for transition. I’m not surprised at all that she’s a musician because my own vocal training was also in the context of music. But I used that training extensively outside of my singing (and still do).
It’s funny because my vocal coach used to absolutely harangue me about deepening my voice. But as a female presenting person in the business world (in the 90s), that was necessary for survival. And I was deeply uncomfortable with my feminine sounding voice when I was younger. I’ve grown to accept it more now, although I still lower and project my voice at work or in other situations where I need to make myself be taken seriously.
That vocal training also allowed me to selectively “turn off” my native Appalachian accent - another thing that gets you nowhere in a lot of professional settings. But I slip back into it when I’m really tired or when I’m talking to my dad lol
my own vocal training was also in the context of music
Is this where I admit that I forgot that is a thing? :)
I’d like to throw in there that vocal training is a large part of acting training as well. I took classes like this. In fact in one we spent the whole first semester doing a little stretching routine, laying on the floor and then “moaning” or vocalizing for about an hour. (In the follow up class we started working on words, phonetics, and speaking) The whole idea is that much like how we are trained and ingrained with behaviors from society, so too is our voice a history of expectations, trauma, ect. Simply the way we hold tension in our bodies we cut off certain parts from vibrating and this results in different sounds. By vocalizing openly we found our unimpeded resonant frequency so that we could unlearn our lifetime of habits (this also includes social habits that effect how we sound and connect with another-- e.g. not holding your breath in preparation to speak something you are planning to respond when someone else is talking, it opens you up to listen, or tension from being told to sit up straight as a kid) and physical trauma. Only then could we see all the possibilities so we could make choices about how we wanted our voice to be. Everyone sounded different after that class. Sometimes really intense emotions trauma and otherwise would be released as parts of ones body finally let go. I remember just bursting out laughing in the middle one day, and there were several days I cried. It was the most centering class I’ve ever taken. And after that I liked my voice, I liked feeling it in my body, like a friend giving a vibrating hug
If anyone is further interested theres a fantastic book we read called “The Right to Speak: Working with the Voice” By Patsy Rodenburg that talks in great detail about these ingrained vocal habits
I know you got your answer but speech training is also useful for people who do a lot of public speaking. It’s not all about pitch (or resonance), a lot of these lessons could benefit everyone.
Also why my (Canadian) health insurance doesn’t cover any gender affirming care, but it does cover speech therapy.
Remember when chapo trap house Lemmy banned trans people from the instance for being transphobic for not aligning with their narrow view of what it is to be trans?
I do.
I’m not sure whether that was meta commentary on my reply, or a reply to the wrong person, but either way, I’m not sure I understand how it connects to my comment
Hexbear blew itself up for rejecting elements of our own community. I think its worth meditating on the result of expecting others to have the same views as you about living trans.
Let’s be nice to each other and be supporting of the experience whether we see cishet woman for voice or choose not to.
We have to fight transphobia ever day. But, please, not against each other.
This is fascinating. I’m cishet and still stupid, but I had no idea what kind of work went into changing your voice. I mean, I still mostly don’t, since all of the jargon she used made no sense to me, but still.
Random extra tip - others have said that voice training isn’t just about the pitch, but a dimension to pitch that can be easy to miss is that women tend to speak with a wider range of pitch — a greater amount of riding and falling in tones. I used to speak with a monotone and this was something I noticed that changed a lot of how people viewed me.
