Hey Everyone,
Last blog, you heard me talk a little bit about communication transition. What is a communication transition, exactly? And how does it apply to trans folks who are looking to change aspects of their voice? Well, those are good questions. Most people seeking to change their voice in order to align with their gender identity tend to think of pitch as the most obvious thing to alter. Pitch is definitely one of the components of voice that can change through voice modification services, but there are many more components that have little to do with pitch that can make a huge difference in gender expression.
Let’s take voice feminization as a way to tease this out a bit. It is true that women are perceived as having a higher pitch than men do. You may even see the pitch ranges of 85-180 Hz for males and 165-255 HZ for females somewhere like youtube or wikipedia. However, there is a ton of variation on those norms within both cis and trans/gender nonconforming individuals, and that variation does not necessarily lead to misgendering or gender confusion.
Why?
Because, in addition to pitch, someone’s resonance (where the speech sound vibrates in their body), someone’s body language, someone’s intonation, someone’s articulation, are all signaling gender as they speak. Like it or not (I don’t really), all of those aspects of communication, plus even more, are ways that people think they can pick out gender identity. It’s all about norms, right? None if it is a true sign of someone’s gender - someone’s gender is only what they say it is. People are the final say on what their gender is, but we live in a world where people make essentialist assumptions about identity based on a whole host of norms.
So, one way for us to reclaim the power over our gender and over our voices is to manipulate its characteristics so that we are perceived in the way we want to be. Let’s go back to our example of voice feminization: a forward-focused and facial resonance of speech sounds is perceived as more feminine than, say, a resonance that happens in the chest. Resonance can also indirectly affect pitch, and working on resonance can more concretely and safely achieve a client’s desired result of pitch change.
Easy onset of consonants is considered a more feminine articulation pattern, as is precise articulation of speech sounds.
Women tend to sit closer to their conversational partners, and they tend to give more affirmations while another person is speaking both verbally and nonverbally. Women also tend to make more eye contact during conversation.
The above are just a few examples of gendered communication. The bottom line is that it all matters when we’re talking about gender perception. If you want to present a certain gender identity to the world with your voice, it takes a lot more than just pitch to do just that. So, I’m asking you to alter your thinking just a bit when it comes to voice modification, and when it comes to communication: communication is a holistic human experience that draws on all sorts of bodily and psychological functions, and to awaken a person’s authentic voice, we need to understand those functions, manipulate them, and transition them together as a communicative whole.