So, we need to talk.
Specifically, we need to talk about speech-language pathologists - have a real, honest conversation about the ways in which we are complicit in… a lot of things.
But first, let me backup a bit. Have you all heard of Chase Strangio? He’s the deputy director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV project. An all-around badass, really. He has also been in the public eye discussing the recent Supreme Court case that established that LGBTQ people can seek redress in federal court if they face discrimination in the workplace.
Over the weekend, after a whirlwind of press and social media discussion of the victory, Chase sent out this tweet:
My first response when reading it: what the hell? Who does this? Who would think that approaching a trans person about their voice and telling them they need to change it is a good idea?
But the answer is pretty simple: speech-language pathologists would. Our field is notoriously the opposite of diverse. There’s this huge conversation going on right now about our field being 92% white and 96% women. I would also imagine that the overwhelming majority, possibly even the totality, of that 96% identify as cis women. It is also exceedingly rare that we encounter training in grad school to work with trans and gendernonconforming individuals. I’m lucky in that I happen to be plugged into the community and also happen to be genderqueer.
Given this racial and gender hegemony, our field has to reckon with its sins of systematic denial of BIPOC and LGBTQ people. That I have a seat at the table sometimes still surprises me. But, I’m tired of just sitting, especially when I see stuff like this. I want to flip the table because when we do things like, say, reach out to high-powered trans lawyers about how their voice doesn’t measure up to our cis standards, we are complicit in violence against T/GNC people.
You might be asking, “but how does telling someone that you can help them change their voice hurt T/GNC people?” It’s a question I’ve seen being asked a lot around the internet, by mostly our 92%, 96% friends. And it’s pretty straightforward: thinking of someone’s voice as anything other than their own business, and then comparing it to the cisheteropatriarchal categories of male and female, makes sure that those categories remain cemented as the standard. And if those remain the standard, if those are what we hold our clients to, we dishonor their journey and shackle them to the same binary that cis people are shackled to.
Let me run something back that I said earlier: We are complicit in violence against T/GNC people. We teach pronouns in a reductive and oppressive way to children in the schools (he/she/they anyone?). We reinforce the dominance of mainstream American English in our society through our language and articulation therapy (this is how you use a conjunction, this is how you pronounce /th/ - rules, rules, rules). Apparently we also approach trans folks and tell them that their voice isn’t good enough, isn’t masculine or feminine enough. This is an act of oppression. This reinforces the male/female binary that puts trans lives at risk. For all of us whose gender falls outside that binary, we take a gamble by living freely and openly. An unjust system that sees people outside of its boundaries attempts to eradicate them, and we are fighting, Chase is fighting, against this eradication on one of the biggest stages there is.
It should also be said, in light of that fight, that trans people are not aspiring to be cis. This is a biased assumption made by cis people.
Trans people are beautifully trans. Trans people can stand in their transness and say this trans thing about me is beautiful because this is my human experience. Trans people’s voices can be obviously trans and they’re still worthy. Their voices are not ours to regulate. Lots of trans and gendernonconforming people don’t want to change their voice or take it to a new place. Some do.
And we need to be there to help guide them when they want that. We have the training to show them how to safely expand what they can do with their voice. But we have to stop thinking about ourselves as the gatekeepers to an authentic trans vocal experience. We have to stop seeing ourselves as the arbiters of correct communication. Our profession should be truly humbling - the sheer amount of ways there are to communicate should humble us. We should be humbled by the realization that we impose all of these white, straight, cis ways of being upon people who are not white, straight, or cis.
The time has come to stop that. SLPs, I’m calling you in - let’s divest ourselves of the notion that we’ve got gender and voice all figured out. Let’s find ways to dismantle the gender binary with our services, not reinforce it. We should strive to build a society where voice does not determine gender, even though its technically not good for business. I guarantee you that a good start would be to have more BIPOC and LGBT folks join our ranks.
And, hey, let’s also stop telling people how we think they should sound.