The best way for me to describe it is a little bit of both. Not only did I want to, I pretty much had to put on a voice that is in the female range because after the surgery I had no other option to comfortably make conversation.
There is a lot that goes into a voice to make it sound like a natural female. Pitch, what this surgery modifies, is just one of them. There is still resonance, pitch dynamics, cadence, word choice, phrasing, emotion, and a whole slew of other things that this surgery doesn't do and you have to learn on your own. After they modify the fundamental pitch, it is up to you to continue training your voice all the way to sounding completely female/passable. It seems way easier this way to me, though, because of two reasons: #1 voice automatically feels more natural in a higher range and #2 never being afraid to make the mistake of going back down into a male frequency range.
No voice surgery is going to make you sound female. If you already have a very feminine voice, then perhaps it totally will. But if you were like me with a very male pattern voice, it still takes a considerable amount of work to pass. It's just easier because it seems less like a search and more like a discovery.
