Transitioning Your Voice and Dysphoria

[Emileeeee]

I just had a breakthrough a second ago and immediately wrote down what I did so I'll hopefully be able to remember it tomorrow. Maybe it would help someone else too.

I don't really know how to explain getting to the point where you are "using the voice behind your normal voice", but starting at that, I found that I need to pinch my vocal chords for a much higher pitch than I thought I needed, just enough that I was able to feel the resonance in the back of my nose (felt by touching the sides of my nose at the back). With more volume, you can feel it without touching. Then from there, I talked like I was really super excited about something and voila it actually sounded female in resonance and pitch. Note that by really super excited, I don't mean breaking into a falsetto. Super excited like I started fluctuating my pitch while speaking.

Also worthy of noting is that it sounded fake to me in my head, which is why I've avoided it all this time, but it sounded fine during playback when I recorded it. I also found that it sounds more feminine when I just say stuff off the top of my head than when I try to read it. It's like I'm trying too hard when I read and it's making it sound like a guy. Unfortunately I've been practicing all this time by reading wikipedia articles!

Not perfect, but definitely a starting point I can live with. I'd imagine once I can get that right, I can probably safely lower the pitch a bit to be less pinched and achieve the same results.

[katrinaw]

I struggle, in fact as soon as I speak my brain just makes me speak the way it know how too, been doing that so many years....

But I like your approach Emilee, just pinched my throat around the VC's and it worked... Yay something better to work with now...

But like iKate I was going to just let it go till VFS... but maybe try a bit harder...
L Katy 

[Gabrielle_22]

Thank you for the replies and advice so far!

I'm trying to put it into words again Gabrielle, but it's surprisingly difficult!

I think I will make a new video later on where you can see my face, and try to break it down.

Thank you for this--I would love to hear your explanation, whenever you have the time.

I just had a breakthrough a second ago and immediately wrote down what I did so I'll hopefully be able to remember it tomorrow. Maybe it would help someone else too.

I don't really know how to explain getting to the point where you are "using the voice behind your normal voice", but starting at that, I found that I need to pinch my vocal chords for a much higher pitch than I thought I needed, just enough that I was able to feel the resonance in the back of my nose (felt by touching the sides of my nose at the back). With more volume, you can feel it without touching. Then from there, I talked like I was really super excited about something and voila it actually sounded female in resonance and pitch. Note that by really super excited, I don't mean breaking into a falsetto. Super excited like I started fluctuating my pitch while speaking.

Also worthy of noting is that it sounded fake to me in my head, which is why I've avoided it all this time, but it sounded fine during playback when I recorded it. I also found that it sounds more feminine when I just say stuff off the top of my head than when I try to read it. It's like I'm trying too hard when I read and it's making it sound like a guy. Unfortunately I've been practicing all this time by reading wikipedia articles!

Not perfect, but definitely a starting point I can live with. I'd imagine once I can get that right, I can probably safely lower the pitch a bit to be less pinched and achieve the same results.

Are you saying that you tightened your vocal chords *after* you reached your female voice, or that you reached your female voice *by* pinching your vocal chords? Thanks for the suggestion about where to feel the resonance. If you have any more feedback about where to get your voice, I'd love it. Do you lift your larynx and then bring it back? Do you speak in falsetto first? Or do anything you can think of to get there? I understand you mean speaking from your head when you get excited to get into the right pitch/resonance but I'm just curious about what you do before that.

[Dena]

People have 4 speaking voices Chest is what males use, Mouth is what women use. The two above that require light air pressure and light tension on the vocal cords. The lower one is the falsetto and the upper one is the whistler. The first time I tried it went directly to the whistler because I had to much tension on my vocal cords. You must be using a mouth voice when you attempt this.

I have learned how to judge a recording of my voice but most people are better of having somebody else judge their voice. In the voice surgery area they use http://vocaroo.com to pass voices around. We all have speech habit that often need to be cleaned up to give us a more feminine voice. Don't think the surgery is going to give you a nice sounding voice because you still have to learn how to use it properly. The surgery is best for someone like me who has a break right in the middle of the feminine area or has other pitch issues.

[bibilinda]

I totally relate to the words I emphasized in bold letters from your quote below. I hate that. I live with my folks, so not only do i have to drop my pitch, but I actually have to speak "as a guy" and I totally hate it, it is literally driving me nuts. So I try to avoid them as much as I can. They have no excuse to keep treating me as a guy, I told them I am transgender-transsexual since almost four years ago. Dad laughed at me, and mother just can't accept it due to her ridiculously biased Catholic "beliefs" i.e. "God doesn't make mistakes." I say: look at me, do I look like a guy? I have also female traits in my body and I don't have the reproductive glands any more. Have been on female hormones almost six years now. In public I dress and behave as a woman. But she just doesn't care, and my misogynist dad just laughs at the whole notion of me not being a "guy". Life is tough, what can I say.

The YouTube videos never helped me.

I took a book, LEAN IN by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, flipped a few pages in and started reading out loud contorting, lifting, and straining my vocals to test different pitch, upper throat + nasal resonances until it started to sound right (and not falsetto) and kept on practicing. Eventually for me I started feeling very comfortable staying in the upper range and usually it sticks when I'm speaking with strangers and not shouting. Your female voice starts to imprint itself into your psyche and you get more and more conditioned to always use it.

The only time I start to lose it is when speaking to family members or others who have known me as a male for a long time. I drop to a lower female range and can't help it because my experiences speaking 'male' is so ingrained in my relationship with said persons that it seems to overpower my will to speak in my female range.

Either way I believe in a vocal 'muscle memory' effect that can only be improved with continuing practice.

Forget the videos, everyone's ideal vocal lift and resonance zone is different, find your range for yourself. It will take a lot of experimenting.

[Gabrielle_22]

I think it's worth acknowledging that what works for each of us is dependent upon the voices we start with. Perhaps some of us can get great voices just by doing the 'head voice,' while others of us need more advanced techniques. I can get my pitch up to the female range easily and am working on talking around there. I speak from the head rather than the chest. I add breathiness and speak in the way women are more likely to. But my voice continually sounds cartoonish and male-like in some way. It's like I just can't escape something in my original voice.

Sorry if this sounds unclear or like I'm rehashing a point. I *know* a lot of what I am supposed to do, I think. It just isn't working. I never liked my original voice because I always thought it sounded a bit ridiculous, and now every attempt at getting into a female voice also sounds ridiculous and cartoonish, just more so.

I totally relate to the words I emphasized in bold letters from your quote below. I hate that. I live with my folks, so not only do i have to drop my pitch, but I actually have to speak "as a guy" and I totally hate it, it is literally driving me nuts. So I try to avoid them as much as I can. They have no excuse to keep treating me as a guy, I told them I am transgender-transsexual since almost four years ago. Dad laughed at me, and mother just can't accept it due to her ridiculously biased Catholic "beliefs" i.e. "God doesn't make mistakes." I say: look at me, do I look like a guy? I have also female traits in my body and I don't have the reproductive glands any more. Have been on female hormones almost six years now. In public I dress and behave as a woman. But she just doesn't care, and my misogynist dad just laughs at the whole notion of me not being a "guy". Life is tough, what can I say.

I'm so sorry to hear this. My mother is also Catholic, and I have been going through this kind of thing, as well. But if you can speak as a woman around them now and then, it may help them 'believe' you more. Voice does so much, for better or for worse. Speak like a woman around them in a passable voice, and they may be more likely to accept you as one. Good luck with this. I hope you have a supportive set of friends and/or other family members you can be yourself around.

[Emileeeee]

Are you saying that you tightened your vocal chords *after* you reached your female voice, or that you reached your female voice *by* pinching your vocal chords? Thanks for the suggestion about where to feel the resonance. If you have any more feedback about where to get your voice, I'd love it. Do you lift your larynx and then bring it back? Do you speak in falsetto first? Or do anything you can think of to get there? I understand you mean speaking from your head when you get excited to get into the right pitch/resonance but I'm just curious about what you do before that.

I think the larynx up and back is the starting point I didn't know how to describe. I just go to it. I'm not really sure how it works. Then I pinched the sound to raise the pitch. I've since then found that I already feel the vibrations in my nose prior to the pinch. I guess my pitch at that point was too far into the male range, so I needed to do the pinch to raise the pitch a bit higher. It sounded a lot higher in my head than it did coming out of the recorder.

I thought about what happens when you're excited while talking. I figured it was just the pitch fluctuation, but I spent the weekend really paying attention to how women talk and another thing I noticed is their mouths are open like a smile but not really a smile and you can visibly see their lips forming the sounds. With my natural voice, my lips barely move and are mostly closed. Getting excited while talking also makes me smile, so that probably has a lot to do with the sound differences too.

[Eva Marie]

In my opinion its not really a matter of pitch, so much as intonation and cadence.

^^ THIS!!

When we are working on our voice we tend to focus on the pitch and resonance aspect of our voices, and we forget about other key parts. A very, very important part of "sounding female" and a reason that women with naturally low voices still pass as women has to do with how they speak. Three key feminine speech markers are (taken from a female voice class that I took):

Remember the key feminine markers: (besides pitch and resonance)

1. Enunciate your words...consonants, consonants, consonants!
2. Modulate your pitch - high's and low's - be melodic
3. Use plenty of adjectives and details...especially in your descriptions. Practice using slightly longer sentences.


These are *so* important! Try going some place where there are lots of women talking and listen for these markers - you'll hear them. When you are practicing don't forget to practice these things too.

As someone said - going full time really helps because you are in a position where you HAVE TO pick up how to talk in a feminine way or you out yourself - sort of a trial by fire.

Speaking of dysphoria - I have severe issues with allergies and acid reflux. Those two together constantly irritate my throat, often making it hard to produce my female voice. This is extremely aggravating when I know if it weren't for my throat I can sound very feminine. Sounding gravely just isn't the way I want to sound but it is what it is and on days where i'm not sounding very female due to my throat it's very dysphoric.

[Evelyn K]

I totally relate to the words I emphasized in bold letters from your quote below. I hate that. I live with my folks, so not only do i have to drop my pitch, but I actually have to speak "as a guy" and I totally hate it, it is literally driving me nuts. So I try to avoid them as much as I can. They have no excuse to keep treating me as a guy, I told them I am transgender-transsexual since almost four years ago. Dad laughed at me, and mother just can't accept it due to her ridiculously biased Catholic "beliefs" i.e. "God doesn't make mistakes." I say: look at me, do I look like a guy? I have also female traits in my body and I don't have the reproductive glands any more. Have been on female hormones almost six years now. In public I dress and behave as a woman. But she just doesn't care, and my misogynist dad just laughs at the whole notion of me not being a "guy". Life is tough, what can I say.

I think I follow you but there is a difference with what I was explaining. My pitch doesn't drop with me doing it on purpose, I'm not willing it to drop. Believe me I'd like to keep it up there. But when I'm around ppls who knew me for a long time as male, there's a weird mental block that's hard to get passed when speaking to them causing me to drop to the pitch I'm used to using all these years conversing with them. It's like the voice you recall and use gets hardwired after many years. Around strangers though, I have no problems talking in the female range.

[Serenahikaru]

The YouTube videos never helped me.

I took a book, LEAN IN by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, flipped a few pages in and started reading out loud contorting, lifting, and straining my vocals to test different pitch, upper throat + nasal resonances until it started to sound right (and not falsetto) and kept on practicing. Eventually for me I started feeling very comfortable staying in the upper range and usually it sticks when I'm speaking with strangers and not shouting. Your female voice starts to imprint itself into your psyche and you get more and more conditioned to always use it.

The only time I start to lose it is when speaking to family members or others who have known me as a male for a long time. I drop to a lower female range and can't help it because my experiences speaking 'male' is so ingrained in my relationship with said persons that it seems to overpower my will to speak in my female range.

I also learned by reading and my voice does that too. >> Except around 2 close friends but with family I sort of have to drop down.