Yeson voice feminization surgery 2.0

[Teslagirl]

So already on day two, my voice feels exponentially stronger than it did yesterday. Not back to business as usual, but at least now I see the pathway to get there. :-) So happy already!


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Such an improvement in such a short time Dana. I think you'll definitely be one of the lucky ones. Incidentally, you have a lovely photo. You're very pretty. I don't dare put mine up; not until I can afford a facelift on top of everything else!

Sarah.

[Dana88]

Such an improvement in such a short time Dana. I think you'll definitely be one of the lucky ones. Incidentally, you have a lovely photo. You're very pretty. I don't dare put mine up; not until I can afford a facelift on top of everything else!

Sarah.

Thank you ::blushes::

Also! It's not luck. This surgery has a very high success rate and very low complication rate. Don't assume the worst until you can resume speaking.


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[Teslagirl]

Oh, no worries. The note stuff is funny though, because it's true! My mom worked in a bank once and her hairs would raise every time someone handed her a note and didn't say anything. The branch did get robbed a few times. Then another bank bought them and closed them down.

Where I live is really quite staid (though multicultural) and nothing like 1930's Chicago. I think that woman in the shop had been watching too many detective movies...

[anjaq]

Lol - yeah - watching too much TV can do that.

What did he say about laser tuning? Can he do it?

I have gotten back the expected answer: They do not recommend it. Actually they think any further surgical procedures at the vocal chords, the voice or trach shave are possibly detrimental for the outcome and can worsen voice quality (so pitch may increase, but voice quality like breathiness and hoarseness or loudness could suffer). So I guess one would have to take the risk upon oneself if one really fels the need to do this and find a surgeon who will do it other than at Yeson.

By the way - I did sent in my 6 month video and they say the F0 is 185 Hz (I assume for the rainbow passage, I got 180 in PRAAT - the freely spoken text is lower, PRAAT says 170 Hz, I do not think they did analyze that part, too) and that I have to work on my female resonance and phonation patterns. This is a bit unexpected, since no one else so far told me I need more work on resonance and female phonation patterns, but I will tell it to my voice therapist as a suggestion. I also am supposed to send in a video of me doing the voice exercises, so they can check if I am doing them correctly, thats nice. Other than that they more or less said to do my exercises and take the pills and wait until the 12 months are over to know the final pitch change.

[iKate]

Praat tends to show some low dips as low as 75Hz for me but that seems like artifacts and that brings down the average. They probably toss those out.

[anjaq]

Yes - I set PRAAT to have a cutoff at the low pitches that are just impossible artefacts and usually I dont do a whole-file analysis, but only pick some "clean" sections of the text that show no artefacts to get my values. My voice therapist confirmed my assessment "by ear" (comparing her perception on her piano) and said that I am usually at a F3 when talking (174 Hz), she calls it the "indifference pitch" (meaning not that it is indifferent in gender but that it is my relaxed base pitch) and when I am speaking with some more intonations, like reading or talking about something with a bit more passion, I am at F#3 or even G3 (180-190 Hz) - So I think this is a good result and basically it is what I expected when I planned voice surgery initially. I was a bit surprised when Dr Kim said it will be a F0 of 210 Hz as this was higher than I was hoping for, so I got caught up in that number a bit and was bugged a bit by not reaching it, but looking back at what my initial goals were - to get rid of the male undertones, to speak without thinking about it, to have a good pitch and feminine sound when I am laughing or saying something in surprise and a average pitch in the range of 180-190 Hz, I am pretty close to those - Yay! - And in the past days, speaking without thinking has become a lot easier (in part because I was just so busy that I could not think about voice at all for a while and that helped to get me just talking without thinking).
Now all that really has to happen is to get rid of the hoarseness, get some more volume back, train a bit more projection and prosody (voice melody), maybe get a little bit of pitch increase to get from 170 to 180 - and of course learn how to work with that stupid voice break within my speaking range. I think this will be manageable... some of it will just come with time....

[iKate]

Praat shows the dropoff to 75Hz here but I can clearly see the fry and sudden decay.

This is "they act like a prism and form a rainbow.

Average without that steep drop is ~200Hz.

You can also see the ups and downs, so it's not a monotone boring male voice.



Then there is this one, "white light into many beautiful colors."

Goes as high as 289Hz then drops back down to high 190s low 200s.

[anjaq]

Which audio file goes with that analysis?

I would definitely exclude such drops or places that have vocal fry or hoarseness in them. I would also be careful about very high pitch parts, sometimes it shows some over 300 Hz which are unlikely to be real and more likely to be noise.

Oh and thats the new PRAAT - I still need to get that!

[iKate]

Which audio file goes with that analysis?

I would definitely exclude such drops or places that have vocal fry or hoarseness in them. I would also be careful about very high pitch parts, sometimes it shows some over 300 Hz which are unlikely to be real and more likely to be noise.

Oh and thats the new PRAAT - I still need to get that!

That's my latest recording.

The high pitch in the last pic is definitely not noise. It's where I say, "into" and the "ih" sound is where it peaks.

[anjaq]

Ok - Here is what happens to me:
When I speak without readin of a text, I get this:

or this:


Its visibly monotonous and rather low in pitch, in one spot you can see that drop where I happen to use vocal fry and it reads 70 Hz, so that pulls the average down. Without these spots, my average is more in the 165 Hz range.

When I read the rainbow passage, things change:

I get more melody, and an overall higher average pitch. Also there is less of these dropoffs.


In this part, you can see what I mean by noise in the upward direction:

Its just small dots between 300-400 Hz in this case but at times there are several of these very high pitched dots, not sure how much influence they have on the average. They seem to be more sparse than the dropoffs to the low end.

[Dana88]

So, my voice is steadily gaining back clarity and strength. Yesterday I was pretty much able to speak normally. There were one or two times that I spoke at length for more than 10 minutes and I felt myself getting weak, but typically if I gave it a rest for 5 minutes or so, I seemed to recover just fine. There's still a little bit of breathiness, but that's also slowly but surely resolving. I did another recording today, this time of the rainbow passage. Without doing anything to speak higher, just speaking at what feels comfortable now, I'm already between 218 and 223 hz! I recorded it three times. Twice it measured 218 and once it measured 223. Anyway! Here's a new recording:

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1RFvkGn4VV8

You can hear how much the clarity has improved in only three days  . I could not be happier. I know I've said this before, when I was a kid, and my voice changed, it was so awful and traumatic, that having this taken care of has given me such joy. Also, as Anjaq touched on in an earlier post, the psychological affect cannot be overstated. For the past three days it has been SO nice just to go out and speak without being terrified that I'm going to get clocked because of my voice. Before, in any public setting, I would sit in my car, and try and find a more feminine pitch, or at least get something mildly passable, and then I'd worry about it all day. It's such a mental lift to not have to worry about that anymore.

[iKate]

That is absolutely wonderful. I actually feel the same way about my voice except that it changed much later as a teenager for me. Around 16 is when my voice began to get deep. So this is more of a restorative surgery more than anything.

The best part of this for me, as Anja hinted to was the involuntary sounds. Expressing shock or disbelief is undeniably feminine. As is a sigh, laugh, cough or sneeze, or clearing my throat (which I don't do much due to fear of damage).

I also notice that you don't have as much glottal fry as I do. I do have some and it's a bit annoying so I try to control it. But eventually I hope to train it away. My pre-op voice did have it though.

[Dana88]

That is absolutely wonderful. I actually feel the same way about my voice except that it changed much later as a teenager for me. Around 16 is when my voice began to get deep. So this is more of a restorative surgery more than anything.

The best part of this for me, as Anja hinted to was the involuntary sounds. Expressing shock or disbelief is undeniably feminine. As is a sigh, laugh, cough or sneeze, or clearing my throat (which I don't do much due to fear of damage).

I also notice that you don't have as much glottal fry as I do. I do have some and it's a bit annoying so I try to control it. But eventually I hope to train it away. My pre-op voice did have it though.

A restorative surgery is actually the perfect way to put it. And luckily I didn't have much of a problem with glottal fry preop. I did have a problem with sound clarity and a reedy quality to my timbre which wasn't present pre puberty but is definitely still very present postop. I'm hoping to train that out as well.


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[anjaq]

This is great to hear you are recovering so quickly. I guess we carry over our voice issues across the surgery and then later have some issues if we had some before. Like the glottal or vocal fry, vocal tremor, gaps where the vocal folds dont close properly - all those things are not directly corrected by the surgery. I hope that some of the issues I had were due to me speaking in a unnatural way for 17 years and that I can now manage to relax those habits away somehow and thus the issues with them also disappear, but its hard to loose old habits. Sometimes, I think it may be easier for those who do the VFS before having spent too many years trying to speak in a female voice all the time.

Definitely the change in puberty was horrible. I was terrified and it was such a horrible thing. I never really dared to speak much at all after that, I was even more quiet and I stopped anything that had to do with music or singing. I used my very low voice to convince others that I am "normal" - maybe I even pushed my voice down even more , using vocal fry and such - because I apparently had one of the lowest voices in my class and this seemed to have saved me from some troubles with bullying. (At the same time this makes me think that the assessment of Dr Kim about my initial F0 was not quite right - A 134 Hz average voice is just in the mid-male range, not at the low end of it, so I guess I just could not "do" my old voice really at the assessment)

I consider all of the surgeries and treatments reconstructive. The voice has to be reconstructed, my genitalia have to be reconstructed (even though I know they changed away from the "right" state even before I was born), hormone therapy is reconstructing my body overall, if I ever get FFS, it will basically also be reconstructing my face from the effects of testosterone and DHT. Overall, this whole thing about surgeries and medical procedures to me is about reconstructing my body as close to how it should have been as possible, to match it as good as it can to my brain body map.

[Dana88]

I consider all of the surgeries and treatments reconstructive. The voice has to be reconstructed, my genitalia have to be reconstructed (even though I know they changed away from the "right" state even before I was born), hormone therapy is reconstructing my body overall, if I ever get FFS, it will basically also be reconstructing my face from the effects of testosterone and DHT. Overall, this whole thing about surgeries and medical procedures to me is about reconstructing my body as close to how it should have been as possible, to match it as good as it can to my brain body map.

This is very true. I've definitely considered both FFS and SRS reconstructive surgeries.

Also, Teslagirl! I was looking back at some of your old posts and counted that you're just about at the four week mark. Are you allowed to speak yet/how are you doing?

[iKate]

A few days until 2 months. I'm so glad I can start the exercises soon!

[Dana88]

A few days until 2 months. I'm so glad I can start the exercises soon!

Yay! Congrats!!! I got three weeks to go :-).

[anjaq]

I loved that 2 months mark - you can fully try out your new voice, play with the scales and the high end notes and being a bit louder or singing. Its fun. I loved it better than 6 weeks later actually when the stupid Botox was wearing off and I had to struggle more. I think I am just now at the 6 months mark about where I was at the 8 weeks mark in some voice parameters - but definitely loudness/volume and clarity has improved massively since then. The main dip I had about the botox was pitch instability and increased hoarseness from month 3.5 which then gradually improved again.

[Teslagirl]

Also, Teslagirl! I was looking back at some of your old posts and counted that you're just about at the four week mark. Are you allowed to speak yet/how are you doing?

Hello Dana.

Yes it's four weeks yesterday. I had to talk a bit because it was the only way to negotiate all the things I needed to do to send money to Thailand. My voice is very quiet and weak, but apart from that I can't say it's any different from my previous voice. I'm not down about it, but resigned I suppose. At least it wasn't a disaster and I still have a voice. Dr Kim said it may take quite a while to see any pitch increase, so there's still some hope. I would have loved a radical rapid change like some of the other girls, but sadly, it doesn't seem I will get that. When I can raise the money, I'll have another larygoscopy to see the condition of my vocal folds.

Thanks for thinking of me.

Sarah.

[iKate]

I am about due for one. (Laryngoscopy.) Doesn't the NHS pay for it though?

Don't be discouraged. People heal at different rates and age and other factors come into play. But you will get an increase. I swell less because of my diet apparently, which has probably helped me get my pitch increase faster.

Now I can't be called "sir" strictly by my voice even if I tried.