How much effort is required for feminine speech after Yeson's VFS?

[Blush]

I'm hoping to try to get this question answered directly - it's been a bit confusing trying to pick an answer out for it from all the info out there.

With only therapy and personal training, no surgeries, my female voice requires conscious effort. It's a taxing effort of tensing up my entire voice box area. Every time I say something, sneeze, or cough, I'm regulating my voice to sound a certain way.

Does Yeson's VFS change your no-effort, born voice, up to the ranges of female? Say postop, I went to speak without tensing my voice to try to get it higher, would it just automatically be up there?

Edit: This question is exclusive to Yeson's VFS in particular, it's the procedure I'm eyeing.

[Dena]

It depends on how low your starting voice is. I went to Dr Haben and even after surgery, my chest voice still sounds male because my starting voice was around 90Hz. Some with a much higher starting voice no longer need the trained voice. Therapy may still be required to learn the feminine speech pattern depending on your speaking pattern before surgery. Without more information, it's hard to tell what will be required after surgery.

[iKate]

It depends on a number of factors. Pitch is one component only. Surgery will change your timbre but won't affect resonance. That one you need to solve with training if you have a problem with it.

Some people just speak naturally whereas others need training and are still conscious of their voice.

Dr Kim recommended that I see a voice therapist even after the surgery but so far I have gotten lucky in that my voice is very passable without any therapy other than their exercise program.

That said by far it is much easier than training alone, at least how I've tried. Some have done it solely with training and I commend them but training didn't work for me.

[Blush]

What about things like coughing or clearing your throat?

[iKate]

What about things like coughing or clearing your throat?

You mean if they sound feminine? Yes they do. For many they do but YMMV.

[anjaq]

The pitch does not really take effort, if the surgery is a good success. But you will still need to control resonance and you will need to use female prosody and voice melody to be perceived female . The surgery for me kind of "forces" me to use a female speech pattern, if I fall back into a more male speech pattern, with lower pitch and male type resonance, my throat hurts soon and it sounds bad. It is much easier for me now to use a female phonation pattern, but it took speech therapy and voice exercises to get my brain to learn that i now have to use my voice differently. This may not be the case for everyone - it seems to depend on age and on how long you have forced your voice before surgery as this has to be unlearned.

[voodle]

It's been nearly 3 years now (may 2013) since my VFS with YesonVC. I actually kind of like my voice these days but VFS was not an instant fix at all (in my case).
Initially after VFS, the clonazepam helped to make my voice sound better / more feminine but once I stopped taking those, it honestly sounded like the VFS didn't do anything, until I worked out how to train my voice correctly.
In my case, my typical way of speaking is to use a low pitch just out of habit (but is fairly typical of a lot of english women anyways), which from what I can tell meant that muscles to control resonance weren't that well developed.

Through seeing a proper speech therapist and my own work, I now know how to use those muscles properly but I find that if I don't speak much for a while, my body still seems to fairly quickly atrophy the muscles - this actually happened to me over christmas and I've just got my voice back to normal again
VFS = successful
Voice training = still terrible