MtF: Female voice without noticing it?

[Natalia]

Hiya!

Today I was on my third voice therapy session.

The phonoaudiologist I am seeing is a very kind woman and she is working with transgenders for more than 20 years. She works mainly asking some poetry to be repeated in a very low volume and on a very musical way. She wants the speaking to change so the words can sound feminine, not the voice. I really don't know if I quite understand what she wants.

And I've been trying to do what she taught me.

Today she told me that my voice was sounding mostly feminine and sometimes kind of neutral. I really wasn't trying to sound feminine, but perhaps I am doing it without noticing. No one have noticed anything at home, so I think my voice didn't change too much.

I got very happy  , but she didn't. She thinks I am doing a falsetto and she wants me to only modulate my voice. She says that I can damage my vocal chords if I keep doing it.

My voice wasn't very masculine before and even now it isn't anything close to high pitched (I am far away from a Mickey Mouse falsetto voice)...but it seems that my voice is indeed sounding way more feminine now. My therapist told me that she could clearly listen the "maleness" before and that now she can't.

Ok, so what's the problem?

She told me to stop and go back to my natural voice, but for what I was aware of, I was on my natural voice already. I mean, if I was really doing a falsetto I would know, right?

She started examining my neck and she asked me to do a few things to check if I was with any pain. I wasn't, but she thinks I was a bit tense and that some parts of my neck were tense.
Then she told me to spend this week trying to forget everything about modulating my voice because she wants me back to my "male" voice.

Is she right? Can I be doing something wrong and I am unable to notice it?

I was like "yay, I am really sounding female!" ...but at the same time she told me to forget everything and start again from the zero. Now I feel quite disappointed 

[JamesG]

(skeptical) She still has a few more boat payments to make. (/skeptical)

[Natalia]

(skeptical) She still has a few more boat payments to make. (/skeptical)

I really don't know if this is the case, because I am not paying anything...

Some may think "yay, is it free then?" 

Not exactly. We have a public health system on my country and she is part of a multidisciplinary medical team specialized to attend the transgender population. Since I am not directly paying her I don't see any point on holding me there for a few more sessions.

[JamesG]

(cynical) That just gives her the justification for submitting several boat payments worth of invoices to the health system. (/cynical) 

I'm kidding (mostly), if nothing else it will give you more practice and time with her.

[JLT1]

Wow, this doesn't sound right.

I understand the reading and speaking to change to more feminine voice (well, a little bit anyway).  But I have never heard of what she is doing.

If you don't believe you are doing falsetto, ask them to send down one of the throat cameras and take a watch the vocal cords as you sound various tones.  Falsetto has a very different vocal cord configuration. 

Somehow, I have this huge vocal range. They did that for me and it wasn't falsetto, it was just me expanding the range by working on it.

Good Luck!

Hugs,

Jen

[smile_jma]

I know if I use my resonance only voice (the only thing I can do at the moment) I will get "stuck" up higher for a while. I'll relax everything and it won't go back down for an hour or so or if I see someone that doesn't know about me. For some reason it'll drop, but not back to what it was for another few minutes.  I don't know if the getting stuck was a good thing (seems like it is?) and I mentioned it to a voice coach and she said that was good.

[Jennygirl]

Sounds right to me. If you hold tension in your voice you can damage it or develop a vocal tremor.

If she thinks you were tensing your neck in places you shouldn't, it is absolutely worth your voice to cut that out before it hurts you.

Training your voice as mtf can be dangerous if you aren't cautious about your voice.

I would try some neck/throat stretching exercises to work out the tension. I'm sure she has something she could have you do that would help. Maybe ask her about it?

[ThePhoenix]

Testosterone didn't affect my voice much, but years of training got me to a point of sounding like a guy most of the time.  I still got called ma'am on the phone from time to time, but passed as male on the phone about 80% or so.  It wasn't a conscious thing, I just very slowly got better at talking lower.  I never experienced the voice cracking and breaking that is common for ftm individuals or biological males in puberty. 

When I switched hormone prescriptions, my voice changed very, very rapidly.  People started commenting on it within about a week or two.  At that point they were saying my voice was pretty neutral.  But I also went through a period of time that one of the people in my circle described as "teenage boy in reverse."  My voice would crack and break, but it would break up instead of down.  The voice change was so fast and so dramatic that it was actually what forced me to be out at work.  By the time I was changing my name on accounts and everything, passing as a guy on the phone was impossible.  I had some hilarious experiences as well as some real arguments over the phone . . . I got accused of trying to steal my own electric bill.  Customer service reps would insist on speaking to (guy me) and not believe me when I said that was me.  A couple of accounts I was able to change based on nothing but my verbal statement that "yes, I changed my name because the old one made people think I was a guy" with no documentation of any kind. 

These days my voice is the single thing that trans* people comment on most.  I've shown up at meetings and had circles form around me with people asking how I got this voice.  I've had people embarrass themselves by offering me up as someone with lots of experience in voice therapy when I've actually never had a single session.  But I've also had people criticize it (too soft, couldn't possibly be natural, etc.).  And what prompted me to write on this thread:  I've even had trans* people tell me they think I'm speaking in falsetto, just like the OP.  I even had one person in my church choir ask me to join them to sing bass, and when I pointed out that I don't exactly have a bass voice, she told me she was sure I must just be faking it and she "knew" I could sing bass if I wanted to.

I'm kind of touchy about my voice because of all the comment, both good and bad, that it has generated and I'm also wary of talking too much about myself, so I doubt that I will participate much in this thread.  But I offer the above story because I wonder if the OP might have something similar happening. 

[sad panda]

Well, I don't know much about voice training either but I think falstto is a bad idea, It doesn't sound very good. Maybe it's just me but I can always recognize falsetto immediately and would get extremely confused if i heard a girl sounding like that. You should be ab,e to get where you are without falsetto and it will sound much more natural I think.

As for whether or not you would notice, self perception can be very bad. I wouldn't tely on your own opinion of your voice. If you were comfortable You could post a recording here and see what people think.

[anjaq]

I would suggest: Get an ENT to check your voice box with a camera and all that. See if it all looks good or tensed up or if the size is maller than expected or something. Try to make a gilssando - meaning you sing a note and then go as low as you acan and as high as you can and relax. Use a lot of air for tha., Make an ffff sound in addition to a vowel. ffffffooooo - and keep that ffff while doing the different notes. it helps relax the muscles. See how deep you can go with that and relax. Check if what you are doing normally is different from that.
Normally voice people should be able to check this. But it can be that you got sooo use to talking the way you do that you do not notice that you are doing something wrong. It was so for me for 10 Years I talked in a "bad" voice which eventuall resulted in me getting throat pains and all that. Wha tI was doing is to hypertension my voice box to sound in a way that I wanted to sound. She also more or less has me now doing relaxation and my voice sadly dropped as a result, but it is healthier now and now I can think about options to get pitch back up.

[Borboleta]

Hi Natalia,

I was quite surprised, because I´m going through exactly the same situation. I mean, all. Everything she said to you, she said to me, and I feel just the same about my voice frequency, my lower voice, tension, etc etc. AND I go to this government health facility where I live. So, I wanted to ask you if it went all right at the end and if perhaps we have the same doctor... I live in São Paulo, where do you?