Quote from: Silk on October 14, 2008, 01:51:08 PM
When I'm posing as a woman, I have no trouble at all coming off as a woman who simply speaks in a low tenor. It goes with my slight masculine qualities, anyway. I even keep my hair cut short, and I wouldn't be caught dead in a skirt or a dress (at least not out in public). I don't do anything to try to raise the pitch of my voice. It's more in the harmonics and body language than anything else, and that's something you learn more through usage than through practice. Also, don't worry about what gender people think you are. Whether you're male, female, or transitional, you shouldn't be associating with people who have trouble treating you as an individual.
I think this is the jumping-off point between gay males, drag queens, other varieties of TG and TS. (refer to Hypatia's thread:
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,45511.msg291810.html#msg291810 ) I truly believe that experience tells me that other TG-types don't quite "get" the transsexual-thang and especially prone to that failure are gay males.
I don't think what is realized is that TSes are not 'posing as a woman (or man.") We simply are female and male, just like you.
Like Hypatia I am not especially fond of being viewed as TG. That has nothing to do with who makes up the transgender rainbow, has nothing to do with the frivolity involved in saying that since Charles Prince coined the term (which he didn't,) that one shouldn't use it since he was all for wiping out transsexuals altogether. (Join hands Virginia/Charles with Janice Raymond and
mAndrea.)
I am not transgender, although I support transgender causes and embrace people who refer to themselves as transgender. For that matter I embrace gays and lesbians as well. O, better not leave out the nons, some of my best friends are non and straight! But I have no interest in "posing" as anyone at all. I simply am Nichole. I simply am female.
Period. (to quote Tink.
)
Is there something terribly wrong with that? Not as I see it. One does voice simply because she's not trying to cast an illusion, make a fantasy or a caricature. She's working toward becoming the very self she is. Like a person who through accident has lost the power of speech, there is therapy, rehab, that makes a voice that, if not the one "one might have had," at least can be passably recognized as female.
Is that important? Not to everyone perhaps, but to me it has been. Yes, it's been hard work. Has it been worthwhile to hear people on the phone invariably use "ma'am" or "miss?" Yes. Has it been worthwhile to not be outed by my voice in a public situation at a restaurant, on the street, in an office, to my clients? Yes.
Along with the other facts of changing one's material self to emulate and match one's heart/soul/mind/brain, voice goes along with breast development, genitalia reformation, touching the places one has always lived in and touching them with life and depth, not a wannabe, but someone real, true, no poses. Just woman.
I don't expect that to be universally understood. I expect many to wish to "break the binary" and they are welcome to do so, as far as I am concerned. I don't require the binary to be myself, but am reasonably comfortable within it as well.
I'm not for segregating ourselves into distinct, separate and mutually exclusive clubs and associations. Why should anyone be left behind? Why should anyone gloat that some could be or have been? That is simply cruel and shallow in my estimation. There's no need to hurl anyone else anywhere at all for me to live into myself. That self, in this life, is female. It's not a pose of any kind.
And I will associate with any other human being. Not always as friend or disciple, but as another human being who deserves whatever respect I give other human beings. Who they are, where they come from, what they believe be damned. It is what it is and their blood is as red as my own, their tears as briny, their laughter as infectious.
Nichole
