so, does anyone else have this?

I feel fine right now, I'm comfortable telling people I am trans sort of right now, i don't totally break down and melt down like i did the first couple times. but, when I look up videos of transgender men i get wierd mixed feelings.

i can't put my finger on it if it is dysphoria or not but like i see the guys go from my point to man and their voice getting deeper and deeper but their speech pattern is the same, and no offense to them you can do whatever you want but  for whatever reason that kind of makes me freak a little. I don't talk very feminine as it is but if i transition and i sound feminine or sick, another thing it's like i want a deeper voice but i feel like sometimes they sound like they have a throat cold when on T. which also makes me have this unsettled feeling. and i know it just depends on the person...

I don't know where i am getting at on this....

I see pictures of the male body yes i want to look like that, but then as soon as someone mentions downstairs growth and they like it i kind of just :/ like i couldn't care if it grew or not. if it did i guess i wouldn't mind but it it stayed like it was i would also be fine. and then i get to thinking if I am really trans? because all I want is to have the body of a man not the parts, to be called mister and have a male name and to be seen as male in society, get married to a woman and have kids.

am I being silly? a weird kind of doubt just came over me as i was on the youtube channels... :/ perhaps im just being paranoid about the unkown and whatnot, any guys relate to me? seeing other trans men and getting this wave of i don't know is it dysphoria it's depressing as hell.

How far along on T were the guys you looked at? It takes quite a while to have your voice really settle...I was fortunate in that mine went from young woman, to mature woman (more rich sounding female), and then just dropped to teen boy, but a lot of guys have a stage where their voice sounds...well, a little funny. It goes away most of the time though.

yeah sorry, i didn't mean to offend. bad choice of words on my part.
perhaps i am over thinking things. I should be feeling happy i am on the way to what i've wanted but the in between of point a to B is this unknown world i've been avoiding for so long and when i bring it up with myself i get all weird.

I might be rushing myself... I've only been seeing a Gender therapist for 2 months and I've only been doubting my gender seriously for about 5 ( though my experiences with dysphoria go back years)

they were of different ranges some for a few months some for 5 years. there was guy i was watching and in 8 weeks his voice was defnitely male. and another where he was on it for years and it was hardly a change, i suppose im just paranoid where my own voice will end up. but i suppose anything more male then i have now would be good. i don't know why i got in a funk all of a sudden.

I have a higher level of T in me naturally from my PCOS, my voice cracks like a little boy entering his teen years, but as if permanently stuck like that. i'm just full of all sorts of "unknown" taboo.

As people say, your voice does get deeper on T, but as for getting a sore throat, it happens. I have had a hoarse voice for maybe 3 months now. But I am having periods of time (usually mornings and late evenings and I have a normal VERY low voice). So I am guessing it is clearing up, but your vocal cords grow. And it affects people sometimes that way.
As for lower growth, some of us like it and it helps dysphoria, and some people it doesn't.

However, you will get those changes whether you want them or not, if you  are on T. The thing is you ARE trans. There isn't much you can do about that. You can want all sorts of things, and there are somethings you can never do and it doesn't matter what you want. You can be a father to a child, but you will never biologically father a child. Doesn't matter what you want in that way. So it's best to decide on wanting things that are accessible or you can't ever be happy. I think you do chose in that sense to make yourself happy or not.


--Jay

I personally think trans individuals can be subject to over-thinking with regards to vocal range. 

A good example of this is that when I met up with a bunch of trans folk I didn't know while still pre-T, I got a lot of remarks from folks that they were shocked because my voice was quite low already.

So that made me think.  I mean, straight off the bat, that was a female range voice, yet it was being considered too low.  However, in the past if I presented as more female, no one ever thought anything of my voice.  Yeah, it was low but they still just heard a female voice because it was.  It lacked a male resonance.

However, if a trans woman could only talk at the range I was at, they'd be disappointed.  One woman had done a lot of voice work and actually talked higher than me at that time, and yet was really upset that she was, "Not in a female range!"  At that point I spoke up and was like, "Umm...you talk higher than me!"  And that was met with, "Oh but you have a low voice."  And my reaction to that is that yeah, it was low range, but it was STILL a female range.  Females can and do exist with that range.  Like I said, no one ever heard my voice and did a double take thinking "Oh, that's too low for a female!"

And now here you are, worrying about where your voice will end up.

The reality is, there's women with low range voices and there's men with higher range voices.  Cis individuals don't get a choice in where their voices end up, so neither do we!  (Unless they smoke like chimneys, then they get a choice, I guess).  If you have a lower range female voice, you're likely to have a lower male voice.  I've talked with other trans guys on T who have a higher voice than me but they still have obviously male voices. 

If you have a higher range voice then you're not going to drop a ton of octaves!  From what I've watched and heard, I think voices don't drop all that much in range really.  For me I think of the drop as being more a drop in where the voice comes from.  The range does shift, of course, but the resonance is the key to it all and that's what the voice sounds like coming more from your chest.  That's what I personally consider the drop - the shift from a voice sounding like it comes more from the throat shifting down to the chest.  For anyone on T, they can try to do their old female range voice again the same way trans women learn, by talking more from the throat.  Then you can hear that difference for yourself and that's when the idea of what's happened to the voice kinda hit me.

If you go into it thinking you're going to be Barry White, then you're asking for trouble.  But if you go into it thinking of it more like a drop in where the voice comes from, then you're better able to roughly guess where your voice will end up.

This is going to sound crazy, I know, and feel free to laugh your ass off at it because I openly admit that it sounds mental even to me, and I was nervous and umming, but I can actually roughly demonstrate throat VS chest talking to try and emulate the shift you'd be roughly able to get:

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0ymaRfJy7lE

Comparing the throat talking here to what I sounded like pre-T (through YouTube vids like this: ) it's damn close, although a teeny bit higher perhaps, and if I'm able to keep that up it means I might be able to hide transition from my grandparents as I don't want them knowing for inheritance reasons (and I'm using the same mic I use for a Skype phone call which ends up sounding more cell phone call quality so it passes pretty well for the quality level I need ).  What I'm doing with my voice is similar (but nowhere near as good) as what trans women can learn to do in order to feminise their voices.

Also notice that when I do a pre-T voice I've been practicing it with my Scottish accent more (for grandparents).  Tried to keep it Candianised for this but failed .

I also do realise that I am lucky with my range.  I'm near 3 and a half months on T and it could well get even lower, I don't know, so you may even be annoyed with me giving an example or saying anything, but I'm just demonstrating how mine shifted.  I did have a low voice pre-T so that really went in my favour here, so that's why I say it's worth just baring in mind that where you're at pre-T is going to make a difference when you take T, it'll let you know roughly what's possible.  Where you're at now is, unfortunately, just the luck of the draw.

As for lower growth, I'm actually kinda the same as you.  I could take it or leave it.  It doesn't make much difference for me.  I'm looking more to get phalloplasty as opposed to metoidioplasty in my future, so how big it gets doesn't make too much difference to me in that regards (at the moment at least).  I also tend to pack regardless.

Jack_M@ wow thanks for the response XD I have a pretty low voice for a girl too, though it cracks alot naturally. im in a funky range. I suppose, I am not too dysphoric about where i am as far as range, how low it is when i talk but the quality of it. I really shouldn't be, it would be nice if i could someday get over the wierd hump my voice has, not quite low enough to come from below my throat but also not high enough to come from my throat unless i force it higher.  might be fromt eh PCOS i don't know. it's always been like that.

I suppose my weird feeling from earlier was just me being a bit afraid of the unknown, I am really a super cautious person. things like permanent changes scare teh sh*t out of me but i do know what i want so i just gotta get around that fear. cuz heck i don't even have piercings cuz im afraid of something going wrong, it's ridiculous XD

just gotta keep the end goal in mind. everything else will just move into place like it has been.

i'm also scared of permanent changes. that would be the reason why i dismissed the thought of transition as soon as it hit me when i was in middle school.

voice is a funny thing. once when i'd had a cold for three weeks, it had ended up really low. too much coughing and a very sore throat made it impossible to speak with anything other than a chest voice, with a completely relaxed throat. never sounded manlier... but i've also once happened to talk to some really cute girls from kyouto. tying to speak "right" made my voice raise into a range that i'm ashamed of having ever talked in. my funny experience is that the voice get deeper with relaxing the throat rather than forcing the voice down, it at least sounds more natural and less like a teenager trying to force it. as an example of this, you can take those times when i've answered the phone when half asleep, and my dad thought i was his brother. another time, when i was in a female mode (which means making an effort to sound more feminine than i really am), he thought i was his sister.

*raises hand* I've had a similar experience. For the past few months I've hardly been able to stop thinking about the idea of T and surgery, but a few weeks ago I sat down and really thought about the changes and tried to envision myself going through them and it seemed... overwhelming, is the best word to describe it? Like, I know I won't go to bed one night and wake up (physically) male in the morning, but the body I've been saddled with-as much as it pains me to live in it-is the only body I ever have lived in, and until I can actually experience living in a male body and confirm that it's the right one for me there will always be that shadow of doubt trailing behind me. It sucks, but I guess doubt is just a natural part of the process.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^this.
that is what i have going on right now too. I want to change, i have the means to do so, good insurance and accepting family and friends, money isn't an issue but as soon as i think about injecting T for the rest of my life i do get worried. i don't even know if i would need top surgery... my boobs are flat, and if t shrinks them a bit they would look just flatter i guess. but if they didn't shrink, and i had to get top surgery that's another freak out thing. having surgery is no fun, i do want my boobs gone, but if the doctor screws em up to what i wasn't expecting or the scars don't fade cuz i have really super pale easy to scar skin will i be more dysphoric than when i was pre surgery? those are the sort of things i worry about. i want them gone, but to what measure am i willing to go? 

the idea of phalloplasty or downstairs anything doesn't even cross my mind.

when i think to myself, yes i want to be male, i want to have pros pros pros pros etc. and as soon as i think of eh cons it's like a tidal wave of doubt.

If your chest is super flat already, if you did need surgery, you could prob get peri and have nothing to worry about with scars.

Jack@ you serious? that just made my day man XD i had no clue of that option.

I have pale, easy-to-scar skin and had a pretty flat chest pre-surgery and by 3 months post-op it was impossible for people to tell I even had surgery unless I told them where to look. If you're flat enough you can get it so the incisions only go around part of the areola (assuming the areolas are also small enough you don't want them resized).

That said, I don't think people should be doing anything with irreversible changes if they're not 100% certain about it. Top surgery IMO is not as big a deal as hormones...breasts are pretty much an either/or thing so if you don't want them then you don't, and there are always revisions...but with t, you don't know for sure how you'll look or sound in a few years. If that uncertainty really bothers you then I'd honestly suggest waiting, talking it over with close friends/family and a therapist. If you end up waiting for several years and then going on t it wouldn't likely change your results much if at all, and it'll be a more positive experience if you're sure you want it. If you're worried a lot about how you'll look/sound/etc. then you could end up disappointed, it's kind of unpredictable.

i think when it comes to t, it is important to know what changes are irreversible, and what will go back to how it was before if you decide to stop. after reading a lot about this and many guys' different experiences, i've concluded that if i manage to get hrt, i could safely try it out for about 6 months to see if it has the effects that i hope it will have. i'd be able to accept the irreversible changes that happen within that time frame even if i conclude that t isn't right for me.

top surgery is a little different for me. i both want and don't want it, so that's where i have to think things through very carefully.

and just to say, it took me over a year to figure this out after finding the necessary information. it's wasn't easy, and i've consciously decided to not talk to any therapist who specializes in transsexuality, just because i don't want anyone else's conceptions about norms and the "right" way to influence my judgement. i'm quite terrified of ending up trapped in yet another binary that just doesn't feel right for me.

I get that. My therapist wont even think about writing me letters until at least january and only then if i am 100% certain its what i want. I know i want to be a man. And i am aware of what that implies what i am in for the rest of my life.

But i sort of realize i dont have anything to lose but so much to gain. I dont like being a girl, i know that and to me i dont have any redeeming qualities that i would be mortified if i lost on t. Really i cant find a pro to being female but so many to being male so i think i just gotta keep plugging forward towards the goal wether that starts now or years from now.