Hello, I am a twenty-year-old woman and I've been taking hormones and passing for about a year now. I have trained my voice (on my own) for awhile now, and I am confident that my voice sounds feminine and completely passes as female. However, I asked my mom for an honest assessment on my voice this morning, and although she agrees that I sound feminine, she said that my voice sounds annoying to her because I sound like a young girl instead of a young woman and I speak very softly. I would like some advice as to whether I should start from scratch on re-training my voice from outside resources such as the voice training exercises from tsroadmap.com under the 'Voice' category, or whether I can train my voice on a smaller scale since I sound feminine already and use a the voice range I'm happy to use. The fact that my voice doesn't sound mature really bothers me, and I want to be able to have a mature feminine voice and sound like a mature young woman.

Here is a clip of my voice recorded from vocaroo.com:

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1pGLZSjoXla

You have a young sounding voice, sure -- but that's just because of your tone (as in how high it is). The manner you speak in though is definitely mature, and you sound like a lot of women I've known who are your age, so I don't think you have anything to worry about. 

Just slow down a little - no way would anyone mistake your voice for male! You just talk so fast the words run together a little bit.

ahh I'm too tired to do any recordings right now but I'll post something tomorrow to give you an example as to what to aim for.

In the meantime, the only tips I can think of off the top of my head is try to lower your pitch just a tad bit, not too much since you're definitely in the female rage already and slow your word flow too by just a tiny bit. Oh and one more thing I'd like to add is that we're still relatively new when we finally find our voice so sounding like a woman that matches your age takes a bit of time you know. We never got to use this voice when we were younger so its natural imo to go through a time where we sound younger than we are in terms of speech pattern, pitch etc..On top of which our vocal chords take a long time to get fully adjusted as well. So try not to worry too much, eventually you'll get to where you want to be with your voice, like all things in our transitions it will come in time.

Just keep going. It will come in time as long as you continue to work on it. When I started to work on my voice. I sounded like a frickin' little girl. It was absurd, but that's where it was at. After some more work, I got into a range that was more consistent with my age. So, just keep going. You will get there.

EDIT: Now that I just listened to your voice recording. I think that you sound really good. Don't worry. I won't just say it to tell what you want to hear. If I thought it sucked, I would have said so.

Hi Rebecca! (love your name btw)

Before you read this, please know that I am not a voice therapist and am in no way qualified to help, but it really sounds like you're pinching muscles above your larynx, giving you almost a squeaky voice. Perhaps also be some tightening of the false vocal folds ( used in falsetto ) because I don't hear any overtones. It's quite mono-tonal even with the higher pitch.

To get a good sound, you really want to allow the air to flow freely through your larynx and through your nasal cavity. That's where your voice needs to resonate to sound 'full'.

Even when I fully block my nasal cavity, I don't quite get the same sound I hear in your voice, so there is more to it than this. If I really try to constrict my larynx and use my false vocal folds, I do get close. But wow that's hard to hold lol. And my poor neighbors must be wondering what I'm doing...

I kind of wonder what's happening to your larynx position actually. If you relax your voice and neck entirely, can you find your adams apple? Or feel where your larynx is? The after you're relaxed and have found it, prepare to talk. Does it move? If so, where and by how much?

Hi girl! All of us are brutally self critical in one way or another. The hard thing to do is listen to others opinions, but if those above say you are OK, well, you are OK. 

As my voice coach told me "Women tend to enunciate words far more clearly than men.  And they add a fluid emotion to sentences that men never use".

You sound really good, but don't crowd your words, and pronounce each word in it's entirety (even slang).

Omg I have exactly the same problem but I am 18 and never trained my voice. How masculine was your voice before you trained it? I am afraid to drop it too much. My voice is in the 260-280 Hz range so it is not very age appropriate but IDK I may have small vocal cords but my voice wouldn't be this high if I relaxed it.

Yeah it is feminine but like others have said, slow your roll turbo...then I think you'll have that womanly sound you and your mom are looking for

Hey Rebecca! I think your voice sounds fantastic. It's very sweet and calming. If it's stereotypical of anything, I would probably have read you as an elementary school teacher, so there's that!

I've been working on my voice on my own for a few weeks now, and I found a ton of great resources out there on YouTube. I won't post all of the links here, but I wrote a blog post a few days ago that has all of them in it in case you're interested in any other resources. At some point, maybe I'll be as brave to share a recording of myself and see what everyone thinks.

http://www.katrinasinclair.com/2014/10/18/talk-that-talk/

Great work!

Hi Rebecca

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with your voice except perhaps for issues of delivery. 

As others have said, slow down, enunciate, and also try introduce a little more inflection or "singing" into your speech.  Men deliver speech in a near monotone.  Women drop in a lot of pitch variations.  You don't need to have a high voice to sound like a woman....

Julia