Recently, I've encountered several instances in real life and on television where a woman was speaking and if you didn't look at her from the beginning, you would swear the woman had a man's voice. In most cases, it was pitch or lack of cadence/prosody. I believe both men and women are starting to use similar ways of speaking so the result is a more ambiguous/androgynous voice for both men and women. If you want an example of ambiguous/androgynous cadence/prosody for men, think of the man who speaks and always seems to sound like he's asking a question when he's really making a statement. Nowadays, younger men can speak with female sing-songing so long as they still have the break-pause moments in their speaking to anchor other people's minds that a man is speaking (think Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Batman vs Superman).
Women media personalities who have men's voices that come to mind: Leslie Jones from SNL and Ruth McCabe (see in My Left Foot and
http://www.voicebank.ie/profile/Ruth_McCabe). Those are deep. Then there's Alissa White-Gluz who sounds like a guy with laryngitis when singing and like a 16 year old boy when speaking. Plus, see here for an interesting article on "The hell of being a woman with a MAN'S VOICE: Is having a deep voice socially advantageous - or just plain irritating?"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3689324/The-hell-woman-MAN-S-VOICE.html ). So it seems that when a woman has a deep man's voice, it's considered warm and romantic sounding, maybe even sultry, which is just a nice way of saying the obvious... hey, she has a man's voice but she still speaks like a woman.
When I had my original voice, the only times I was clocked consistently was over the phone. In person and after many years of real-life-experience, because of my presentation skills, I was rarely clocked unless someone was looking for it. I liked the fact that I could sing even if I did sound like a man. With my new voice, I can sound great on my best days but pretty androgynous on bad days and when my voice is tired at the end of the day it could sound like I have laryngitis. I can't sing anymore. I wish I could, but I can't. My range is way too limited to sing much more than an octave. I think there is something to the differences in the size of the throat and not just stitching up the vocal cords to raise the pitch.
On the whole, though, even after almost two years after my second surgery, I still think of my outcome as a modest success. I look at it this way... if I'm a reasonably attractive person going for surgery to make myself look like a supermodel, chances of looking like a supermodel no matter who the surgeon is are slim to none. However, there is a better chance I could look 1% to 10% better than I originally did and possibly a much higher chance of looking worse (think of all of those women who get new lips or cheek implants that are way too big for their faces). Overall, I'm 10% better than I was before, so that's a modest success (maybe even considered a success) given the good and the bad. I think doctors need to curb patients' expectations. These days we rely too much on the one word of mouth person who praises a certain surgeon to no end just because that person got a great result, never thinking that there were many factors that led to that great result. Many factors that the rest of us may not have.
This is why listening to all the praise and listening to all the really bad reviews is not the way to go. I would like to know what the average person can expect and that's the type of surgeon I usually gravitate towards.
