A feminine voice is as important as any other aspect when you're talking about passing and blending in with the public. Most of us are not gifted with the privilege of transitioning early and often times deal with our voices dropping. If we want to blend in with the public, and not get stared at as soon as a word comes out of our mouth, then it is our obligation to adjust ourselves to some amount of "acceptable standard". This includes the overall image you project from your appearance, to your mannerisms to your voice and speech patterns.
Now with that said, you can adjust yourself to an "acceptable standard" and still be unique. In my experience the acceptable standard is actually quite wide and you only need to fit into this standard with the majority of your presentation for the general public to put you on your desired side of the gender binary.
There are a number of things to consider. Your appearance, your mannerisms and your voice. In my experience, you need to meet about 2.5 of these 3 criteria to pass. For instance, if you have a feminine appearance and mannerisms, but you have a manly voice, it's going to be a lot harder to pass; if you are able to work up to at least an androgynous voice, basically to the point to where people can't tell what you are on the phone, then you should be able to pass without much problem. Granted, it's more complicated because each of those 3 points are quite intricate and complex.
Your appearance; hair, eyebrows, facial hair, clothing; these are the 4 biggest things you can address to passing based on your appearance.
Long, feminine hair styles really transform the entire face. Big bushy eyebrows are not characteristic of a woman's general appearance. Facial hair, obvious one there. Clothes are VITALLY important, picking clothes that can work with your body, even creating a faux shape can give you the appearance of having hips, even if you don't. Not all clothes work for all people; the certain style you like may not be flattering to your body shape. Tight clothing is often the most difficult to get away with; while clothes that are too baggy kind of makes you look more masculine. Experiment, play around, find your middle ground, when you do find the right article of clothing, it will SCREAM at you when you wear it.
Your mannerisms; walk, sit, standing idle, talking with your hands, etc. ; are all subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) queues that people pick up on. Things like avoiding slouching, keeping your legs closed or crossing them over at the knee, walking with shorter strides; these are all small things that can add up. If you walk with large strides and with a heavy foot, you'll look like a guy. Spreading your legs while sitting is a nasty habit that I see a lot of transgirls do.
Now we're at the meat of this write-up.Your VOICE; resonance, pitch, consistency, loudness; 4 things, in order, that are vital to getting a really feminine voice. I'm going to try to explain each of these points as best I can.
Resonance is absolutely, 100%, without a doubt
the most important part of your voice. If you raise your pitch without addressing your resonance, you'll just sound like a man with a high pitched voice. 75% of the voice is resonance, or lack thereof, and the rest is pitch and projection (loudness).
It doesn't matter if you have a low voice, some women have lower voices, and you can have a low voice and still sound feminine. There is a certain pure tone that a lot of women have regardless of their pitch and the reason for that is
RESONANCE! Okay, so are you tired of me talking about resonance? Tough! Let's talk about how you can fix it!
So to get the resonance you need to sound feminine is to stop talking from your chest, and to start resonating from your head. Sounds easy, right? It is simple, but it isn't necessarily easy. It's hard because getting out of your chest resonance can be quite challenging, and keeping it in your head resonance takes a bit of muscle strength. I know for me, this was the hardest step for me to tackle. Let's talk about how we can get into your head resonance.
A lot of videos and tutorials online may tell you to go into your falsetto and sound like Mickey Mouse, then bring it down, and soften it. That never worked for me. It may work for you, and it's worth giving a try, I'll post some links at the bottom of this write-up for how to do this. For me, getting out of my chest voice involved singing at my upper range. When you do this you'll feel your larynx (Adam's apple) raise up to a higher position in your throat, this is where it needs to be. Another way was to try to sound surprised, think of when someone surprises you with tickets to a concert and you're saying in an excited voice, "Wow, Thank you for the tickets! These are super mega totally cool!!" You may feel your larynx rise when you talk like that, pay attention to this feeling and try to raise the larynx even further to reduce the resonance.
When you try to sing, find someone who is at the upper end of your range but doesn't make you strain too hard or cause your voice to "crack" too much. After a few songs you may feel your voice getting tired, this is normal. What is happening is the muscles which raise your larynx and tighten your vocal chords are weak, and like any other muscle they need to be strengthened. This brings me to my next point.
Practice is vital because it adds much needed strength to your muscles. If you remember, consistency was one of the 4 points I brought up on how to work on your voice. Practice will bring consistency. As you strengthen your muscles, you will also get a higher range because as your muscles get stronger you can pull your vocal chords tighter and get higher pitches, much like a guitar string.
Pitch is an easy part to address. After you tackle resonance, just play with the pitch and get to something that you think sounds good. Be careful not to get too high, because girls are very erratic with the pitch of their voice. Girls put emphasis on certain words and statements by using pitch variations, while guys tend to project louder while being more monotone. Think of the differences between guys and girls when they say, "
What a cute kitty/cat!" Girls will put an emphasis on pitch and it almost sounds like they're singing. While guys tend say it more quickly and to the point, while putting emphasis on certain words like "cute" by saying it louder.
Girl's will also elongate words of the sentence, for instance when saying "
What a cute kitty!", girls may elongate the Y at the end of "kitty", so it may sound more like "
kittyyyyyy-". This may be a cliché, but it does tend to be true for a lot "standard" girls.
Loudness/Project your voice. Another problem I had for a while was I had a habit of talking a bit too softly. This has a tendency to sound "fake". Just try to talk louder while maintaining your resonance and pitch. It's not too challenging, but it is something you need to be conscious of.
I have a few extra tips about your voice.
Record yourself. I know you didn't want to hear this, but it's super important, and it can REALLY help you. I've named a condition that we all feel when we record ourselves, the "
Butthole Complex"; because you feel like a butthole when you hear yourself. But it is really really important to do, the reason it's so important is because you need to hear yourself outside of your head. When you talk, your sense of how you sound is flavored because your voice is resonating directly into your ears. Recording yourself is
VITAL.
Everything is cute or sad. Lots of "aww"s, girls do it
ALL THE TIME. When somebody says something, just say, "awww". If you see a bug clinging to life on your windshield as you drive 85mph down the highway, just say "aww" (and laugh a little because it's funny!).
After a while, when you get adjusted to your new voice and you become accustom to talking in your higher resonance, slightly higher pitch, and projecting your voice, you'll feel your voice sort-of click into place. This is hard to explain, it may have something to do with muscle memory. Once you get to that point, you'll find that you have a new lower range while maintaining this voice, you may not be able to get down to your overall low while in this voice, because this voice has its own unique range. This is something I've personally experienced, but I don't know if many others experience this.
When I try to talk at a lower range while in my preferred voice, my voice cracks and I can't get any lower. It's a different feeling than trying to drop down to my lower range while in falsetto.
Last suggestion I'm going to give is how you can practice talking to strengthen your muscles. I do suggest the use of a spectrogram.
This link will give you information on where you can get one, how to set it up, and how to use it. The software is free and it can be a valuable tool for training purposes. It can show you where your voice is sitting as far as pitch and it can help keep you at a proper range, because a lot of times your voice drops over extended use.
Finally here are the links I said I'd give you.
This one helped me a lot.
Hope this helps someone, took me a while to put together.
