Disclaimer: What is written here is from the perspective of one trans woman and I do not speak for all of the trans community.
Voice is the method of communication that we use most often. It is how we make connections with people and how we express who we are to others. It can be used to make people happy or sad. It is also used to identify a person. In our society and culture, we look for visual cues to help us determine the identity of a person. These visual cues can typically include the clothing that we wear, the way we groom ourselves, or even the way that we walk and use our body to express emotions. These cues are used to define how a person is gendered. If a someone is wearing cargo shorts, a football jersey, and has hair on their legs and arm, then people would associate that person with masculine characteristics and assume that that person is a man. However, if that person were talking and it sounded high pitched and feminine, then people do a re-examination of what that person’s “true gender” is. (True gender being what people think that person’s gender should be based on the visual and audio cues)
For a transgender person, voice can be life or death. If a transwoman is completely passing but speaks and has a low, deep voice, then the people around her may either give dirty/confused looks or go so far as to inflict violence on the transwoman. For transwomen and transmen, passing is when they are able to fit the traditional gender roles of what a woman and man should look like. There have been several cases where voice is the soul thing that outs a trans person and other people inflict violence and sometimes even kill that trans person. For me, voice was something that brought on severe anxiety in the earlier days of my transition. On my 18th birthday and I went out into public as myself for the first time, I could barely muster the confidence to speak to my two friends for fear of someone outing me and I could only imagine what would happen if that moment came to pass.
I was so deathly afraid of simply having to speak in public, I turned to resources online to see if there was any way to modify my voice. Unfortunately, once the body undergoes puberty a certain muscle, the larynx, slowly expands outward and forms what’s known as the “Adam’s apple.” Once this process was complete or even underway, there is no way to permanently place the larynx back into place. For transmen who undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT), the larynx will slowly move into place and their voice will naturally deepen. (Hormone replacement therapy is the process which a trans person either inserts testosterone into their body, for transmen, or inserts estrogen into their body and suppresses testosterone, for transwomen). There is a surgical option to shave the larynx back into a person’s throat; however, it is a very costly surgery and the risk is high. Some have completely lost their voice after undergoing the surgery and even after the surgery has been completed, the person would still need to train their voice to hit the right pitch and resonance.
As an 18-year old at the time, I turned towards the internet for some form of lessons that could raise the pitch of my voice and allow it to sound more feminine. However, speech therapists were charging close to a $100 per session and there didn’t seem to be any way that I could get professional help. I was luckily able to find a free guide produced by Deep Stealth Productions that was an in-depth guide on what to do. The issue was that even after doing the exercises for a few months, I was still terrified to hear my own voice because I feared that I made no progress. Even 2 years later, I’m still afraid to record videos where I’m talking or to even talk to people because I’m afraid that my voice sounds off. For a large part of my college career, I didn’t talk to anyone because I was so terrified of what they might say after they heard me speak. This is also the truth for some other trans people that I know and it causes a great deal of anxiety speaking in front of a whole classroom full of people.
My advice is to never make comments on how a person’s voice sounds. It’s like if a person has acne, most likely that person knows that they have acne and would rather not have attention drawn towards it. For a trans person who may have a shaky or different voice, do not draw attention to it, more than likely that trans person is aware of their own voice in some way and is simply trying to feel confident enough in themselves to actually speak. Furthermore, always ask the pronouns of a trans person and be sure not to misgender them simply because their voice may or may not fit the traditional roles or masculine or feminine. Voice is one the largest parts of self-expression and if we can’t even speak then we become something even lower than oppressed.