Gender Hacks

Today’s Super Easy Trans Voice Activity

The soft underbelly of sound

Calling all trans girls! Or anyone else who wants to make their voice sound a little more like their kind of lady.

I want to discuss a mega common obstacle to voice feminization. But more important…a quick tip on how to get past it.

We start off by getting a bunch of other stuff right

Tell me if you’ve heard this story before.

• We start off speaking in a slightly higher pitch (not as important as we thought, but…)
• We lighten the weight of our voice
• We brighten the resonance
• We eliminate that horrid buzzzzzzzzz undertone that makes even a soprano sound like a dude

And yet as soon as we say actual sentences, we realize none of it matters if…

We missed that one thing

That’s just a cliffhanger gimmick to keep you reading. You won’t mess your voice up just because you missed one thing.

Everything you do to cultivate your voice matters. This is just one of those things that I think matters most of all.

The soft underbelly of your voice

If your voice sounds hollow, the pitch stops mattering.

Once you get rid of the buzzy undertone that makes a girl’s voice sound like a dude’s, it’s not like there’s a wonderful sound left in its place.

Here’s me pretending to have a hollow voice.

If you don’t fill that leftover space, it’ll just be a hollow cavern. That place that used to contain a buzzsaw now sounds like the emptiness of deep space.

And yeah yeah, that super cool James Webb telescope revealed space is even less empty than we thought but —

Wait, maybe they’re on to something. If that’s true about space, isn’t it true about your voice?

The James Webb trans voice spectrum

Testosterone makes it hard to fill out the soft underbelly of your voice with something other than a buzzsaw. As the vocal cords thicken and get longer, it’s easier for your voice to touch deeper, darker, rougher pitches.

That buzzsaw tone is one of the last elements to go if you’re working to feminize your voice.

Note: This is just, like my experience, but it’s often the place people start from who are working to masculinize their voice

It’s just what happens when a voice spends that much time with testosterone.

The power of a high-pitched sun

I think of a testosterone-impacted voice almost like Superman first being exposed to the yellow sun that gives him powers. He walks around in a world of tissue paper. His trouble is containing all that power.

I wrote a fan fiction story where Superman had a choice whether to accept the yellow sun’s energy— or admit they were trans and resist how much the sun would masculinize their body (and their voice).

In the real comic books, Superman is a boy (shocker). He learned to contain his powers. Through rigorous practice, Superman figured out how to make his powers so precise that he gives the impression he’s kinda brawny but weak as hell.

Here’s how he’d fill out his voice to sound as much like a girl as he wants (and might secretly be).

Constriction vs Retraction

Superman would fill out that space with two different methods:

• Retraction
• Constriction

Retraction refers to the soft expulsion of air that makes the sound of your voice. Kinda like a yawn, but with enough air to engage your voice beyond falsetto.

Here’s an example of the soft underbelly of your voice.

The opposite is Constriction. Think of that like an old man yelling, or what metal singers do to get that buzzzzzzzzzz.

Here’s me yelling like an old man.

It’s actually best to work on this one in your mid to lower pitch range (imo) since if you go too high, it’s a lot harder to make this sound without flipping into falsetto.

The tone of your pitch

In the documentary In Search of Greatness, the legendary hockey player Wayne Gretzky said that the reason anyone becomes excellent at anything is because the thing a person is great at isn’t an activity. It’s a lifestyle.

When Wayne Gretzky walks down an aisle in a grocery store, he can’t help it. His mind coordinates each object, each person, each flight path, the density of each object and how they would react if catapulted off the floor and down —

You gotta do the same thing with your voice.

We can’t just reach for gender. We need to reach for an expression of self. Gender is just one part of revealing our authentic sound.

I like to just talk a lot (but only when no one is around lol). I talk to myself. I mumble. I hum. I make strange noises.

I imitate people from movies and TV shows. If I hear an interesting voice, I’ll play around until I can make the same kind of sound.

I keep it within that medium-ish pitch range, because that’s where I’m going to end up talking all the time anyway. Besides, it’s not like pitch matters that much.

Speak your truth

If you love figuring out how to contort your mouth and throat and voice box into new shapes to make new sounds, I hope this exercise helps you enjoy cultivating your voice.

If you have a deep and/or raspy voice, here are a bunch of deep female voices from cis women. Undeniably women with undeniably deep feminine voices. Would one of their voices serve as a good example for the voice you’re cultivating in your transition?

And if you want a little motivation, the Transgender Little Mermaid comes with a guaranteed front-row seat.