How Transgender People Are Changing Their Voices

Lorelei Erisis, a transgender woman, tries out the Eva app in her Ayer home. (Martha Bebinger/WBUR)




A number, 75 percent, pops onto the screen.









A screenshot of the Eva app

A screenshot of the Eva app


Transgender men — that is, women making the transition to men — can lengthen their vocal cords and develop deeper voices if they take testosterone. But for transgender women who begin the transition to female after puberty, hormone therapy does not make vocal chords shorter or thinner. Some transgender women have surgery to shorten their vocal cords, but the results are not predictable.

Learning to sound like a man or woman goes beyond pitch, says Adrienne Hancock, an assistant professor of speech at George Washington University who studies transgender voice and communication.

There’s resonance. Hancock says imagine actor James Earl Jones humming an “M.” As compared to, say, Marilyn Monroe.

And patterns of speech can be quite different for men and women, argues Celia Hooper, a dean at the University of North Carolina Greensboro who has taught speech and language classes for transgender men and women on and off since 1978.

“Let’s say I wanted to be a typical older male,” Hooper says, offering an example. “I’d use short, clipped speech. ‘Yep, nope, just like that.’ ”

Women are more likely to elaborate and use what Hooper calls flowery speech, “saying things like, ‘Oh, it’s just fabulous. That’s just marvelous.’ ” Or, laughs Hooper, “‘Bless your heart.’ ”

Hooper has had clients watch soap operas, first with the sound up, then off.

“Not that you want to be like that, but soap operas are full of people who are either hyper-female or hyper-male, so you can get an idea of their behavior and then kind of reel it in because gender expression is on a continuum,” Hooper says.

Erisis, the transgender woman, has discovered the implications of her position on that continuum.

“If I use a more submissive tone and a more questioning tone, people will be more likely to gender me as female,” she says. “On the flip side, if I make statements, if I’m clear about what I’m saying, if I’m bold, people will very often be more likely to gender me as male.”

So Erisis chooses, from one conversation to the next, whether she wants to be seen as female — and perhaps be taken less seriously — or seen as male.

“I have to make those little decisions every day, often several times a day,” she says.

There is some debate about which physical characteristic most clearly signals our gender. Voice, says the speech language pathologist Perez, is a window into the emotional or spiritual self.

“[Voice] is indeed the organ of the soul,” she says, quoting the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
