Finding My Voice, Literally
As a trans woman it’s taken work to change my voice, but becoming myself is worth it
I’ve never liked my voice. As a child, when I heard myself in recordings, I’d think I sounded like I was trying to be someone I wasn’t (partly because I was). When my voice broke at puberty, I came to detest it even more. The deeper it got, the more I felt like my voice was an unfaithful facsimile — it identified me, but it also misrepresented me. It was too deep. It was full of masculine affectations that I’d absorbed from other people to fit in. It was full of eagerness for acceptance, masking fear and insecurity. In so many ways, it felt inauthentic, forced, and fragile.
In adulthood, I stopped paying attention to what I hated about my voice, and started paying attention to how to use it. I learned that volume, silence, intonation, and tone were powerful channels for non-verbal communication. As a teacher and speaker, I learned to stimulate curiosity with pauses, to create confidence with baritone, and to get attention with projection. My voice, as much as I hated it, became a tool to command audiences, to demonstrate listening, and to pretend to be a man. It was still inauthentic, forced, and fragile, but in a useful way.
Maybe changing my voice isn’t really about changing…
