Trans Tuesday 163 – Voice 2, hearing the true you (discharged from therapy, voice timeline, constant work, DISTERB) (revision of 104)
Welcome to #TransTuesday! This is the second part of our discussion of the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life! Welcome to TRANS VOICES 2: HEARING THE TRUE YOU aka I GRADUATED VOICE THERAPY OH NO WHAT DOES THAT MEAN.
Please see PART 1 of our discussion on voice, and voice therapy, and all the work I’ve been putting in for so very long. I began feminizing voice therapy in November of 2020!
Before we get into it, I need to talk about the response to Trans Voices 1: Gendering. Because what became readily apparent is that there are a whole lot of unqualified individuals offering “trans voice services” despite not remotely being qualified to do so.
I’ll also talk in a bit about the prevalence of YouTube tutorials on voice training, which are almost universally also from people not qualified to be providing that training. And listen, people want to help. I understand that. I do too.
But my method of helping was to talk about my own experiences with it, and you can see right in last week’s essay I made it abundantly clear: I am not a speech language pathologist. I’m not going to offer to coach you in it because I AM NOT REMOTELY QUALIFIED TO DO SO.
And almost nobody offering tips or classes or “coaching” is either, but they largely don’t bother to tell anyone that. And I don’t know if that’s because they’re being exploitative, or if they just genuinely don’t know.
Someone having degrees in music theory or who offer singing lessons are also not qualified to provide gender-affirming voice therapy. Nor are those who coach in how to do accents for voice acting.
Are you going to do that accent every time you speak for the rest of your life? NO. Are you going to sing everything you say for the rest of your life? NO. This is what I think people don’t understand.
In gender-affirming voice therapy, you are using muscles you’ve never used before (or used in this way before) and you have to build up strength in them and do it safely, because you are literally changing the way your muscles and parts of your body work.
When you need to do that for any other muscle or part of your body, do you go to someone who seems fit and sporty? Or do you go to a trained physical therapist? When you can’t see well, do you go to your friend with 20/20 vision or do you go to an optometrist?
When you have a cavity, do you go to your friend with good teeth and a drill at home? Or do you go to a dentist? When you need gender confirmation surgery, do you go to a friend who had it? Would you even go to someone who specializes in open heart surgery?
Of course not. You’d go to a surgeon who is trained and specializes in the care you need. VOICE IS NO DIFFERENT. You are changing the way your body functions, and you have got to be careful with what you do and who you listen to.
If you do the wrong things, you could end up damaging your voice. And then you’ll need voice therapy to try and fix the damage before you can even get to gender-affirming training.
Trans people don’t generally have much money, believe me I know. Gender-affirming voice training with a speech pathologist is not covered by all insurance and may be unaffordable without. So we have to do what we can on our own.
But you can get tips from speech pathologists. You can listen to the experts and not just someone who’s done it before or who knows a lot about music. Before you pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars, PLEASE: check their credentials.
Find someone who is QUALIFIED to give you SAFE and effective care. Speech language pathologists are medical professionals. Find one trained in gender-affirming care if you can. Singing, accents, music theory are NOT the same thing.
This is your body, and you’d go to an expert to fix any other part of it. Voice is no different, so please please please be careful. Be safe. I don’t want you to get hurt. Okay, on with today’s topic.
In late August of 2022, I had my last session with my second voice therapist… ever! I received this follow-up report afterward:
8/30/2022
Total number of visits: 28
Subjective: Patient seen for speech therapy video visit follow up. Patient agreed to treatment.
Objective: Patient averaged G3 in conversation, but reports that during practice, she averages A3 more often than she does not. She presented with thin vocal quality while maintaining feminine resonance in 90% of trials.
Assessment (including progress towards goals): Goals met.
Plan: Patient discharged from therapy.
Some of the more musically-minded out there may understand this better than I, but A3 is the average note I was shooting for in terms of pitch. Not that I’m speaking in a monotone, but my voice goes above and below that and that’s hopefully the center line.
That’s where I was at when I was discharged, and now, over a year later, I find I’m at the high side of A3 on average, whereas before I was on the low side.
I was basically hitting that when I remember to do all the shit I have to do! DISCHARGED FROM THERAPY WHAAAAAAAAAAAT. And it wasn’t that I needed to hit that A3 average to get discharged or anything, it was all based on ME and what I’m happy with.
Pitch work was the very last thing I did with my voice therapist. Well, let me back up, because in the original thread I told you about “sirens” and the like, which are part of pitch work.
As I mentioned in the first Voice topic, I had two voice therapists. The first only for a few months, and she had me starting with pitch.
But the second, who I had for the vast bulk of my time in therapy (and who I’ll have an interview with next week), had me start with everything ELSE first, and then we did pitch last.
And frankly that was a much better way for me because while shifting pitch isn’t what I’d call “easy,” it’s nowhere near as difficult as everything else.
We spent the least amount of time on pitch, honestly. It came pretty quickly. I CAN get my voice to where I want it to be, where it makes me HAPPY to hear it. That’s something I never thought would even be possible, honestly. I owe my therapist so much, she helped me work a miracle.
In fact, if it weren’t for her I would have NEVER been able to turn trans tuesdays into a podcast, or to be able to record the audiobook of my book BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX! Available now!
If you listen to that audiobook, my second voice therapist gets a special thanks at the end because, truly, my ability to record my book in my own voice would not have existed without her. She made it all possible. She’s the one I’m interviewing next week!
Quick aside, but in my discharge note it says I had 28 therapy sessions (over a period of about two years). That doesn’t tell the whole story, but it doesn’t count the sessions with my first therapist.
But also, that’s just the time talking with the voice therapist in training sessions, and doesn’t at ALL show the hours upon hours upon HOURS I spent doing voice homework and practicing. Daily. Every every every damned day.
And I suspect those 28 sessions are something I wouldn’t have been able to afford if it wasn’t covered by my insurance. I know trans ladies whose insurance doesn’t cover it, and they can’t afford it and are just stuck. Or they use YouTube tutorials and do the best they can.
The danger with that is that it’s very easy to hurt or even permanently damage your voice if you do the wrong things, and most of those tutorials are not from actual voice therapists. And that’s not great! Voice therapy NEEDS to be covered by insurance for trans people.
But that’s part of why I’m doing that interview with her next week, because hopefully she can give you tips on how to safely practice until you can hopefully see a licensed expert of your own.
For many trans people, voice is a vital part of addressing/lessening our gender dysphoria, as much as HRT or anything else can be. My voice therapist is actually releasing a book on it with some of her colleagues, and you can bet I’ll share that everywhere once it’s out.
But back to ME, because this is my thread. 😌So what does it mean that I got to that point? I’m done and good and my voice will be perfect forever?
Oh my no. No no no no.
It means there’s not much else my voice therapist could do for me. She had taught me all the tools and techniques that she could. So it became a matter of me CONTINUALLY PRACTICING until it’s all second nature. I used to wonder if it would ever happen.
The good news is IT DID! I’m so amazed and excited by it, but it came after well over another YEAR of daily practice after being discharged. So you’re looking at over three years of constant, daily work to get there.
Stamina was the last thing to arrive, as even when it was mostly second nature I just couldn’t maintain it for a very long time. Now I mostly can! But it still adds up and can falter, especially when I’ve talked an obscene amount.
You can hear this in action in the podcast versions of the nine-part discussion on the trans allegory of Silo season 1 (which begins HERE). We recorded all nine episodes in the span of two days, which took about three hours each day. But the day before we started recording?
I ran one of my tabletop role-playing game sessions, where I’m basically talking for something like four hours straight. Under that much strain I think ANYONE’S voice is going to falter and sound weird and tired, and mine certainly does and you can easily hear it.
BUT it caused me almost NO dysphoria even when so tired and strained! And I cannot tell you how HUGE that is. I don’t like how it sounds, it doesn’t sound like ME, but it doesn’t sound like HIM, y’know? It’s pretty amazing.
It’s SUCH A SLOW SLOW SLOW SLOW SLOW PROCESS. And through the entire thing you’re hearing every mistake you make and have to fix, because the best way to improve is to record yourself during practice and listen back.
It’s really hard to deal with, especially early on in the process when your voice still sounds mostly like your old deadvoice, and so recording and listening back to yourself exacerbates your dysphoria. But you NEED to do it to be able to hear and correct where you messed up.
So my forever homework was to record myself EVERY DAY, playing each one back and listening to how I did before I went on to the next one. Again and again and again, over and over and over.
Until I would MAYBE get to the day where I hit it right every time, all the time. A very big maybe. One of the hardest parts was not knowing if I’d ever get it to where it made me happy to hear all the time.
Because with the tools and techniques I have, my voice will KEEP CHANGING over time. I don’t know where it’ll be a year from now, or five years from now. Here’s a video with a transgender voice timeline my therapist shared with me. Listen to five years of difference!
So while I’m actually really happy with where my voice is now, I may like it even more in the future… which is pretty damned exciting. And while it’s all second nature now, for years it wasn’t. And it was a struggle to remember everything I needed to.
So I came up with a mnemonic to help me remember every part of it: DISTERB.
D – diaphragmatic breathing
I – intonation
S – slow down
T – tongue positioning
E – ee-ifying vowels
R – resonance
B – breathiness
I can’t really explain all of those to you here without making this thread so much longer than it already is, but the point is these are all different skills/techniques/issues I had to remember before talking.
Imagine having to remember ALL of those things before you speak, EVERY time you speak. It’s SO much it feels like your brain will melt. And then you’re also trying to think of what to say and HA HA OH IT IS SO FUN. Notice PITCH isn’t in there!
Those are the much more difficult things it took me years to get to the point where they’re second nature. Now, I probably couldn’t talk the way I used to if I tried. Actually though, I kind of did?
We’re big fans of What We Do In The Shadows over here, and before the show there’s a little title card and an announcer who, in a very deep and kind of hilariously “doesn’t this sound evil” voice says the title of the show and gives the content rating.
And it’s so weird and idiosyncratic, and… I don’t know why, but once I just blurted out a mimic of the way the announcer says it, in the same deep pitch. And not only did it emotionally feel TERRIBLE… it HURT. IT PHYSICALLY HURT.
My vocal folds and tongue and all those muscles that contribute to making sound have changed enough from my years of practice that now UNDOING it is as painful as trying to sound more feminine used to be when I was pushing things too hard. It’s a strange and fascinating thing.
I think most of you may know this, but in case you don’t: my wife and I run one of the oldest and biggest podcasting companies, Pendant Productions. We’ve been making scripted podcasts longer than just about anyone (and they’re freakin’ good too, but you don’t have to take my word for it).
I only mention that to say that there are tons of recordings of my voice through the years, and I can’t do anything about the old ones. They’re just going to be that way forever, even if I don’t listen to them again. BUT it led to a unique opportunity.
Ever since we started, way back before the flood of media that made it impossible to keep up with everything, I still felt that people choosing to spend their time listening to OUR shows meant something important. And so I‘d personally thank them at the end of every episode.
That means there are probably 500+ episodes across 20 shows out there right now that have a thanks from me at the end. And I’ve always said the exact same thing: “For more information, visit tillystranstuesdays.com. Thanks for listening.”
And for SOME reason (I honestly do not know why!?) I have kept every new version that I ever recorded. And as my voice began changing through voice therapy, I would record a new one because it sounded better than my old voice, even if it didn’t yet sound great.
I’ve stitched them all together. And so you can hear me saying the exact same thing over time as I progressed through voice therapy, which helps you really notice the different ways my voice changed and evolved as I learned and practiced more.
My voice therapist listened to this and said she could actually pinpoint exactly what techniques we were working on during each recording, because the sounds are that specific to the process.
Most of these spike my dysphoria really bad, ESPECIALLY the first one with my “normal” old deadvoice. If I never hear that again it’ll be too soon.
The voice timeline.
In order:
1. deadvoice
2. four months into therapy
3. eight months into therapy
4. eight and a half months into therapy
5. nine months into therapy
6. eighteen months into therapy
7. two years into therapy/Sept 2022
8. two and a half years after I began voice therapy/March 2023
That’s been my voice journey so far. Maybe I’ll do another update in a year or whenever I notice things have noticeably changed in some way again. I’m SO curious to know what I’m going to sound like a year, two years, five years from now.
Please be sure to see next week’s trans tuesday interview with my speech pathologist, who I hope can go more into the science behind it all and provide safe tips for people to practice and work on your own.
But I want to say to the trans folks out there who find this as daunting as I did…
Change. Is. Possible.
It may be the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to do (it was for me), but if you put in the time and the effort, remarkable things can happen.
It’s so hard to be patient, but you can’t rush voice changes or HRT or ANYTHING involved with transitioning, really. Every single part of it is an exercise in patience.
Be kind to yourself and don’t give up. You can get there. You’re worth it.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
PS – part 3 is here!