A little late, here's this week's dose of #TransVoiceFriday self-flagellation.

I despair at ever sounding any better; it all still sounds like a dying wheeze. I'm not even all that fussed about sounding pleasant. If I could just produce reliably comprehensible words, that would be a huge step forward.

Also, I've found that none of the fiction I read in my youth comes remotely near passing the Bechdel test.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beeton%27s_Christmas_Annual/A_Study_in_Scarlet/Part_1/Chapter_3

I haven't seen any #TransVoiceFriday posts of late so I'm going to have a little fun today.
On my break, I grabbed a quiet spot and did this.
Please note it's for fun and not for Rate My Voice.

A little snippet from the late, great Tom Lehrer.

I'm late for #TransVoiceFriday, which is particularly egregious because I already had something recorded. Someone at #3CR was collecting anecdotes from trans people about how they chose their name, so I put on my posh voice and sent them this.

If you'd like to hear more incisive, socially relevant, quality content like this, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that for the price of a cup of coffee a month, yada yada: https://www.3cr.org.au/subscribe

Been listening to recordings of my voice for the last few days, which is an uncomfortable experience. I sound okay when I'm talking to myself as I potter about the flat (a perfectly normal thing to do, by the way), but there seems to be something about the presence of a microphone.

So I think I should recommit to #TransVoiceFriday, and post a one-take every week, not agonising about getting it perfect. Don't feel obliged to listen, just tell me off if I don't post anything.

I have ferocious voice dysphoria at the moment, and the only way I can think of dealing with it is by committing to a program of regular public humiliation, otherwise known as #TransVoiceFriday

Today's reading comes from the book of Adams I, chapter 1, and demonstrates how far I haven't progressed in two and a half years.

A friend supplied me with a poem, when I had asked for one: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17125760

And so I read it out, in order to post here on the fediverse, for #transvoicefriday

Enjoy molybdomantic's The Gate Of Hell, Or, On the Redemption of Souls

I enjoyed reading it

Where I info dump about starting to learn archery and something I experienced at the range a couple of weeks ago.

#Archery
#TransVoiceFriday
#Storytime

Hey folks 🩷

We did the #TransVoiceFriday thing 🫶

Once again, cos of the stupid alt-text character limit, we've had to put the transcript within the post.

#TransVoice #VoiceTraining #VoiceFeminisation #VoiceDysphoria #trans #transgender #TransFem #TransWoman #transition #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+

Transcript

Hey lovelies, loveliers and loveliests. We're going to try to do a quick voice recording while it's still Trans Voice Friday, because we haven't done one in a while, and we feel like we should try to whilst we can. We haven't exactly made a breakthrough as such with our voice or anything, but we have begun to feel like maybe it's not as awful as we'd started to believe it must be, due to the frequent misgenderings we've continued to have in recent months. Part of this was from realising that we actually do have limited recordings of our pre -transition voice, going at least as far back as about 2004, which was during our uni days. We actually have even older recordings going as far back as 1999, but those are in digitised versions of family video recordings and lower audio quality. Listening to those made us realise that we have gradually feminised our voice over the last four plus years, which kinda helped us to stop completely hating our current voice. Don't get us wrong, we still don't like our current voice, and very much want to improve it. However, it softened the feeling of cringe we'd been having whenever listening back to ourselves. We've also realised that, from others' point of view, we actually don't have a bad voice or vocal range. For example, if we work our way gradually into it, we can raise our pitch and hold it higher like this more-stereotypically-femme head voice. It doesn't sound particularly awful to us, but it also doesn't sound quite like how it should sound. So we tend to let it sit around this level instead. By the same token, if we focus on our voice, we can gradually push it lower and lower and keep using this deep chest voice. But the moment we stop holding it down here, it naturally floats back up to this point we've got ourselves to. Once we've got more time and energy, we'll try to do more recordings and share thoughts, but for now, this will sadly have to do. Ta-ta for now.

Edit: In case anyone's interested, our pitch range was about as low as 81 Hz and apparently as high as 274 Hz, but we're not 100% sure. However, given that we were given a pitch target of A#3, which is about 233 Hz, ages back, it's not impossible.