Jess👾
Trans pro tip:
You don't have to stress too much about ensuring you always do fem/masc/neutral voice around close friends and family who accept you. To them, you just sound like you.
Mar 24 at 5:46pmWeb
Show threadJess👾23h ago
When either of us are thinking hard and concentrating on other stuff, or tired or not with good posture and breath support or whatever, it's easy for voices to go to shit. But folks who know you for you? It simply doesn't matter. You're you. You sound like you. Just a you who is distracted or tired or whatever else
Show threadGay Violet20h ago
@JessTheUnstill 🌠 Agreed 100%! Change your voice for yourself, not for other people; the same goes for every part of your presentation. The only person who absolutely has to live with your choices is you.
Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   23h ago

@JessTheUnstill Strangers, too, TBH. Like, I watched this video on another platform of a girl with really bad voice dysphoria talking about how she desperately needs VFS.

I never would have known she was trans if she hadn't been talking about dysphoria.

Gender detection is a grab-bag of different factors and no one of them is The Thing.

Show threadJess👾23h ago
@faithisleaping I do focus the most at the start of conversations - especially on the phone. Cis people tend to quickly lock you into a gender and keep you there regardless. So give them as many signals as you can up front
Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   23h ago
@JessTheUnstill Yeah, I definitely put in more effort over the phone. On the phone, that and maybe your name are literally the only things they have to go by. In person, though, I have a decent default from a few years of habit building but otherwise don't typically even think about it anymore.
Show threadJess👾23h ago
@faithisleaping I still stress about it when I hear recordings - the worst is distorted feedback in video calls - but then again I've never really liked hearing myself. So meh. I just do my usual thing and somehow it works out "well enough".
Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   22h ago
@JessTheUnstill Oh, for sure. I did a talk earlier this year the conference has presenters approve videos before they go out to make sure stuff like audio sync is okay. I took psychic damage listening to myself.
Show threadJo (lesbian is my persona era)23h ago

@JessTheUnstill
@faithisleaping

I spent more time on "answering the phone" in voice lessons than any other single thing. And it's basically the first second or two of sound and yeah you get locked in so long as you don't have any jarring dramatic shifts in sound.

Show threadJess👾23h ago
@ElsaPreme @faithisleaping my "catch phrase" is a "hey there" since I can pretty much always toss that in and normalize my pitch and resonance by habit. It helps set things up so I'm not wildly swinging around finding the right groove.
Show threadJo (lesbian is my persona era)23h ago

@JessTheUnstill @faithisleaping

My pharse is "Hi, this is Jo..." Hi was what we agreed on worked the best for me being the "brightest" saund I could consistently make from not talking.

Also I love the name Jo so I always say it in just the best voice. But I don't always drop my name. It depends on who's calling.

Show threadLuna Dragofelis ΘΔ🏳️‍⚧️🐱22h ago
@JessTheUnstill @faithisleaping my "solution" as someone who doesn't pass in any way yet and is currently too intimidated by the effort to try: I just say explicitly that I'm trans.
Show threadMorgan ⚧️22h ago
@JessTheUnstill @faithisleaping oh that's a good idea, I should try that. I've found that when people can see my face, they usually just gender my voice as "gay", but on the phone I'm pretty likely to get misgendered, and in public it depends on how they gender my clothes because my mask covers the beard... So maybe I should start those conversations off with an attempt at sounding masculine and then let go, because that sounds a lot easier than forcing it the whole time 😅
Show threadJess👾21h ago
@raphaelmorgan @faithisleaping Yeah, first impressions are key when dealing with casual cis interactions. They just don't think too hard, take the first random gendered signals they notice, make a snap judgement, and stick with it since MOST people they interact with are just cis people
Show threadMorgan ⚧️22h ago
@faithisleaping @JessTheUnstill it makes me sad how often trans people think we're Instantly Clockable because of One Trait that is just a normal variance in all categories of human... Low voices on women are beautiful, low voices on cis women are common, and low voices on trans women frequently sound no different than low voices on cis women. I should remember this about short men as well 😅
Show threadJackie22h ago

@raphaelmorgan @faithisleaping @JessTheUnstill

I'm very insecure about my voice because people always compare it to my brother's

Show threadMorgan ⚧️21h ago
@burnoutqueen @faithisleaping @JessTheUnstill 🫂 I get that. I hope over time you can learn to see it as simply a low voice on a woman, no different than on a cis woman. Or change it to your liking--either way is fine by me (and I'd be a hypocrite for suggesting trans people not do anything to change our voices, bc that's been my favorite effect of the T) I just want you to love yourself and every part of you
Show threadJackie21h ago

@raphaelmorgan @faithisleaping @JessTheUnstill

I can work around the low pitch.

Show threadJackie21h ago

@raphaelmorgan @faithisleaping @JessTheUnstill

The pitch isn't that important for having a feminine voice, and many women have low pitch anyways. That's not my problem

Show threadJess👾21h ago
@burnoutqueen @raphaelmorgan @faithisleaping yeah resonance is the tricky part
Show threadMorgan ⚧️21h ago
@JessTheUnstill @burnoutqueen @faithisleaping I should've phrased differently 😅 "low voice" obviously is used to describe pitch, but I also use it to describe resonance sometimes bc idk how else to say that without leaning into patriarchal assumptions of masculinity and femininity. Like, I'd say I have a low voice pitch wise and a high voice resonance wise, but no one really notices the pitch so I do mean cis women with low resonance too
Show threadJess👾21h ago
@raphaelmorgan @burnoutqueen @faithisleaping I get it, people's voices come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but dysphoria is a fuck and I for one like to hear "the right voice" in my head as much as possible. The thread was mostly an encouragement to younger trans folks that it's okay to let yourself be "lazy" in safe places because people just know your voice as your voice.
Show threadMorgan ⚧️21h ago
@JessTheUnstill @burnoutqueen @faithisleaping fair, and sorry if I coopted the thread! I understand the desire to hear the right voice as much as possible, I can't listen to old recordings of me because of the dysphoria (or some more current ones if I'm talking, bc T didn't help with that quite as much as with singing). And I appreciate the original post a lot
Show threadJess👾20h ago
@raphaelmorgan @burnoutqueen @faithisleaping I know it's no panacea, but I am always a bit jealous of the pitch changes many people get from T "for free". Not doing some "who has it better", both have plusses and minuses, but that's one that certainly would be nice to wish for some parity on.
Show threadMorgan ⚧️19h ago
@JessTheUnstill don't worry, I get it. There are absolutely elements of transfem transition that I'm a little envious of, and I don't see either of our feelings as some sort of competition. I wish we could all just trade/donate what we don't want 😅