Help & Advice - Transgender and transsexual

This item is contributed by one of our former moderators of the trans topic in P2SForum and provides useful advice relating to adjusting your voice to your chosen identity.

Whether you have already practiced or not, there may be areas you are looking at to improve your voice. If you are fortunate enough to spend time outside of work in the female role already, you may be well practiced.

Either way, one of the things that can give away even the most convincing of us can be our voices. You might look like Kelly Brook, but if you sound like Mel Brooks, its going to still give away your past.

It is therefore important to try and get some speech therapy prior to going fulltime. Changing the sound, tone, pitch and intonation of your voice, is possibly the hardest thing to do. You do not want a falsetto, then drop down to bass, or to sound like a camp bloke (an unavoidable phase for most of us). You can try and get a referral to an NHS Speech Therapist, through your Gender Specialist or you MO.

If you are a Private Patient, you may find it difficult to get an NHS Speech Therapist to treat you, and not all Therapists will specialise in Transsexual Patients. My own PCT agreed to go ‘Shared Care’ and allow a therapist in Lincoln to treat me. She was not a specialist in transsexuals, but had experienced people like myself and had some exercises that we found worked. She then referred me on to a specialist in the TS voice in Sheffield , but they would not treat me on the NHS as I was a Private Patient.

Speech therapists with TS experience can also assess your non verbal behaviour. The way you move, present yourself, if you sit legs wide open and walk like Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays, BIG GIVE AWAY!!! Almost deportment type lessons can be given by them too, hopefully , if this is who you were born to be, mannerisms, movement and presentation should come quite naturally, but there will always be some who need a little help and direction, especially after X amount of years in the Armed Forces, where even Natal females have to butch it up a bit to be accepted in some areas. Lots of eye contact, smile more etc, all these things are covered in the document below. Quite a lot of time its not what you say, but how you say it , and what your body language is saying.

Also remember, in passing its 80% what you see and 20% what you hear so given a reasonable voice you should pass ok. On the telephone, you are not offered the courtesy of people being able to see who they are talking to, to assess male or female, and enable the correct pronouns. You will get times on the telephone where you will get sir or ma’am depending M2F or F2M, and this can be upsetting, and in the early days you might find yourself getting frustrated and just telling them ‘Look I’m a TS ….’ Just so they sort their pronouns out.