It’s been a while, friends. In fact, it’s been 5 months. Not that I’ve not had things to say, just not enough bandwidth to commit them to the blogosphere. In fact, today’s topic is something that’s been ruminating for some time. The original impulse for this blog back in 2019 was to write about voice and its intersections with identity, so I’m right on brand with this post. And no, I’m not talking about the US election (no one wants to get me going on that one).
Ever since attending the NATS Conference in Knoxville in July 2024 and seeing the powerful documentary film “The Sound of Identity” featuring trans female singer Lucia Lucas, the idea of the voice being so connected to gender identity, and thus to one’s sense of self in a visceral way, has preoccupied me. I was reminded of it again while watching the newly released documentary Will and Harper, where actor Will Ferrell takes a road trip with his friend Harper Steele who has recently transitioned. One of the most moving scenes in the film is where the two of them meet with another trans woman who talks about taking “voice therapy” to try to learn how to speak in a higher register so that she sounds more like a woman. Ultimately she realizes that this would mean denying an essential part of herself (her baritone voice) in the desire to be more “acceptable” to society, and she abandons this quest.
Just yesterday, I was sitting in a classroom with my Masters students, watching excerpts from composer Sarah Hennies’ documentary music theatre piece, Contralto. It’s described on her website as using “the sound of trans women’s voices to explore transfeminine identity from the inside and examines the intimate and peculiar relationship between gender and sound”. Further, Hennies notes that “when a transgender man begins taking testosterone it causes his vocal cords to thicken and his voice deepens and drops into the so-called ‘masculine range.’ It is not widely known, however, that trans women’s voices are unaffected by higher levels of estrogen in the body. Being a woman with a ‘male voice’ creates a variety of difficult situations for trans women including prolonged and intensified dysphoria and higher risk of harassment and violence due to possibly exposing someone as trans unintentionally.” This deeply unsettling and moving exploration of voice, identity and self-actualization and acceptance reminded me once again of how strongly our voices reflect our deepest selves, and how much we need to feel seen and heard–literally–with love and compassion.
This love and compassion, however, is not only what we hope to receive from others, but what we want to feel for ourselves. It’s the profoundest kind of acceptance to honour our own sound, our own voice. The struggles of trans women to befriend their “gender mismatched” voices and accept themselves as they are has made me think deeply about the universality of this struggle, and how much we have to learn from these stories and experiences of folks who have been–until very recently–so silenced and misunderstood.