I’m starting to hit a bit of a wall with voice training lately. I can find my resonance, I can adjust the positioning of my vocal cords and where my voice is coming from. I occasionally pass on the phone, and I work all day over the phone so I do get pretty regular indirect feedback in terms of how my voice gets me gendered.
But I am very much struggling with pitch and maintaining consistent pitch. It’s just not happening and even when everything else is perfect my pitch will slip, and then I’ll get misgendered. I cant seem to find a specific pitch and comfortably rest there. I’m also 8 years in at this point, I’ve been doing voice training for a long time and I just think when it comes down to it I might be one of the women for whom training alone just isn’t enough.
I’ve done a lot of research into glottoplasty and find myself in a financial position where I could hypothetically afford it. Most accounts from people who’ve had the procedure seem to indicate they’ve had great results with it, but there’s a lot of people who swear that it’ll basically render me mute if I get it done. Its minimally invasive and the surgeon I’m considering has good rapport with his patients and I’m confident he’d do great. But on the whole I’m hesitating a little bit and curious what other people think. I do IT work that involves using the phone quite a bit, but if I had to take time off work for a little while that would almost certainly be fine. I don’t sing and really don’t have any concerns with regard to vocal range either.
Are you considering vocal feminization surgery? Why or why not? Have you experienced similar things with regards to voice training, or has training alone been enough for you?
Feel free to chime in with whatever thoughts you have on the operation or voice training in general.
Thats it, like I’ve done enough training that for small periods of time with focus i can pass. But its a very conscious effort and even with focus my pitch very easily slips back down. I’ve been told by my friends and coworkers that I talk like a woman, that my cadence and intonation reads as feminine, but I have inconsistent pitch.
I’m basically weighing different options for the future of my medical transition and what parts I think are most important to me. When it comes down to it my voice is the source of a lot of my dysphoria these days. I’m kind of viewing glottoplasty as partially undoing some of the damage that testosterone did to my vocal cords. I can practice all I like, master every aspect of pitch maintenance and vocal weight and all of it. But no matter what training I do the “instrument” I use to speak isn’t the right one, and I sorta feel like even when I’m putting 100% effort in that it’s not really my voice. Kinda like I’m faking a voice. And I’ve heard that not being able to have a lower vocal register at all makes a huge difference with this regard. I want to no longer be able to do my deep voice at all.
Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind sharing, what surgeon did you go with? And how happy are you with your outcome overall? Do you feel like its made a difference in how your voice passes? Do you still have times where your voice doesn’t pass?
My surgeon was an Australian, Dr Broadhurst in Brisbane. Overall, I’m really happy with the results.
In my case, I had to have vocal cord surgery anyway to remove nodules on my cords, and given that there was a vfs surgeon in my city and he was willing to do both in the same surgery, that made my decision pretty easy.
I won’t say my voice is perfect. I’m never misgendered over the phone, but I think on some days, without context clues, some people don’t know how to gender me. Most of the time though, people gender me just fine. I think though that my voice is a bit less rich than many cis women’s, but that’s because I never really focused on the training that it sounds like you’ve got down pat.