Yesterday I made the plunge and signed up for a vocal feminization course through Undead Voice Lab. I met the voice coach at Trans Pride Seattle and decided that now was as good a time as any to restart that work. It’s expensive but I was able to get a partial scholarship to make the monthly payments more affordable.

I tried working with a trans voice coach once before a few years ago but I ended up stopping because I was experiencing so much dysphoria from hyperfixating on how masculine my voice sounded. It is easy to ignore most of the time but if I think about my voice too much, it becomes overwhelming quickly. At that point I was in the middle of my physical transition and it was just a lot to handle at once. So I put that work on hold.

My roommate asked me yesterday why I was doing this work and I realized as I answered that it isn’t as much about my own dysphoria around my voice but rather about other’s perception of me. I get misgendered on the phone so often or don’t have people take me seriously in person, ostensibly because of my voice, and that misperception is what causes the dysphoria. If we lived in a perfect world where people didn’t make assumptions about you because of your vocal pitch, I probably wouldn’t put in the effort.

This time around I think I’m in a better place to do the work. I’ve finished my physical transition and have fewer areas that cause dysphoria on a daily basis. I’ve also done a lot of work in therapy to be able to approach this more non-judgmentally and just accept the pace at which I’m able to work. I know this is more of a marathon than a sprint.

If I really focus on it, I have the skills to feminize my voice but I’m not sure if I’m doing it sustainably. I also don’t want to have to always focus that hard on it so the real work is creating something that is effortless and natural and doesn’t take conscious effort every time. Fingers crossed that that is something I can achieve this time around.