Posted on 04/25/2017 11:24:08 AM PDT by simpson96
In her 30s, Sophie Marat, now 42, used to record herself reading poetry aloud, then play it back to hear if she sounded like a woman. Ms. Marat, who is transgender, had spent years trying to remake her voice in private by speaking in a higher pitch but ultimately felt that her efforts were hopeless.
“I was feeling like changing my voice to match my gender identity was almost impossible,” she said. “It was terrible.”
Ms. Marat’s transition from male to female has been a gradual evolution. She had come out to friends and family back home in Mexico, then began to wear skirts to work as a software engineer in Manhattan. Still, her confidence would falter with everyday tasks like ordering takeout. “It was really painful to speak on the phone,” she said, “because they would reply, ‘O.K., sir.’”
That was before she started her weekly sessions with a voice therapist at New York University’s speech-language-hearing clinic, one of a growing number of programs that cater to transgender clients seeking to retrain their voices.
Just as some transgender women and men choose to take hormones or have surgery, or choose neither, some seek to feminize or masculinize their voices. Many say they want a voice that matches their appearance or that the change allows them to escape unwanted attention. There’s also a growing recognition among health professionals who have transgender patients that altering one’s voice can improve quality of life and reduce distress.
After eight months, she had raised her pitch, worked on moving her resonance forward and finishing phrases with an open ending, rather than bluntly.
“This isn’t just a sidebar,” said Sandy Hirsch, a Seattle-based speech language pathologist who was a co-author of the pioneering textbook on transgender voice and communication therapy. “It’s
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Born a man...always a man.
I understand valid scientific research is showing that transgenderism is a mental disorder and not a natural occurrence. I recall someone at John Hopkins recently published a paper on this and I read another a few years ago from some place else - surely online.
Even their voices need “retraining.”
Their mental illness pits them in an endless battle against nature and biology, which they can never conquer.
lol
What’s really interesting is that John Hopkins was the FIRST to start surgically ‘fixing’ these poor people. Follow-up studies made them realize that most were as unhappy in their new gender as they were before. Since then JH has stopped doing these surgeries.
Oh dear God.
I love Reagan but in a way this is his fault. In the 1980’s he closed down public insane asylums and gave the insane legal rights. Now it is almost impossible to commit anyone. This is the problem.
oy.
Marta’s transformation is remarkable! A few more thousand dollars and he will pass for Audrey Hepburn.
I am glad to hear of such research, but it really isn’t necessary. All we really need to do is recgnize that the objective reality that one is born with VERY rare exceptions involving genetic disorders) either male or female. There is no escaping that reality. If it’s not apparent by appearance, genetic testing can determine which gender someone is.
If someone claims to be a dog, we don’t put a leash on them and a newspaper on the floor for them to go to the bathroom on. We give them appropriate treatment to fix their mental problem. If someone claims to be Napolean, we send him to a shrink. We don’t give him troops to command and try to conquer Europe with. Denial of reality used to be recognized as the mental illness it is. We should not ridicule or persecute such people, but we also should not enable their mental illness.
This would make more sense (less nonsense?) in Japanese and certain other languages in which females are expected to speak differently than men in a few important ways, not just in terms of tone but also word choices.
In English, though? The sexes speak much more alike.
How do I learn to “Talk like a man/woman” without relying on gender stereotypes?
Well said.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth
Sex changes are not effective, say researchers
OTOH....hermaphrodites need help, surgeries, and they are the ONLY ones I have any compassion for. And they don't need voice coaching and usually not implants nor hormone treatments!
They’re sexual deviants NP.....and no matter what surgeries they get or how they dress...their issues are not going away....all this stuff is just dressing them up to avoid addressing their real issues. They ALL soon discover that over time....
It was Sadistic to post that picture of Ms. Marat.
It made me sade.
Oh, good gravy! If someone wants to pretend that’s a woman, fine. But anyone with legal vision can see that’s a man wearing a tablecloth.
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