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 ...
or ratios of head to body or head to shoulder width etc.
Great. Somehing else we taxpayers are going to pay for.
Weird dude dressed like a woman. Don’t feed his delusions by calling him “she” ...
Looks like Monty Python ...
uh...so he can have sex with men.....
My post stands.
Transgender is a combination of “alternative facts” and rejecting science. As with most items in those categories, transgender, trans-species, and other forms of trans-nonsense are predominantly liberal aberrations.
I’ve always had a fairly low voice for a woman, and when I was in the ICU on a mechanical vent two years ago, it cut at least three full notes off of the top of my range.
I looked into therapy to boost pitch a bit, and found that not only would it be expensive and time-consuming, it also carried the risk of permanently damaging my voice even further.
I’m sorry to say these guys’ prospects as sopranos do not look good. My own best bet is baritone.
Mainstreaming mental illness.
I read the same story, in the book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Dr. Oliver Sacks. A very interesting book to say the least.
They stopped doing the surgeries because something like 40-60% (depends on the study) of them were committing suicide afterwards.
But it’s normal and natural and healthy right?
I heard Bruce Jenner interviewed today. He still sounds like a Bruce.
Your post is dead accurate. They all look like fools.
The RATs in congress did that, but Reagan appeared to have lost his VETO pen.
Yeah, i’ll bet that’s what he’s doing that for. /s
He still looks like a man.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.