Imagine that feeling you get when you hear a recording of your own voice – that icky, cringy, heebie-jeebie sensation that makes your entire body clench. It might feel unbearable. You might cover your ears or leave the room or demand that someone turn the recording off. Inevitably, you will turn to your friends or family and ask, “Is that really how I sound?”

Now imagine you get this feeling every time you speak, as if you’re living in a universe where the recorded version of your voice is all that comes out of your mouth. According to voice training expert Nicole Gress, this is how many trans people experience voice dysphoria.

Related

Internet in tears over grandma’s beautiful reaction to grandaughter coming out as trans

Gress founded Undead Voice Lab (UVL) in 2019 as a dedicated voice training program for trans people experiencing the psychological distress of having a voice that does not align with who they are.

The public conversation around gender-affirming care focuses almost exclusively on visually perceived characteristics, but for many trans people, changing their voice is a critical piece of the puzzle.

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

“The impact on mental health cannot be overstated enough,” Gress told LGBTQ Nation. “Whenever we ask people the most important part of their transition, voice transition is across the board in the top three. It’s access to hormones, surgery, and then voice training.”

“Ever since puberty… I had a very tough time communicating with people,” UVL client Daniella Daedala told LGBTQ Nation. She even developed a stutter because she was so afraid to talk.  

Her voice dysphoria, she explained, “just manifests as me not being social with people and thereby lacking connections.”

How traditional voice training fails trans people

Gress explained that for a long time, trans people have been taught to transition their voices through standard speech pathology methods that have not been tailored to the community’s specific needs.

UVL is part of a handful of organizations that have developed methods specifically for gender transitions. “A lot of times we are taught as speech pathologists to focus on primarily pitch, and pitch is not the number one way that society codes gender into the voice,” Gress said. “When you hear somebody speak, the top thing that you are using unconsciously to categorize their voice is the resonance.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by FOLX Health (@folxhealth)

There is also a common misconception that hormone replacement therapy is sufficient to change a person’s voice. But testosterone, for example, only impacts pitch. Gress said pitch is only one of the five vital pillars of voice training: vocal weight, vocal tilt, resonance, pitch, and dynamics.

Resonance, Gress said, the number one way we code gender in voice, is controlled by the size of the vocal tract, which is made up of cartilage and not impacted by testosterone at all.

As such, Gress found that the trans patients they worked with in traditional health care settings never seemed satisfied with their voices by the end of their programs. So she spent six months exploring every voice pedagogy she could find and created a trans-focused curriculum.

Then, they spent a year testing the program with 100 trial subjects. Six years later, UVL has served 100,000 people across 20 countries. In addition to a paid membership program (for which scholarships are available), the organization offers a free 3-week course and a free Trans Voice 101 guide.

UVL has transformed thousands of lives – and it isn’t just through changing voices. “Undead Voice Lab is 90% community, 10% voice training,” UVL client Daniella Daedala told LGBTQ Nation. “Because no person is an island.”

Voice training’s secret ingredient

The first time Daedala logged in to a UVL group meeting, she felt immediately at ease. “I live in what feels like a queer desert… and here I am looking at all these people, and I’m thinking, wait, are these people like me? That feeling of isolation immediately began to dissolve.”

Gress emphasized that community-building has become a critical part of UVA’s mission. “What you’re teaching people to do with their voice is obviously the thing that’s going to have the largest impact on the sound that is created,” Gress said, “but when it comes to the actual process of transitioning your voice, the most important thing for that is having community.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Undead Voice (@undead.voice)

They explained that being surrounded by folks with the same lived experience who deeply connect with voice dysphoria makes everyone feel more comfortable being vulnerable and not sounding perfect when they practice. Realizing how deeply community building impacted progress, Gress said UVL “flipped the dynamic of traditional therapy on its head.”

Instead of only having access to a coach during a weekly or monthly training session, clients can direct message coaches anytime to ask questions and share recordings. “You actually need help the most when you’re practicing,” Gress said.

The all-online organization also hosts weekly group coaching sessions and live coach office hours. But the most important piece, Gress said, is the private virtual community space, which includes about 4,000 people across various chat threads.

An act of self-love

Gress’s goal is to help her clients change what she calls their “home base” or “reflexive” voice, the sound that naturally comes out when they speak. The more you learn and practice, the easier it becomes to reflexively respond in a different voice than your original home base. But the goal is not for that original to disappear or become inaccessible, Gress emphasized. Sometimes, that one is needed for safety.

“We don’t want you to completely lose access to what you had before because a lot of times people, for whatever reason – safety or they’re not yet out at work or with certain people or there’s situations in which they still need to use their dead voice or their original voice – should always be accessible.”

The voice is much more malleable than many believe. Folks at UVL learn, for example, to control the height of their larynx,  which manipulates the width of their throat and helps them obtain either a “darker” or “brighter” voice, as UVL puts it to avoid gendered terms.

Viral TikTok videos of trans people demonstrating their dead voices compared to their lived voices show the incredible changes and control voice training can bring, and how, eventually, it is possible to almost effortlessly drift between darker tones and brighter tones.

For many people, starting the program is a mental challenge. Gress said coaches often encourage clients to try to play different characters at first, which takes some of the pressure off.

“A lot of people struggle with being able to change their voice during voice training because it sounds unnatural or it’s a little scary,” she explained. “Character voices help kind of unlock some of that playfulness, which allows you to overcome the anxiety and nervousness.”

Daedela also hopes those who are just beginning their journeys try to have some fun with it.

“You don’t sound as dumb as you think,” she said. “It’s an act of self-love to not try to drive oneself to change so rapidly. Because we’re learning how to relate to ourselves in a different way.”

“You have to unlearn a lot, and having overnight success is not desirable. It’s a journey, and getting there is half the fun, so enjoy the ride, even if it’s bumpy.”

“A voice is so personal,” a former client and current UVL voice coach, who asked to remain anonymous, told LGBTQ Nation. “It’s an enormously personal piece of identity.”

“I never liked my voice,” they continued, “and that meant I didn’t say a lot. I didn’t speak up unless I was called on, unless there was space made for me. And now that I love my voice, that changes. I’m much more willing to speak up for myself and make space for myself rather than wait.”

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.