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Helping trans people find their authentic voices

Helping trans people find their authentic voices
Christie Block is a speech therapist in New York City profiled by Fusion as a resource for transgender women and men.

More and more trans people are turning to her and others like her to change the way they sound, in hopes they can learn to train their voices to avoid being misgendered, or to adjust their voice to fit better with their gender identity.

Block, a cisgender (non-trans) woman who’s been a speech therapist for 14 years, practices her craft at the New York Speech and Voice Lab. One of the perceptions she must confront, according to Fusion, is that her work perpetuates gender stereotypes.

“I don’t see it that way,” she told the network. “It’s about showing people what the norms are or what we all think it means to act feminine or masculine and finding a set of skills that fit along that continuum with that person’s personality.”

As the debate rages about the need to “pass” or conform to binary genders, Block argues her job is teach vocal skills to trans as well as cisgender clients that suit their individual needs. No matter their gender identity, she works to help them find a voice that sounds right to their ears.

Of the 20 to 30 patients a week that seek Block’s help, half of those clients are trans men and women, most of them women. In their first 90-minute session, Block’s clients speak into a microphone that feeds audio to a computer program that tracks a person’s pitch.

According to Block, the target zones for feminine-sounding voices is 220 hertz, masculine-sounding voices are at 120 hertz, with gender-ambiguous voices in between at 155 to 187 hertz.

Over the next several months, the clients work with her to develop what Fusion identified as the three most important areas of speech: pitch, intonation, and resonance. Pitch and intonation refer to how high or low a person’s voice sounds, their speaking range and how they use that range. Resonance is how a person uses their mouth, tongue, and throat to shape the sound they’re projecting.

But for those looking at the binary scale, it’s not just the sound; Block told the website clients also seek to change telltale speech patterns, like speaking less abruptly, what she described as a stereotypically male trait. Block said trans men want more than just a deeper sound, which testosterone can boost, but also to change their patterns to be perceived as more masculine.

The investment in time is about three months, Block said. “That is to kind of learn some basic skills, to get in the right range vocally,” adding that it is typically one year before clients achieve a new voice, without having to think before opening their mouths.

But what about the financial investment? Block’s transgender patients are generally able to afford her sessions regardless of whether their insurance covers them. And most insurance providers don’t, although as the website points out, patients stand a better chance if their psychologists write them a letter explaining it is essential to their transition.

“I think there are a lot of issues of privilege that go along with some of this,” said Laura Jacobs of the Callen Lourde clinic in NYC, which is one of the most prominent LGBTQ healthcare providers in the nation. “It does take a certain amount of money to access someone like Christie or even private psychotherapy or hormones or surgery.”

The Fusion reporter also interviewed one client of Block’s, Rebecca Oppenheimer, a trans woman and astrophysicist who came out in 2014 and started seeing Block a few months later, concerned about how she sounded when she gave lectures and talks in public.

“It used to be the telltale sign,” Oppenheimer told Fusion. But a greater concern was that her voice could put her in danger.

“In fact I’ve been assaulted over it, a really bad thing, that was 13 years ago… It’s not necessarily a need to conform to a male-female stereotype, but to not be spotted instantly,” she said.

“There is part of the trans community that is really trying to push genderqueer issues and thinks that binary is outdated and passé and an artificial construct that’s imposed on us,” said Jacobs, 47, who is transgender, and identifies as genderqueer, but has plenty of clients who identify as binary.

“That is no more or less valid a choice than genderqueerness,” they told Fusion. “It’s just where they want to be on that spectrum.”

“I am a facilitator for empowering you to express yourself not only in an authentic and effective way,” said Block in a statement on her website, “but also, should you choose, in a way that challenges societal concepts of what it means to be feminine, masculine, both, neither, or other. Viva la gender variance!”

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