We don’t often associate professional voice therapy with gender reassignment procedures, but it is an essential component in finalizing the new identity of a transgender person. The main goal of professional transgender speech therapy is to alter the speech patterns ever so slightly to match the new external physical appearance of the recently transformed individual. It’s the final step to completing the metamorphosis into a new identity.
Our voice is a very important factor in determining how we define and view ourselves. It also plays a huge role in how others perceive us as well. A good comparison might be when we hear ourselves on a voice recording. Most of us often feel slightly uncomfortable hearing the sound of our own voice, but imagine how a transgender person feels whenever they talk to someone in public. When the voice doesn’t match how we view ourselves inside, we can become highly self-conscious and extremely insecure even in everyday interactions like going to the store or talking on the phone.
Voice Transformation
During professional transgender speech therapy, a speech-language pathologist (S-LP) works with the transgender patient to develop a vocal tone, pitch, and quality that is complimentary to their newly transformed outward appearance. The results will differ from patient to patient, but speech therapy is extremely helpful in making a transgender person’s voice either more feminine or more masculine, whichever the case may be.
Speech therapy can even help those who want to develop two different forms of speech inflection, for those who want to maintain two different gender identities simultaneously. While maintaining two different patterns of speech is a bit less common, this is an important consideration for those considering the gender reassignment process. Just like actors learn different dialects and accents for movie roles, transgender people want to learn the proper vocal pronunciations commonly associated with their new gender identity.
This learning process can vary in length from person to person, and the techniques used in professional transgender speech therapy are constantly evolving and improving. With such a surge of public acceptance of the transgender community occurring over the last few years, transgender speech therapy is advancing at a rapid pace.
