For transgender women, starting a journey of transition sometimes means letting go of your “old voice”. To “no longer betray themselves”, nor to read “incomprehension” on the faces of their interlocutors when they speak, some feminize their voices.
“The voice cannot lie, it is our whole personality, it is more important than having a strong chest”, quips Maëlle, 40 years old. She who says she is “locked in a boy’s body” since a young girl began her transition in June.
“The voice is the exchange with society,” abounds Julie, 25 (and whose first name has been changed), who began her transition in March 2020. “It’s more important than the physical. Even for someone who has pronounced masculine features, the voice directly tips the scales, ”says the young executive in financial audit, living in Yvelines, near Paris.
The two women, who wished to remain anonymous, attend sessions with speech therapists, guided by the desire to have a voice in “harmony” with who they are.
Vocal rehabilitation in transgender people is mostly a woman’s business.
For the latter, assigned to man at birth, the hormone-based treatment that they may be prescribed by an endocrinologist as part of the transition helps to initiate a physical change.
At the speech therapist
“This will change their body, give them breasts, feminine hips, but this has no effect on the voice”, explains Carine Klein-Dallant, speech therapist in the Paris region who has been caring for these patients for about thirty. years.
The thickening and especially the lengthening of the vocal cords in adolescence in boys is an irreversible anatomical development. However, most women make their transition after moulting, hence the need for care to harmonize their voice, appearance and identity.
In transgender men, assigned to women at birth, on the contrary, taking hormones will “trigger the moult”, thicken the vocal cords and consequently worsen the voice without systematically requiring support.
After having “tinkered around in (her) corner” for a long time, Clara, 48, a socio-cultural facilitator with adolescents, wanted “to see what a speech therapist could bring her”.
Vocal exercises to work on the “flexibility” of the voice, text reading, sung exercises, work on intonations and the larynx to learn to hold higher notes: speech therapy sessions last 30 to 45 minutes and management can be carried out. last several months.
There are also “concrete situations” during which “the speech therapist will play the role of the opponent” to learn to control his voice in response, including by staging lively exchanges, says Julie.
Carine Klein-Dallant confides receiving more and more requests, she who follows a dozen patients. “No one treatment is like another,” she said. “We adapt to their experiences and their requests, which are very different”.
In this medical transition, patients are recognized by the French State as suffering from “gender dysphoria”, and thus see their care path reimbursed by social security.
Deep voice
But then, what is a “woman’s voice”?
“We cannot talk about a female voice without questioning how to live your femininity,” explains Carine Klein-Dallant, author of several collective books on the voice and vocal feminization.
She points out that many transgender women “often demand a higher-pitched voice, thinking it will be synonymous with a female voice.” But “take Catherine Deneuve, she has something extremely feminine in her voice without having a high-pitched voice,” she points out, noting that female voices have tended to become more serious in recent decades.
The frequency, or height of the voice, that is to say its perception, serious or acute, “it’s really a very small part of the job”, confirms Elisabeth Naux, speech therapist in Nantes who accompanies seven patients in transition.
“We have high-pitched voices in terms of frequency which do not seem feminine because the phrasing or the articulation is not feminine”, she explains.
For these specialists, the objective remains above all to support patients “towards a voice in which they feel good, safe” and above all “in harmony with who they are”.
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