How to Talk Like a Man
Soon after I started taking testosterone, a strange anguish took hold of me, a naturally talkative person. I heard my speaking voice drop, about an octave it seemed. Though this felt wonderful to me, it was also true I wasn’t sure how my voice sounded now, generally. It was lower, but was it sufficiently … dudely? I suspected not, but I couldn’t place what was wrong with it. I tried to listen to myself and drowned in terrible feelings, my ears seizing on my shrill laugh, my girly intonations. A new acquaintance who’d met me online before doing so in person made passing reference to my voice being a surprise, and I asked what they meant. They grew bashful.
I gradually came to barely talk at all. I held back whatever I might have otherwise said. I avoided answering the phone. Meeting someone, I tended to smile but not speak. I worried about all this a lot.
In my previous guise—as an out and androgynous-presenting nonbinary person—my high voice had been a tell, in increasing contrast to my more masculine dress. But now I had started T, boy juice, a bit of oily magic injected weekly into my thigh. Hairs sprouted from my face, and the face itself transformed in ways that were subtle and yet somehow communicated male. In my reflection now I saw relatives, sort of, but I also saw something more eerie and profound: I saw myself.
My shoulders broadened, so much so that I resigned myself to the reality that not a single T-shirt nor dress shirt I once owned fit anymore, nor did my one suit. My butt narrowed, and my belly gestured outward. Hair grew anywhere it wanted, it seemed—on my toes, on the tops of my feet, on my inner thighs, around my nipples. I marveled that my body knew how to do any of this, like somewhere the architect had drawn up plans for my male self and then just left them on the workbench. Now, with a bit of hormonal prompting, my body somehow knew how to find those plans and unfurl them, dust them off. My hairline receded. My blond beard filled in very slowly, focused mostly on the area under the chin. Those first months especially I was the stereotype of a teenage boy: highly sweaty, perpetually horny, and also ravenous, often eating consecutive bowls of cereal.
I loved it all. I found myself in a state of constant euphoria. I was also confused. I wondered how to do seemingly basic things, like open a door in public or walk down a busy street. If I followed too close behind a woman walking down the street now, I realized I might come off as threatening. If I approached a door in public, I was expected to open it and allow others to pass, which I’d never really done. (How long was I supposed to stand there?)
I realized that salespeople, baristas, waiters, they didn’t make small talk with the likes of me anymore. All those years I’d looked like a blond lady, everybody had felt entitled to talk to me, for better and for worse. Later, as an androgynous-appearing nonbinary person, I’d often attracted suspicion and ire, especially in gender-segregated bathrooms. Now I passed through the world and few stirred me. Perhaps this is male privilege? I wondered. All the time I wished I knew how others saw me—as in, was I passing as cis? After I left a bodega or paid at the gas station, I half-fantasized about handing out an exit survey, asking like: Did you notice that person was trans? Does this fact bother you?
As I crossed two years on testosterone, I’d look in the mirror and marvel at the man who blinked back. And yet, I remained hesitant to speak in public, afraid my voice would give me away and perhaps I’d find myself in danger.
I fixated on the voices of other men. I listened to both trans and cis men, how they talked in person and in the media. I couldn’t answer the question: How are men supposed to talk? I consoled myself that some cis men sound really high pitched. Like Sam Bankman-Fried, for example, real high voice, or David Sedaris with his iconic Billie Holiday impersonation. But a few outliers didn’t seem like much of a consolation if my goal was to pass. Especially as a five-foot-four guy, especially where I live, in a rural area where Trump flags fly.
I tried to remind myself that what the other side wants is for me to be afraid. Their worst nightmare is a trans life well lived. Someone like me continuing to be alive felt like an act of rebellion. Every Sunday morning when that syringe plunged beneath my skin, I felt a hit of Fuck ’em, I’ll just survive.
And so I resolved to find a speech therapist to teach me to talk like a man.
The speech therapist wasn’t cheap, and I spent a while waffling about my plan. I couldn’t afford this, I told myself, nor should I figure out how to. I wondered if I could get reimbursement from insurance, knowing that even if it were possible, therapy-reimbursement paperwork is the sort of task I personally will probably put off for forever. This is largely because of how much I’ve grown to loathe forms with little boxes, not to mention talking on the phone.
I eventually resigned myself to sorting out the expense, knowing that part of being trans is it’s just really hideously fucking expensive. Clothes, shoes, name changes, hormones, surgeries, it all costs so much. Never mind the cost of total estrangement, for example, or having to move because you are being politically persecuted. To be a trans American today, at least for me, is to often perform mental calculations as to whether I should flee now or wait and see. How to feel one is actually worth further investment, that’s another tricky bit.
My first Zoom with the speech therapist, though, I felt an immediate sense of possibility. It was obvious she’d met other transmasculine people in my position—who were both on hormones and were still sort of quiet for fear their voices would give them away.
We met over Zoom, she from her office in the city and me from my home in the woods upstate. Though a cis woman, she was one of those rare sorts who seemed to have interacted plenty with someone like me, I could sense, just because of all the mistakes she didn’t make. I found myself freely discussing my difficulties interacting with cis strangers, and she didn’t seem to minimize these stories. We could call these “microaggressions,” but that word always seems too tame to me. Just existing makes trans people a target for the random unkindness and small-mindedness of random people. I could tell right away that she understood this.
She had me read aloud from a passage commonly used by speech therapists, a paragraph about the science of rainbows: “When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors…”
She recorded and measured my pitch. She affirmed that my voice had dropped: I averaged about 115 hertz, which, as she showed on a chart, was smack in the middle of cis-male pitch.
I gawked at this, my 115Hz. I loved my 115Hz.
How, I now wondered, was I still sounding too “feminine,” then? I admit that before our first session I’d barely read about transmasc speech therapy, the topic had so overwhelmed me. I really didn’t know what the speech therapist and I would work on going in, especially if she was now confirming my voice had sufficiently dropped. Was it, like, hand gestures? Or projection? Perhaps I just needed to act very confident all the time? To my surprise, during that first session and all our meetings afterward—every other week for the next several months—it all came down to one small, but in my case enormous, aspect of speech: lifting my soft palate.
I’d always been a singer; twenty years ago as a teenager I studied classical voice pretty seriously for a while, opera. Now as the speech therapist explained what we were going to work on together, that old opera training blinked alive: lifting the soft palate is basically the number-one thing one learns to do as a classical singer. As a result, I got what she was scheming for us to do and why it might help me.
Picture two instruments of the same family, one smaller and one larger—like a bass and viola, for example, or a trumpet and a tuba. They are the same basic idea, but one produces a lower and more resonant sound because it is larger, making larger waves. In starting testosterone, I’d traded in my smaller instrument for a larger one—T had made my vocal cords thicker—the result of which was this more “average” male pitch, like if you’d restrung a violin with bass strings.
But there is only so much T can accomplish for someone who takes it in their mid-thirties. Trans men who start hormones when we are already adults will not experience any impact to our bones, because our bone growth has completed. For this reason, trans men such as myself who start T later in life tend to still have short hands and small feet, as I do. We are often short kings.
This is where the soft palate comes in, that same latent vocal power that opera singers harness, as do professional actors (and I did also long ago train as an actor). Specifically for my purpose as a trans man who wanted to sound more confidently “masculine,” we were going to raise my soft palate. We’d train it to stay there, the effect being a slightly larger and therefore more resonant and therefore more male-sounding speaking voice. The concept was brilliant; I had no idea if I could actually pull it off.
So almost exactly like I did way back as a sixteen-year-old opera singer, my speech therapist and I started warming up vocally. We lifted our soft palates, yawning, sighing. She made low, open sounds, oooooh, loooooo, her pitch rising down and up, her jaw stretching down. I was reminded of Dory’s speaking whale in Finding Nemo, because I’d just rewatched it.
Yes! she said, like Dory speaking whale. We sat across from each other on Zoom and together spoke whale like Dory awhile. That, she said, is what we’re going to teach you to do.
We entered a mode that was familiar to me, one I’ve been in before, with professionals—surgeons, for example—figuring out what’s the best we can aim for, given the body I’ve got. Us trans folk aren’t always going to have the same setup as our cis peers, perhaps, but especially when we’re lucky enough to work with compassionate allies, we often can make profound shifts toward our desired goals.
That is, if I practiced every day. Right away I seemed to regard my speech homework as a chore, one I struggled to get to, and sometimes I’d go to bed still annoyed I’d not done it. It was another reminder of my teenage opera years, how much I loathed practicing. Back then I’d just force myself. And so I forced myself now. I sat in my chair, back straight, feet firm on the floor. I rolled my shoulders and neck and stretched out my jaw. I made yawning and trilling sounds, my cheeks and lips vibrating with resonance.
I practiced saying various sounds and words—sets of go-go-go-go and yo-yo-yo-yo. The homework was monotonous on good days, tedious on bad. But it was just training; the point was to do it. The speech therapist explained we’d train my ear and then my voice would catch up, which, as a singer, made natural sense to me. As a singer you just practice whatever you aren’t good at until you are better, and that happens in the brain before it happens in the throat.
As I did my speech exercises, I thought often of the brief unfortunate dalliance I’d had with CrossFit about a decade ago. How there was a sort of structure to that torture, and that made it bearable somehow. The medicine ball would bounce off the wall back at me, and I’d catch it in a squat and lob it again at the wall in one motion, over and over. Doing reps on the nonsense word molm, up inflected and then down inflected, I pictured the word as a medicine ball, lobbing toward the wall and back—moLM, MOlm. moLM, MOlm.
Every session, the therapist gave me new sheets of exercises, words and phrases focused on whatever I had to practice. Sometimes I was navigating brighter vowels, like eeee, that naturally send the back of the mouth into a more closed shape. Sometimes I was getting through longer and longer phrases, trying not to lose my breath and open posture. As happens when I’m singing “correctly,” I became very aware of the size and placement of each breath.
All talking started to feel like work. I found myself preposterously conscious of my voice, of my every utterance, even to my dogs and cats. If anything I became all the more daunted by the variety of sounds that seemed to escape my face—shrieks, giggles, baby talk, profanity, exclamations of frustration or pleasure or anger or pain. I wondered how I’d ever become so conscious as to control it all. Sometimes it felt more tempting to just give up on speaking altogether. But I also knew it wasn’t sustainable, the silence. In my line of work I need to be able to speak—to record podcasts or give talks or readings at bookstores. Not to mention that sometimes I did want to order a sandwich or pick up a package from the post office.
I confessed to my speech therapist in a subsequent session that now I was just too self-aware. That all of talking, all of life, was feeling like a performance, perhaps more than ever, and it was exhausting me. How do I deal with laughter, I lamented, or those moments when I involuntarily yelp or scream? As ever, her response seemed to be pragmatic: All this can be shifted with awareness and practice. Next time, she ended our meeting saying, we’ll work on cackling.
What is an authentic voice? Is there ever such a thing? Awhile back I did a story about my singing voice on the radio and afterward heard from a lot of people who’d had to relearn to talk—people who’d had strokes and other injuries, as well as other trans people, especially trans women. In my observation, working with speech therapists tends to be more common among transfemme people—whose bodies do not experience a rise in pitch from feminizing hormones. As I later discussed with my speech therapist, it’s less normalized for and among trans men, the benefit of such interventions.
I’d sometimes ask her if she heard any progress in my voice. Yes, she said, I was making progress. She heard—and I thought I heard, too—that my baseline speaking voice was shifting. She and I could both hear a lovely, open, low sound in there, especially when I was doing my homework and was mindful. But I could still hear other sounds, too, higher ones, ones that bothered me. I have a very expressive voice and always have. I’m a Robin Williams type, you might say, a long-ago improviser, a quasi-unconscious producer of all manner of voices and impersonations and sounds.
Do cis men ever worry they sound too animated or too high? I assume some must, especially pubescent males undergoing their own voice drops, or those who are afraid of sounding effeminate. I had complained about this to my speech therapist, too—how cis gay men like David Sedaris or Sean Hayes, for example, have made careers talking, and they have “high”-sounding voices. So what gives? I’d asked. It felt unfair that I had to do all this work and they didn’t. My speech therapist surprised me when she said, Yeah, it’s not fair. Trans people do have to do a lot of thinking that cis men do not and work that cis people do not. Which of course I knew.
Sometimes I can reframe this to myself as: I’m just playing around. I’m just finding out what feels best. As my speech therapist has often said to me: reset. If you don’t like how you sound, that’s all right. Just reset and refind that open sound.
It happened slowly and also suddenly; something settled, in my voice and in my head and in the circuit between the two, I suppose. Those around me heard it, too, cautiously brought it up, characterized it as a positive change. I noticed it in my own confidence. How when I went to the grocery store I made small talk. I even started answering the phone.
But the other day I did so and a customer service rep misgendered me. I wondered afterward whether it was because of my name, Sandy, a name (as I’ve lately grappled with) that is popularly less understood to be gender-neutral than I’d probably hoped. After this person called me “Miss” a second time, I stopped them. “I’m a man,” I said, and they apologized.
I told my speech therapist about this incident, and she made a pained face. She did agree that my gender-neutral but probably-associated-more-these-days-as-feminine name was probably a factor (Sandy Koufax and Little Orphan Annie’s dog notwithstanding). Impossible to know, though; she commended me for just speaking up at all.
That session, she recorded me reading the same passage about the rainbow that I’d read during our first hour together. She then played the two recordings back for us to hear. The difference was unmistakable. Her eyes sparkled and she applauded. The addition of that resonance, that additional space, and the effect. It’s slight, perhaps, but it’s there and it’s real.
I work on accepting that the never-ending feeling of being trans is perhaps just its nature. Perhaps someday I’ll have the courage to confidently come out to my neighbors or whomever else and hazard whatever comes back. Perhaps I’ll stay quiet and anxious. Perhaps they already know and don’t care; who’s to say? Like a lot of trans people, I’d venture, ultimately I wish everybody cared a lot less about the likes of me, or about anyone else but themselves, when it comes to gender. But that, like so much else, remains a work in progress. My voice still isn’t perfect; I still catch myself sounding too girly for my own taste. But I notice; I try to not burn myself down about the error. I reset.
I’ve noticed, lately, I am quiet sometimes for another reason. Like when the old couple who live around the corner drive slowly by, commenting on the weather and saying hello to the dogs, I am hesitant to chat with them, lest they finally notice I’m trans. I scurry by, perhaps muttering good morning or allowing the dogs’ barking to drown out my greeting. But I am quiet now not because I don’t sound like a man but because I do.
Photographs: Joe Lingeman
Prop styling: Heather Greene
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