Why do most TIM not seem to care about their voices?

[MagicSexEssence]

TIMs seem to go to a great effort to "live as a woman" except when it comes to their voice. Like Robin White - had all the surgeries, wears stereotypically female clothes and jewellery, makeup, hairstyle, insists on using women's facilities. But the voice...unmistakably male. I have used Robin as an example as Robin's voice is quite familiar to a lot of us but it seems a common presentation across the board.

I don't get it. If you are so dysphoric and endangered using the male facilities then why does your male voice not make you equally as dysphoric and in danger of being "outed" (lol).

I know that this post is preaching to the choir and that there is no sensible answer to this. Is it laziness? Voice training, as I understand, takes a huge amount of time and effort. Or is it fear of feeling silly? Clearly when TIM look in the mirror they don't see a "man in a dress" but, perhaps, if they try and raise the pitch of their voice they hear one.

At the moment SALT is a very captured profession where we've got huge chunks of the high ranking people in professional bodies who are gender-affirming voice therapists. The rest of us just smile, nod and get on with our own horrendously under-resourced caseloads and seethe quietly.

However since those I've encountered working in the gender field are generally rather insufferable - we quite enjoy not having to deal with them on a daily basis in our own work lives so please don't send them all over to mainstream services!

Thanks for this thread, which I must've missed at the time. It's something I've wondered about.

Yes, indeed. Can you imagine any listener tuning into WH after his introduction would mistakenly think that he was a woman? They might think that Brian Bessed was speaking, but not a woman.

Indeed.

White did try to frame it as ‘power’ from not having damaged voice box causing voice box. White did not like at all being told that White was very aware that male voices, particularly in the past, in court rooms carried male privilege into that room as well. No no, we were told, White didn’t mean that a distinctly male voice carried patriarchial power!!! No way! Because White was a ‘woman’ with no male privilege at all……

It resulted in MNHQ warnings of course to any poster pointing out the obvious. Those were the days!

This reminds me of something I saw today. I’m frequenting their subreddits, sort of like a hobby. And you would be suprised how delusional they are, and how validating they are at each other, at the question of «passing»/«going stealth» as women. So many of them genuinly go around thinking people just see another female.

Earlier today I saw a MtF (male to female) transitioner there who said he was worried about not passing since he was transitioning now at 55 years and 1,9 meter tall and big, and the other were like «no, you’ll be fine, there’s plenty of things you can work on to pass, don’t worry about it». You go girl!

I think that’s because they live their lives in validation/affirmation echo chambers, and the need to pass is so incredibly strong that their brains filters out small everyday cues that they do not pass (like stares), and they misread politeness for affirmation. They simply have to believe it, or their place in the universe will make no sense. The sacrifice is so total, so it must be true. That’s why they lose it when someone says or does something that they can’t possibly misinterpret to fit their reality, like when someone is using wrong pronouns. It creates a cognitive dissonance. To reduce the dissonance, the brain shifts into defense mode (anger). For some it can even lead to narcissistic rage, leading to the disproportionate measures of revenge that these people often enact in. Anne Lawrence wrote an interesting article about just that many years ago.

YY @PatrickBaitman as a fellow TRA Reddit lurker 🙌

I'm sure some of them realise that it isn't really worth the effort. They never sound like women, they just sound like men talking in a high simpering voice. At least some of them must admit that to themselves.

To be completely honest, I hate it when they try to put on a higher-pitched, breathy, weedy, 'woman' voice. They sound (and look) ridiculous and are fooling absolutely nobody. NHS speech therapists wasting clinic time on teaching men to try and fake female voice/speech patterns is a totally sexist waste of taxpayers' money.

I remember a clip of a certain litigious self-styled lawyer being interviewed. The sight of an absolute unit of a bloke putting on a high-pitched breathy voice was utterly ridiculous. Made I larf ☺️

But, suppose I am a man who has species-dysphoria, and I identify as a dog? (It has happened, i.i.r.c. in Japan)

Therefore, if I am in, or can get to, UK, I must without question be entitled to unlimited 'free' treatment, maybe plastic surgery to make my nose more canine, and hair-implants on my face, voice-training and/or surgery, to make my voice more canine, maybe a prosthetic tail to add to my costme, and whatever else the NHS can/ MUST, provide me.

Why not? It does not matter to me if there is or is not any surplus of free NHS capacity: The only thing that matters to me is what I want. Plus, there is a powerful lobby group advocating 'self-I.D. for TRANS-species-changers': Therefore, I will get whatever I demand, from the UK public purse.

I don't care how many people die, or get little or no NHS care, in order to give me what I want, from a finite budget. I am TRANS, therefore I must take priority.

To me, and to my TRANS- lobbying powerful friends, there could not possibly be any other, more important claims on NHS time and money. We don't care if there are long NHS waiting lists for life-saving treatment.

I have declared I am TRANS and I want to be a dog, therefore I must be indulged in the fantasy that such a thing is possible.

i agree

i had a breakfast meeting this week and at a table in my eye line I could see two people in their 50s. One was female and appeared to be a line manager or someone conducting a job interview for a senior candidate. The other appeared to be a senior staffer/candidate - a well groomed male, dressed in women’s clothing with an expensive/good hairstyle and a soft/effeminate Manchester accent. The male was far larger that the female and for that reason attracted attention. I was interested to watch the interaction in a regular people watching way and was interested to see the male looking around to see who was looking. The female was focussed on their meeting. This person had gone to huge effort to “pass”as female but I still read them as male. They’ll never know because it’s none of my business to inform them… they may have an echo chamber on Reddit but silence from silent observers in real life have a different opinion

The majority of them don't care that they're in possession of a fully functioning set of dick and balls. So I'm hardly surprised about the voice.

It's just playing woman face dress up. They know they're not female and never will be. It's part of the thrill trying to force themselves into places they're not wanted. And shouldn't be legally.

Until people get their heads around that, the overreach and the pushback from sane people will continue.

There are users on reddit claiming to pass completely but not on the telephone, and not be too bothered about it?

It could be recognition of their limits and hearing others failed attempts, but i think it has more to do with men being visual. They look good in the mirror, and that what counts.

The typical fundamental frequency (ie, the rate at which the vocal folds vibrate, and which is the acoustic correlate of what we hear as pitch) is generally around 100 Hz for male speakers, with a range from about 90-150 Hz. For female speaker the mean fundamental frequency is around 200 Hz, with a range of about 150-300 Hz. Individual speakers may fall outside those ranges, but those are the rough normal distributions.

Much of that difference is down to physiological differences in the size and structure of the male and female speech organs, with males typically having a larger larynx and longer/thicker vocal folds post-adolescence (=voice dropping). Individual speakers do have some control over our pitch, but changing habitual pitch is hard to sustain in normal conversation. We can do it for brief periods, within limits, but there is a reason that singers are divided up into soprano/alto/tenor/bass - there is some overlap between the groups, but ultimately for most people there will be a comfortable pitch range and it's hard and uncomfortable to perform at the outer edges of ones range for any length of time. We can learn to modify our habitual speaking pitch (compare for eg. early recordings of Margaret Thatcher with her later prime ministerial years) but it takes access to good training and lots of effort and motivation. And Maggie was merely switching from a higher female register to a lower one - moving from a typical male to typical female pitch is a much bigger shift.

As others have pointed out, differences in fundamental frequency are amplified by differences in the resonant characteristics of the vocal tract (ie. the size of cavities in the throat, nose and mouth) - again, these are largely physiologically determined and not subject to conscious control.

Vocal fold surgery is a thing - as I understand it the surgery involves reducing the size of the larynx to thin and tighten the vocal folds, which is likely to result in a higher pitch. However the vocal folds are incredibly thin and delicate structures, and any surgical intervention is likely to cause scarring which will result in voice quality characteristics that still don't sound entirely natural, even if the pitch is successfully raised. Also I would hazard a guess that ENT surgeons might be more than a little squeamish about undertaking gung-ho interventions that come with a high risk of turning a healthy structure into something that functions with overtly pathological functioning. Obviously gender surgeons are doing just exactly that every day, but ENT surgeons are probably more grounded in normal medical ethics. And maybe even those who do carry out those surgeries (and there'll always be someone who'll throw caution to the wind when there's £££ involved) are maybe more honest with their patients about the risk/benefit ratio?