Over the last few years, speech therapy has been shown to be the most reliable discipline for feminizing the voice. Being non-invasive, speech therapy guarantees results by maintaining healthy vocal cords and developing the vocal potential of the patient.
However, voice feminization sessions not only work on the vocal level, but also on prosody, the patient’s expressive capacity, emotions… in short, they work on what speech therapist Mariela Astudillo calls the “emotional voice”.
Voice and gender
It is important to understand that a voice is only a sum of articulated sounds. An isolated note does not really have a gender, that is, the fact that a person speaks using one note or another does not define its gender at an acoustic level.
After many years of study, of experience, of hypotheses, of questions, it has been concluded that what really defines gender is the way people speak. The way they express themselves, the way they express their emotions, the way they articulate, the way they use the muscles of the face, the way they are able to express an emotion through their face are elements that, when well combined, allow us to determine whether a person belongs to one gender or another.
This is why the Astudillo method achieves such decisive and effective results, because it works on each of these elements in order to obtain a feminine and natural voice.
Many transgender women who try to feminize their voices by themselves, achieve some positive results, but are imprisoned within a vocal scheme that does not allow them to express any kind of emotion. They do not leave this comfort and security zone, and masculine parameters reappear.
In other words, many women achieve an acceptable conversational voice at the feminine level and constantly maintain it in all situations of daily life, which ultimately leads to an unnatural expression and prevents them from expressing themselves as they are. This, in the long run, is not advisable.
How can a voice be feminized?
Speech therapy strives every day to perfect its intervention when it comes to feminizing a voice. In the case of the Astudillo method, a feminine and natural voice is currently achieved in 10 sessions of 30 minutes. After two and a half months (or even sooner), the patient achieves total control of her voice, her way of speaking and expressing herself, she manages to automate the new vocal gesture, to personalize it, so that she feels free to express herself in all situations of her daily life with total freedom.
In conclusion, when you want to feminize a voice, it is important to understand all the elements that must be combined to achieve a natural and lasting result.
It is not enough to work on vocal parameters in isolation, nor is it enough to seek a unique conversational voice as a response to all situations of daily life.
It is important to understand the vocal richness of each person, it is also important to respect the identity and personality of each patient and how they express it through their voice, through their non-verbal language, through their facial expressions. It is also important to respect the way this person expresses his or her emotions, fears, joys, etc…
Is it necessary to have surgery to achieve the definitive feminization of the voice?
We have full confidence in the results of speech therapy, and we question the benefits of surgery. Indeed, surgery is a solution to which you would have to resort as a last resort because it does not work on any of the parameters mentioned above. It is based exclusively on tonal augmentation, that is, on the search for high notes, but as we have already mentioned, femininity cannot be summed up in a single high note.
More information at www.femivoz.es