Since I began my career as a speech-language pathologist specializing in feminization of the transgender woman’s voice, the topic of laughter, coughing and sneezing, as hardly controllable reflex acts, has been a much talked about topic. At the beginning of my thesis, when I was looking for the key to feminize a voice based on my logopedic knowledge, I discovered that indeed these reflex acts did not have to be feminized voluntarily.
Sixteen years ago, when I started working with transgender women, I paid close attention to everything they told me: their stories and their lives. They shared with me their fears, their hopes and their demands. They also shared with me their feelings, their needs and even their personal views on femininity and all those everyday elements that could betray them.
Often, reflexive acts, such as coughing, sneezing or laughing, can be real enemies for transgender women who have not yet feminized their voices. However, over the years, I have discovered how my method subliminally and indirectly influences these anatomical reflex acts, since I work the laryngeal, facial, respiratory, etc., muscles in a profound way. This is how I understood that I did not have to work on the reflex acts, since they would be automatically feminized through the exercises proposed to my patients.
The reflex act as self-expression
It is necessary to think that laughter, for example, is a very personal act, and that there are no expressive rules for it.
I know people who have vividly particular laughter, men who laugh in a very sharp way and women who have a very deep laughter. Even so, from my point of view, it is not possible to say that there is a feminine or a masculine laughter. If we were to think about it, we would be talking about a stereotype of the voice: high-pitched female voice and low-pitched male voice.
Therefore, I think that both laughter and speech are very personal elements, and therefore, they will be influenced thanks to the feminization work that I propose with my method. Many patients notice a modification at the level of laughter or cough after my sessions. Indeed, I think that the muscular work done ends up influencing the resting position of the larynx, and that in general, it influences the laryngeal and respiratory dynamics, in a global way.
On the other hand, during my voice feminization sessions, I work on facial expressions and expressiveness in a very precise way. This allows me to feminize not only the facial mimics of my patients, but also the expression of their feelings and emotions. In this way, the patient ends up feeling a liberation not only expressive, but global.
Therefore, and from my point of view, I think that it is not necessary to modify these reflex acts during the feminization sessions. In the same way that it happens with the scream, any reflex act linked to the voice will be implicitly feminized and the feminization work will be done in an efficient and deep way. This is the case of the Astudillo method.
When working on the feminization of the voice with a person, it is always necessary to relativize the objectives we are trying to achieve. It is important to emphasize that it is important to avoid a stereotype that could alienate the personality or identity of the patient. In my sessions, I never feminize the voice of my patients with a mirror effect to my own, but rather I seek to push the patient towards a path of introspection, discovery and exploration that will lead her to exalt her own femininity in a personal way, which will allow her to reach a totally personalized voice and way of expressing herself.
As far as reflexes are concerned, the same is true. I find it absurd to think that we have to teach our patients to laugh, cough and sneeze. These are “reflex” acts, of course, but they are totally personal. There is, therefore, in my view, no imposed rule as to how we should cough, laugh or sneeze.
I repeat it many times, the Astudillo method is a liberating method, since it frees every person from vocal, emotional, expressive or human pressures, thus allowing the evolution of the person and the expression of his or her own personality and identity without having to feel obliged to submit to social or other impositions.
Reflex acts and emotions
What is then the limit or the difference between a reflex act and an act produced by an unmanageable emotion?
Indeed, we could think that emotions make us react in an uncontrollable way leading, in certain situations, our voice and our way of expressing ourselves to be prisoners of an emotionality difficult to control that could betray us or, of course, betray us.
Over the last few years of practicing my methodology, I have realized that the approach to emotions as a role-play or “laboratory” version was very helpful to the patients. Indeed, I apply what I call “experience memory”, i.e. the memory of experience, which asks the patient to recall emotions previously experienced in order to reproduce an encoded schema.
This is what I put into practice in the feminization of the emotional voice. This emotional voice allows us to go through different stages where our brain would codify or assimilate a way of expressing certain emotions. It would also allow us to train them and prepare us for future situations in which these emotions would be requested or not subjected to any control. This practice allows my patients to reduce their anxiety in conflictive situations, for example, and to release their emotions and personalize their reactions.
Finally, it is important to take into account each of the parameters and elements in order to guide our practice, keeping clear objectives and based on the personality and identity of our patient. No therapeutic scheme can be applied, like a cooking recipe, without taking into account the human and emotional factors directly linked to the patient herself.
Let us remember that the Astudillo method is a therapeutic method of vocal training based on intuition, on the human factor and on the emotional factor that achieves the complete liberation of the individual.