r/transvoice

I’ve just booked my flights to Seoul for voice surgery at Yeson Voice Center in Gangnam.

This has been one of those on/off/on/off decisions for ages. I’ve been doing voice training with Seattle Voice Lab, and my coach says I’m doing okay, but honestly, I’ve found it so much harder than I expected.

I thought I’d be good at it. I can sing, I can do impressions, I have a decent musical ear, and I arrogantly assumed it would click. It absolutely has not clicked 😂

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge wasn’t one huge dramatic moment. It was lots of little ones.

Being visually read as female, then speaking and watching people instantly recalibrate.

Trying to say “no” at a petrol station in my careful trained voice, then having to repeat it louder and feeling the whole thing collapse.

Phoning a hair salon and being told, “James does the men,” because I sounded male on the phone.

And then the big one: recording a software demo for a client, playing it back, and thinking, “Oh God. I just sound like Stephen Bennett with a girl face.”

That was the moment I knew.

So I’ve written a longer piece about why I’m doing it, why I chose Seoul, why voice has become the thing I can’t ignore anymore, and the strange comedy of going to Gangnam for voice surgery while not being allowed to sing Gangnam Style out loud.

After fifty-seven years of trying to find my voice, I’m flying halfway across the world to lose it deliberately.

Hopefully, when it comes back, it will sound a little more like me.

https://fasttrackfemme.substack.com/p/gangnam-style-silently

Asher Phoenix (1998-2025) and I had a brief relationship before Asher became trans. Asher worked as a photographer and writer for the Los Angeles Times. Later Asher moved back home to Kansas and lived with family until Asher passed. Spoke to Asher's mother and aunt on social media and neither knew the cause of death. Asher and their trans girlfriend McKenzie Jane had issues with drug abuse. In 2021, Jane died after having male-to-female gender transition surgery from drugs laced with fentanyl. I got a single thank you email from Jane after donating to their GoFundMe medical page, Asher had told Jane about me. Hope they're both in the afterlife together. Goodbye, beautiful friend.

hopefully someone responds, and thank you if you do :)

hihi i've been voice training for like 3 years or something atp, but i still hear weirdness in my voice, any feedback / should i save up for vfs

either way tyty

This is a video that was just meant to be sent to a friend, but I thought was a good example because it's exactly how I speak when I have to raise my voice a bit irl, which I think is a lot harder to do well than doing a quiet, curated, heavily controlled clip.

(Just for context, I was just leaving an event I photographed, which did not go well 😂)

So what do you guys think? Pass or no?

I can control everything besides resonance i literally practice and nothing works i do everything right i just still don’t sound fem i can control vocal weight and pitch (I attached a video of me talking about bullshit so yall can hello and give me an idea)

Confused by resonance? Exactly.
Do you find other people to be wrong about resonance? Exactly.
Do you think resonance is actually really simple and don't get the confusion? Exactly.

Come fight me about resonance (and more) LIVE @ 8 PM ET tonight!!!! (I'm trolling obviously, but only partially)

I'm a Professional Voice Pedagogue and Researcher, and I'm doing a presentation on "resonance" as a teaching tool at The Voice Foundation Symposium (voice pros definitely say hey PLEASE). I wanna find more holes to poke in resonance approaches for that presentation, so I need YOUR bad resonance ideas (😜 i keed 😜) below and especially during my LIVE event @ 8 PM ET tonight to help further develop my presentation.

Let's get started with my resonance refutations:

1. Resonance approaches are often ABLEIST because they require a very non-literal, non-anatomically accurate, unintuitive understanding of your body (how do you NOT sing from your throat?). This makes it inaccessible to a lot of autistic and other ND people.
2. Resonance approaches are often SEXIST/TRANSPHOBIC because people be tryna say stuff like "Women don't have chest or falsetto" and "Men don't have head or whistle" when this is not corroborated by laryngeal vibratory mechanisms and several other models.
3. Resonance approaches are often RACIST because sympathetic vibration sensation relies on very culturally specific referents (chest and head don't translate to non-Western languages) and even worse, things like facial/mask resonance relies on the sympathetic vibration of facial structures that are often very different across the lines of race.

Atm I have VFS scheduled with Dr. Yung coming up but I have been going back and forth and going crazy.

My voice passes pretty well but I'm very quiet and anxious about "slipping" a lot of the time. I also hate the way I sound when I cough, sneeze...involuntary sounds etc.

Some girls sound incredible post-vfs to me but stories about underwhelming or unsatisfactory results are scaring me along with the intubation risk with future surgeries. I already can't yell or project and I’m not a singer but I do enjoy singing in the car so sigh idk.....Feeling seriously conflicted

Anyone deal with anything similar?

Please let me know any criticisms you have with my voice, especially vocal weight. When I first started voice training I felt like some scratchiness made it sound better but maybe I should refine it into something cleaner.