This post is a somewhat unassorted collection of observations about voice feminization that I wish I had known about when I first started.
This is not really a guide to voice feminization, meaning that this post alone won't help you feminize your voice or even help you get started. However, this might help supplement or accelerate your existing work to feminize your voice.
Also, this guide will focus more on "meta" tips for feminizing your voice and focus less on low-level specific tips. These tips are not necessarily in any specific order, although I made an attempt to order them into a somewhat logical progression.
Throughout this guide I'll do my best to distinguish observations that might be idiosyncratic to me and observations that I believe are generally applicable, based on what my voice therapist has taught me and also based on what I've learned from comparing notes with other people feminizing their voice.
I wanted to explain a bit about my own background before I dive into the various observations since that background may help provide context for what I'm about to say.
I'm a trans woman and I began feminizing my voice before coming out and publicly transitioning. The relevant events from my personal timeline were:
- January 2021: I began to practice feminizing my voice by being self-taught (using this guide)
- July 2021: I first came out publicly on Twitter
- January 2022: I finished coming out to essentially everyone in my life
- March 2022: I began to see a voice therapist
- September 2022: The time I initially wrote this post
So throughout a long part of the voice feminization process there were plenty of times where I had neither the psychological safety nor support to feminize my voice.
That lack of psychological safety is what led me to being self-taught instead of seeking a voice therapist and also led to many bad habits that I had to unlearn.
If some of that stuff sounds familiar to you then you might find this guide helpful.
Also, for what it's worth, these are two recordings of what my voice sounds like before and after voice feminization (the first video is pre-transition):
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Before voice feminization: Nix meetup presentation
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After voice feminization: ZuriHac 2023 presentation
I'm also still continuing to learn more, but I feel comfortable enough to share what I've learned so far.
Alright, with that out of the way, let's get to the tips …
I cannot stress this enough. You do not need to strain your voice to feminize your voice. Your feminine voice should feel comfortable, easy, and natural when you speak.
The reason why this is my #1 tip is because this is the only mistake you can make that can cause permanent damage to your voice. Voice feminization is a completely reversible process unless you chronically strain your voice and then you risk irreversible degrading your voice.
I was fortunate to avoid irreversibly damaging my voice, but I probably came close back when I was self-taught. Not only did I strain my voice quite a bit while training, but I began to notice that my voice would reliably get hoarse for a while after extensively using my feminine voice. I did some research and realized that I needed to stop and get help, which led me to seek a voice therapist.
You also don't want to strain your voice because it will greatly decrease the quality of your voice: even when you're not hoarse you'll literally sound "strained" and unnatural while speaking.
Strain feels like a build-up in tension, typically around your throat. As this tension builds up you find that you have greater difficulty sustaining your feminine voice, typically after only a few minutes of use.
The surefire sign that you strained yourself too much is that your voice becomes hoarse. It's not the end of the world if you accidentally make your voice hoarse (everybody gets hoarse once in a while), but frequent and repeated episodes of voice hoarseness are a red flag that you need to seriously stop and see a voice therapist.
When I do feel strain I most commonly feel it either around my vocal cords (near the middle of my neck) or in the neck muscles beneath my jaw.
Many transfems report feminizing their voice by "just" gradually trying to slowly speak more effeminately over time. I cannot guarantee that this will work for you but I felt it was important to mention this.
I never tried this route because I am a tryhard. When I learn new things I am pretty intense and voice feminization was no different.
Did my intense process help me or speed things up? Probably not. But it's just the way that I learn. I also had no idea when I first started that the gradual process was even an option.
If you continue reading, I'll assume you are a tryhard like me.
I think most people know this. If you went through a male puberty like me then most likely testosterone irreversibly deepened your voice. It's unfortunate, but that's the reality.
There is such a thing as voice feminization surgery, but that mainly affects your habitual pitch which is not really the most important part of voice feminization. Also, even if you undergo surgery you will still need to supplement that surgery with voice therapy anyway.
This is a long-winded way of saying: you will need practice and time to feminize your voice regardless of what you choose to do. There are no shortcuts here.
Don't despair! A lot of transfems greatly underestimate how much they can feminize their voice. Even if your pre-transition voice is extremely deep and manly I'm confident that you can achieve a very convincing and comfortable feminine voice.
Your voice is actually an incredibly versatile instrument and once you learn to unlock its power you will surprise yourself.
Moreover, not only can you feminize your voice you can make your feminine voice your default voice, meaning that you will not need to pay attention or concentrate to feminize your voice. With practice, your feminine voice can become automatic and effortless.
What I mean is that almost all the muscles you need to engage to feminize your voice are already strong enough to do what you need. The main exception I can think of would probably be the muscles you need to raise your larynx. In the early stages of vocal feminization you will need to strengthen those muscles so that it becomes effortless and comfortable to keep your larynx raised all day, every day.
Other than that, voice feminization is mostly about developing improved proprioceptive control of the relevant muscles, rather than improving their strength.
To make an analogy: I'm currently unable to raise my left eyebrow in isolation. I can raise both of my eyebrows simultaneously or raise only my right eyebrow, but I cannot raise only my left eyebrow. If I cared enough to really work at it I could slowly begin to learn how to move it over time but it would take spaced and repetitive practice before my mind could learn how to properly control those muscles. My brain would probably have to slowly form new synapses over time before I could fully control my left eyebrow.
Voice training is like that. You're learning to move muscles that you've never moved that much before or never moved "in that way" before. No matter how diligently you practice your brain just needs time to learn how to control those muscles.
This also means that it's less important how long you practice and it's more important how mentally engaged you are with your practice. Don't just mindlessly drill various exercises: instead, pay attention to what is happening inside your vocal tract and use your brain. There are all sorts of things you can focus on as you practice speaking or perform a drill, like:
- How does your throat feel? Relaxed or tense? Do you feel strain?
- How does your voice sound to you in your head?
- How does your voice sound when you play back a recording?
- What does the flow of air feel like?
- Where do you feel vibration?
- What did you do to make all of the above happen?
- What is your overall emotional state as you're speaking?
The more you pay attention to these things the more you improve your "mental resolution" of what is going on and that in turn improves your control.
Thinking of vocal training as a mental exercise rather than a physical exercise will also help you avoid strain. You do NOT want to try to persist or power through any difficulties you encounter.
If a certain way of speaking strains your voice, it will always strain your voice. No amount of practice, exercise, or persistence will fix that. You just have to explore something different.
If you find yourself straining as you feminize your voice, then follow these steps:
- Stop
- Take a break
- Try something different next time
- Don't give up: trust that you will eventually find a comfortable voice
Along the same lines: if you haven't discovered anything new since your last practice then likely nothing will have improved since then. Repeating the same practice over and over day after day without learning any new lessons along the way will not result in any progress. I'll reiterate: voice feminization is mostly a mental exercise, not a physical exercise.
Or to put it another way: if nothing changes, nothing will improve.
Keep experimenting so that you're always trying new things and learning new things. Don't get stuck in a practice routine.
A lot of people will hear "mental exercise" and think that they can discover some sort of clever shortcut or trick to speed up the process. This is partly true and partly false.
There are some aspects of voice feminization where a leap of insight will lead to a marked improvement, kind of like being taught a new way to solve a math problem: once you know the trick it clicks and now you've got a powerful new tool in your toolbox.
However, there are other aspects of voice training that require patience. In particular, there are many lessons or tricks you might be unable to learn until you develop improved proprioceptive control of the relevant muscles and that takes time.
Eventually you will encounter the following frustrating phenomenon:
- Your voice is "on fire" (it feels great and sounds great)
- A few minutes later, you can no longer speak that way
- You can't figure out what went wrong or how to go back to being "on fire"
I call this "misplacing your voice". You feel like you left your voice somewhere by mistake and now you can't find it.
A more advanced form of "misplacing your voice" is:
- You figure out a trick to produce your desired voice
- You go to sleep
- The next day you try the same trick and … the trick no longer works
This can be extremely demoralizing! So many times I would go into voice therapy and say something along the lines of "I swear I had this down pat yesterday but now I can't do it for some reason".
In my view, misplacing your voice is sometimes an indicator of poor proprioceptive control. In other words, you have a low mental resolution of what's happening to produce your voice. You probably understand and can identify some of the things that you're doing correctly, but there are other things you are doing that you are blind to. Failing to notice those "other things" is one reason why the same trick will work on one day but then fail the next day.
Some voice training guides will try to distil voice training to a few orthogonal axes like:
- resonance
- pitch
- airflow
… but this is a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening when you produce a voice.
First off, these elements of a voice are not really independent of one another. With training you can manipulate your voice to modulate only pitch or modulate only resonance, but by default if you try change one of these things that will likely spill over into other changes. Everything inside your vocal tract is interconnected. Controlling your voice at first will feel like like trying to program with really messy and low-level assembly code.
Furthermore, there is a lot more dimension to these things. For example, you can technically measure resonance on a linear scale, but your vocal tract is not a linear dial; there is more than one way to produce the same target resonance.
This is why you need to understand your voice at a low level first before you can begin to understand your voice at a high level. Be detail-oriented and nuanced when thinking about your voice, even if you have to make up your own terminology to explain to yourself what is working for you and what isn't. After doing this long enough you will build up the mental tools to begin thinking about your voice at a much higher level of abstraction (like programming in a higher-level programming language).
LOL. Just kidding. Voices are still complicated, but I'm going to to simplify things in the way most other guides do so that I can talk about voices in broad strokes.
The three things I'll mention for the purpose of this guide are:
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resonance
RESONANCE IS THE MAIN THING THAT FEMINIZES YOUR VOICE!!!
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airflow
Increasing airflow is what reduces strain and helps you attain a comfortable, effortless, and natural-sounding voice. Given the importance of reducing strain, airflow is really important!
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pitch
Pitch does far less to feminize your voice and is more of a "stylistic" thing. I'll expand upon this later.
If I had to rank these things in order of importance I would say that resonance and airflow are tied for first place, whereas pitch is a distant third.
This means that you should focus primarily on resonance and airflow at first before worrying about pitch. A common mistake that most people make is assuming that pitch is the most important part of vocal feminization and that is (in my view) wrong or at best highly misleading.
Here are two great recordings highlighting many elements of vocal feminization:
… and the author of those recordings also authored the same guide that I initially used for being self-taught.
Although that guide ultimately did not work out for me, it is a GOLDMINE for useful exercises, videos, and recordings.
Resonance is the main thing that feminizes your voice. You want to increase your voice's resonant frequency which is also called "brightening" your resonance. In isolation, brightening resonance will make your voice sound brassy and you will feel your vocal tract "buzz" in new places.
Anything you do to make your vocal tract smaller will brighten your resonance and feminize your voice. The most common and effective way to do this is to raise your larynx, but there are other ways you can modulate resonance, such as by shaping your tongue or mouth.
A good sign that you're not brightening your resonance enough is that your voice doesn't sound feminine enough to your own ears.
"One simple trick" I see transfems commonly share for brightening resonance is to try to speak as if your voice is coming from the top back of your vocal tract instead of coming from your chest. If you do this correctly you will naturally raise your larynx when attempting to speak in this way.
I also recommend this video that explains resonance and some ways to practice and build an intuition for resonance:
The Single MOST Powerful Element of Voice Feminization: The Gender Dial (R1) | Exercises and Lecture
Airflow is how much air you muster in order to speak. The greater the airflow the more "breathy" your voice is, both figuratively (the way it sounds) and literally (you can feel more breath coming out of your mouth).
For example, a loud laugh will tend to produce a lot of airflow, but also being (or pretending to be) exhausted from aerobic exercise will also produce a lot of airflow (because you will breathe more heavily). Those are extreme examples (you don't need that much air when speaking) but they can help you get an idea of what better airflow feels like.
A good sign that you're not recruiting enough air to speak is that you strain your voice when speaking (especially when accessing higher pitch). In particular, you will feel tenseness or a pinch around your vocal cords if they're not getting enough airflow. When you recruit enough air your vocal cords will feel more relaxed.
This video is the best resource I could find on this subject and it helped me build an intuition for what to listen for and how to promote airflow:
CLEAN UP THE VOICE & AVOID STRAIN | False Vocal Fold Control | 8 Exercises, Document, and Lecture
I think we all know what pitch is, so I'll gloss over that part.
The main thing I want to mention is that resonance is not pitch. They are very different things and the most common mistake people make is believing that pitch feminizes the voice, when it's really resonance that feminizes the voice.
I like to think of pitch as a tool for self-expression, meaning that it's something you modulate to "color" the way you speak to better convey yourself. Masculine speech tends to be more monotone whereas feminine speech tends to access a much wider range of pitch.
In particular, feminine speaking can use pitch in a very situational way; it's not like a feminine voice has just "one" pitch. On a "macro" scale, women might lower their pitch in professional settings and raise their pitch in more casual settings. On a "micro" scale, feminine pitch can vary wildly and repeatedly over the course of a single sentence as a tool for emphasis.
So think of pitch more as a tool for improved self-expression rather than as a tool for feminizing your voice per se. Accessing a wider range of pitch gives you more tools to express yourself, and that greater expressiveness does more to feminize your voice than the average pitch.
I tried to do pitch training using this video (from the self-taught guide):
"How To Warm Up Your Voice" - Voice Lessons To the World
… but ultimately I found that improving airflow did much more to improve the range of my pitch than those exercises.
I can summarize the recent points by giving you the following rules of thumb for what to fix when your voice sounds wrong to you.
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Does your voice not sound feminine enough? Brighten your resonance
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Does your voice sound feminine, but artificial? Increase your airflow
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Does your voice sound natural but it's not your "style"? Vary your pitch
There's obviously more to feminizing a voice than these three changes, but those were the biggest wins, in my experience.
Minimizing strain and improving airflow was a particularly big deal for me because I have an unusually high "voice demand" compared to to other people. In particular, I do quite a bit of "long-form" speaking, such as:
- presentations
- streams
- teaching
- leading meetings at work
… where I may have to speak for extended periods of time with infrequent interruptions.
This is more challenging than conversational speech, where you have numerous opportunities to pause, catch your breath, and reset your voice. In demanding contexts, my voice would begin to strain and degrade quite quickly (on the order of a few minutes) and while I might occasionally reset and recover my voice quality it would rapidly degrade again.
For me, improving airflow (and also speaking a little more slowly) was the big thing that fixed that. Now I can speak at length with fairly consistent quality.
Moreover, once I found a voice with much better airflow and lower strain I began using that voice everywhere (even in less demanding contexts) because it was way more comfortable. Once you get the hang of speaking effeminately with lower strain you get hooked on it and can't go back.
More generally, my voice therapist really drilled into me the importance of airflow:
Pinching your voice to brighten resonance? Not enough airflow.
Voice degrades at night when you're tired? Not enough airflow.
Having trouble controlling pitch? Not enough airflow.
Straining your voice? Not enough airflow.
Voice degrades during long-form speaking? Not enough airflow.
I got a little sick of hearing of this and it took me a while to understand what she was asking me to do, but then I realized how right she was.
In this guide I'm not sharing a lot of specific tricks, except for this one. This is one of the few tricks that had a disproportionate effect on the quality of my voice and the speed of my learning process. It might not work for everybody, but I'm mentioning this in case it does help somebody because I never saw this trick mentioned in the wild.
The thing that worked really well for me was trying to "mix" specific vowel sounds into my speech. In other words, I try to "color" the way I speak to make it sound more like a specific vowel.
For example, if I mix an "e" sound (either a long "e" or short "e") into my speech, that tends to promote a brighter resonance. Similarly, if I mix a "u" sound (either a long "u" or short "u") into my speech, that tends to promote improved airflow. Longer vowels tend to promote a higher pitch than shorter vowels.
The reason this worked well for me was because it focused more on the way my voice sounded rather than the way I was moving my muscles. I personally found it easier and more intuitive to reproduce a desired vowel sound (because I already know how to prounce every vowel) than to think about "move X muscle to Y position" or "force the air to flow over here".
The other reason this worked well for me is because it made easier for me to not "misplace" my voice. Any time my voice was "on fire" I would study what vowel sounds my voice most closely resembled. Furthermore, those vowel sounds captured enough nuances of the voice that I'd be able to recreate the same voice fairly closely day after day.
You would think that this advice is obvious but I have met people trying to feminize their voice that don't do this.
You will actually need two types of recording apps, which brings us to the next two points:
You will need to be able to quickly record and play back throwaway recordings of your voice when practicing by yourself
This quick and easy playback is essential for a few reasons:
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You need to listen to your voice the way others hear it
A voice that sounds feminine in your head might not sound feminine to others. Taking a recording lets you hear your voice the way others do.
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You will listen more critically to a recording of your own voice
Have you ever thought you look great in a mirror but ugly in pictures? That's because you're more used to seeing yourself (flipped) in a mirror than (unflipped) in a picture. Same thing with your voice: you're not used to hearing recordings of your voice, so you'll listen more critically to recordings.
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You will build an intuition for the way your voice sounds
The more recordings you take, the less you will depend on them. After a while you will build a pretty solid intuition for the way your voice sounds to others without having to record your voice.
I personally use Vocal Pitch Monitor on Android for this purpose.
You also need to create more permanent recordings of yourself to listen to days/weeks/months later
These long-term recordings serve several purposes:
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Newer recordings can help you find a "misplaced" voice
If you record yourself when your voice is "on fire", listening to that recording can help you recover that voice if you "misplaced" it.
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Older recordings can improve your morale
Sometimes when I feel like I'm not making progress I listen to an old recording and realize how far I came since then. It's like "progress pics", but for your voice.
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Audio notes are much more effective than written notes
Sometimes you will figure out a new trick or a new voice to play with and it's much easier to document what you learned by recording it.
I personally use QuickTime on macOS for this purpose.
If you use QuickTime you can also easily record and play back videos of yourself speaking. This might not seem like a big deal, but for me it went a long way towards internalizing my voice as "mine". Seeing my face speaking effeminately helps when I want to cement any new speaking habits.
I prefer most of my notes to be audio recordings (organized by date), but written notes are okay, too, and can help supplement those recordings.
The main purpose of taking notes is to force yourself to think about what you are doing. Remember that you will progress more quickly if you mentally engage with the voice feminization process.
A secondary purpose of taking notes is to help yourself revisit an older voice or trick that worked well for you in the past, especially when you "misplace" your voice.
You don't want to go too overboard when critically listening to your own voice. At some point you will begin to become more critical of your voice than even strangers would be. If other people tell you your voice is great or strangers on the phone stop misgendering your voice, then trust their judgment.
Truthfully, the femininity of your voice doesn't really matter that much around friends and family. Whatever voice you use will always sound normal to them after enough time because in their mind it's neither a masculine nor feminine voice; it's just "your voice".
Vocal feminization makes a bigger deal when interacting with strangers when you don't want to be misgendered. However, even then it can be easy to get carried away. There's actually a lot more overlap between the natural range of feminine voices and masculine voices than people acknowledge and as you actively train your voice you will become more conscious of this overlap and (hopefully) more forgiving of your own voice.
I've mentioned this already, but it's important to keep experimenting with new things for another reason: the more tricks you learn to feminize your voice the less you will strain your voice.
Why? Because you won't lean so heavily on any one change to feminize your voice.
For example, if resonance is all that you know for how to feminize your voice, then you will lean too hard on resonance and likely strain your larynx.
Similarly, if pitch is one of the few tools in your toolbox then you might lean too heavily on pitch to feminize your voice and strain your vocal cords.
There are actually a large number of ways to improve the perceived femininity of your voice, including:
- Articulation
- Tongue control
- Word selection
- Intonation
- Body language!
Body language is an interesting one because it can work even if the listener cannot see you (e.g. a telephone conversation). Just moving your body in a more effeminate way as you speak can actually mentally prime you to feminize your voice.
Anyway, use all the tools at your disposal to feminize your voice because a well-rounded voice is a more comfortable voice.
By "code switching" I mean what this video is describing:
Code switching made it harder for me to feminize my voice because I had to "relearn" some things in different social contexts. For example, there would be many contexts where I could feminize my voice very confidently and then other contexts where I struggle, because my mind would basically be like "this is not at all the same thing".
Anyway, I mention this to note that it's totally fine if your feminine voice doesn't "transfer" easily between contexts. That will get better as you gain more experience feminizing your voice in each context.
Many transfems who begin to feminize their voice do so before they come out (myself included). Unfortunately, this can make it hard to find a safe place to train without accidentally outing oneself.
You can partially mitigate this by focusing on practicing resonance first. Many resonance-related exercises can be done under your breath or without even speaking at all, which makes them safe to use in even hostile environments.
Or, you might find an environment where you can speak out loud, but not too loud. For example, you might train in the privacy of your own room if you're quiet enough.
However, you don't want to do this for too long, for the following reasons:
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You will learn a bad habit of speaking with not enough airflow
If you're always speaking quietly or under your breath you won't learn how to recruit enough air and you will consequently strain yourself once you try to graduate to more advanced stuff (especially varying pitch).
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You will lean too hard on resonance to feminize your voice
… which will also strain your voice. You want to cultivate a more well-rounded voice in order to keep your feminine speech comfortable.
So, it's really worth investing in finding a place where you can practice "for real" free of any volume constraints or inhibitions.
Some places that might work for you:
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Your car (if you own one)
You can drive to some parking lot and then sit in your car and train. Or you can train your voice while driving.
Along the same lines, if you own a motorcycle you can also train your voice while driving.
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Middle of nowhere
If you know a secluded place (e.g. along a trail, a park, or the wilderness) where you're unlikely to meet other people, you can use that.
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A music practice room
If you play an instrument, you can rent/reserve a practice room and train your voice while you practice your instrument. If the rooms are sufficiently sound-proof and/or your instrument is loud enough then nobody will notice.
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A public place where nobody will recognize you
You might not be scared to practice your voice in public if it is around complete strangers (if all you are worried about is friends and family finding out).
Additionally, you can also try just gradually feminizing your voice, even around people you know. If you feminize it slowly enough they won't even notice you're doing it for quite a while. People are generally pretty self-absorbed and won't notice stuff like that until it hits them in the face.
Let me know if you disagree with any of the advice here. I'm pretty open to being corrected or using more guarded language if I spoke too confidently.
Also, feel free to submit changes if there's anything you'd like to add.