Image from H. Andrew Schwartz, Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791
It is obvious to everyone that trans people modify their visual presentation. Most people realise the voice, like visual appearance, is a strong auditory cue for gender identification that, for most trans people, must also be modified. Many people are not aware that there are many subtle para-linguistic features of communication that must also be modified in order to ‘pass’ as a specific gender.
Linguist Mark Liberman, in his blog post entitled, Male and female word usage, reports some differences in vocabulary choice and other paralinguistic features in cis men and cis women’s speech, as evidenced by research.
| MALE | FEMALE |
| Unintelligible 11% more often | “Gosh!” 4.4 times more often |
| False starts (self-corrections) 45% more often | “Goodness!” 5.6 times more often |
| “uh” perhaps element of dysfluency | Laughter 60% more often |
| Phatic exprepressions “yeah” “no shit” | Phatic expressions “um-hum” “yes” “uh-huh” |
Liberman queries the possible reasons for these differences,
It's less clear why women should laugh 60% more often than men do — are women on average happier, or more overtly sociable? Or do men feel constrained not to express positive emotions?
He replies to a commenter on his post,
It's well established, both by empirical studies and by common sense, that men in general "cuss" or "use profanity" much more frequently than women do, and that women are more likely than men to substitute euphemisms instead…Presumably this reflects a gender difference in how people are socialized to express the emotions and attitudes underlying taboo-word usage, not an intrinsic difference (whether genetic or learned) in how men and women feel and react.
Liberman also considers whether women put more effort into signalling attention and agreement during conversation by using more phatic expressions or merely a different choice of such expressions.
Delving further into this area of paralinguistic modification, I was intrigued by an interesting article by Claire Rudy Foster (ftm), “The secret life of an anonymous speechwriter to the stars,” in which he explains how he had to consider vocabulary, cadence, tone and even timing of speech in order to be perceived as masculine. He writes,
My voice started to drop, a second adolescence. Yet my expressions did not change. When I spoke, my cadence and word choices were still “female”.
But not only was perception of gender a concern, he also found his social status changed, as well. This change meant his words and the way he spoke them had a different effect on listeners, both male and female.
Although the words I spoke didn’t change, my voice and the way I sounded altered the way that others heard me. Short statements, in a deep, gruff voice, can be heard as controlling, dismissive or rude, a sign of un-self-aware male privilege. The anger that commanded respect and interest when I presented as female became a liability as my voice lowered, acquiring the tones of patriarchy. Each word carried more weight, bigger consequences than before. I’d had practice writing speeches for other people. Now, I had to learn new lines that were right for my voice and the body that carried it.
So, it seems Foster had to be sensitive to the changes in perception imparted merely by his change in voice quality. A masculine voice made him vulnerable to negative perceptions typically attributed to male-ness (controlling, dismissive, rudeness).
The human ear picks up on subtleties of both voice and speech. Pairing that sensitivity with social sensitivities of role and status results in even trickier communication challenges for transgender people. The old adage, “It’s not what you say, but how you say it” has never been truer.