Who’s behind the mask?

“Does anyone else think it's going to be much easier to pass when wearing a facemask?!”  That was a question recently posed on one of the popular online transgender forums.  The answer?  No.  One person responded, “I’m being misgendered more, I imagine because when you can’t see most of the face you use other cues - height, build, voice.  The answer is probably to put on ten tons of eye makeup.”  

As Rebecca Root discussed with me, we have two strong projections of gender - that of visible presentation and audible presentation.  Masks eliminate many visual facial cues to gender, such as lipstick – a hallmark of quintessential femininity.  Fortunately, one of the most expressive features of the face is still accessible – the eyes and eyebrows.  Other than that, we have cues such as height, figure, hair, hands, presence or absence of an Adam’s apple, and dress to visually convey gender.  

With the reduction of visual cues we can offer others, audible voice cues grow in importance.  Muffling our utterances, masks even impede precise articulation, which is widely considered a feminine speech characteristic.  Pitch, inflection, timbre and tonal cues of voice become more influential in confirming gender.  

In the pandemic world, a trans person may find their voice to be the key to presenting to the world just who is behind their mask.