There are a number of differences between the way males and females produce voice.
That's largely down to the anatomy of the larynx
and the vocal folds that sit inside the larynx.
So, in males, the cartilage that forms the prominence,
the Adam's apple we can see in men, is at a much tighter angle.
So it's much more prominent in the neck, compared to women.
The other difference is that in men,
because of testosterone that's released in puberty,
those vocal folds that sit inside the larynx are a little bit thicker,
a little bit longer, and so they vibrate more slowly as the air passes between them
and that creates a deeper pitch in comparison to women,
In a typical clinical caseload for somebody who works in a gender clinic
around 80% to 85% of that caseload
will be people who are transitioning from male to female.
The reason for that is, people who are transitioning from female to male
take testosterone as part of their treatment.
This immediately causes changes to the vocal folds and the way voice is produced.
Usually the voice deepens automatically as a result of taking testosterone.
For people who are transitioning to female,
the hormone treatment that people take makes no difference to the voice,
so the key aspect there is having voice therapy.
The hurdles in terms of voice for transgender women
tend to be much more significant than for transgender men.
When I was a child, my father was always telling me off
for being too girly when I spoke.
Apparently, I used to move my lips quite a lot.
And because I've always been interested in the theatre,
I trained in the theatre,
I've always had what I would term a musical voice.
It's always had cadence in it.
I think, sometimes, the problem is that if you transition
and you've been used to speaking on a monotone and reining everything in,
then it gets rather difficult if you suddenly feel
that you've got to move your voice about a bit.
It's much nicer for people to listen to if you've got some cadences in there –
you rise, you fall and you've got an expressive voice.
That is the kind of voice I have
and, of course, as an actor that's the kind of voice I need.
I'd only been on testosterone about three weeks
and my voice was sort of breaking fairly quickly.
People who were seeing me probably once a week
could actually notice the difference in my voice.
Saying, "Crumbs! It's getting deep! It's getting deep!"
It's still changing now, at three years.
Three years being on testosterone and it's still...developing!
You're going through a second puberty, basically,
but when you go through your first puberty it's over several years,
so it's more natural, things develop slower.
But when you're put on hormones, it's very strong hormone
and the changes happen very, very quickly.
The effect's much stronger, more powerful on your vocal cords, especially.
When I was at university, I was in a production of The Maids by Jean Genet,
who was a French writer.
He was gay and said that any female parts he wrote should be played by the male sex.
I played one of the sisters in it and I wore a wig,
a bob, very much like this hairstyle now.
I looked in the mirror and I completely recognised myself,
so I knew that was the kind of style that I would adopt.
And vocally speaking, the person who had that hairstyle was Fenella Fielding.
She had a marvellous, deep, velvety voice – and in fact, still does.
I knew that I would never have a little girly voice, however hard I tried.
I didn't think, anyway, that it would go with the way that I looked,
because I was tall and dramatic looking
and I wanted a dramatic voice to go with it.
Certainly, when I first started, I had a very dramatic voice,
but I've actually learned to soften it and lighten it now,
because it can get a bit wearing being dramatic the whole time.
Pre-hormones, obviously, I sounded female, I looked female, I was treated as female.
It was very frustrating, especially when you're on the telephone to people.
They'd say, "Can I speak to Mr So-and-so." "Yes, speaking."
"No, it's a man I want to speak to." "Yes, speaking." "Oh, right, sorry."
Eventually they would carry on, but you could tell they still weren't sure.
But the minute my voice started breaking and changing –
which was within as little as three weeks it started getting lower –
slowly, more and more people, when I'm speaking on the phone,
started saying "he" to me and "Mr" and saying "sir" and things like that.
And the feeling lift you got from that was amazing.
You'd be smiling to yourself.
There are three main components we need to think about,
in terms of what makes up our voice.
These are pitch, resonance and intonation.
So, pitch is whether our pitch is high or low.
We can all alter that but, typically, a male pitch is lower on average
and a female pitch is higher on average.
Resonance is about where the voice is placed.
It's about the position and the tone of the voice, where the voice comes from.
The final aspect of voice is intonation.
Intonation is the modulations that we have in our voice as it goes up and down.
That's how we express feelings and express our emotion with our voice.
Typically, if you asked a man to count from one to five
he would be much more likely to produce "one, two, three, four, five"
in quite a monotone, quite a flat way, in terms of intonation.
Typically, again, if you asked a woman to do the same thing,
she would be much more likely to put more intonation into her counting.
(WITH MODULATIONS) "One, two, three, four, five" as opposed to...
(MONOTONE) "One, two, three, four, five."
If we were to work on pitch, what we would like is to increase the pitch a little
to help that person sound or be perceived as more feminine, in terms of their voice.
We would start with some humming exercises at that optimum pitch.
Then we'd move on to merging those humming sounds with vowels.
So, "Mmm-a."
And then producing words, producing phrases, and into conversation,
working through a hierarchy of steps with pitch.
The next thing we might look at is resonance.
In order to produce what's perceived as a more feminine sound,
we would work on moving the voice from being placed at the back of the mouth
to producing a brighter, cleaner sound
where the voice is produced more from the front of the mouth.
We might also work on introducing a slight breathy quality to the voice –
again, something that's perceived as being more feminine,
but it's really important not to over-feminise the voice.
The third aspect of therapy that we might look at is intonation.
So, increasing the intonation patterns,
increasing the amount of modulation in that person's voice –
again, to allow that person to express emotion and to express feelings
using their slightly new voice.
I suppose I was convinced my voice had...changed gender
when people stopped saying "sir" to me in shops or on the telephone.
I've had discussions with my friends about this,
how everybody learned to do things differently.
I had one friend who, whenever I rang her up... (CHUCKLES)
..I'd say, "Have you rushed upstairs?"
Because she'd always go... (WITH BREATH) "Hello! Who's that?"
I'd say, "It's me" and she'd go... (FLATLY) "Oh, fine. OK."
It was her way of being able to speak on the breath so that...
(IMITATES) ...when she picked up the telephone,
nobody was going to call her "sir".
The way I feel about my voice at the moment, the relationship I've got with it,
is not saying I feel it's part of me as much now as it was before,
because it's like someone's took control of my voice.
Like I feel more alienated from me.
It's like a little man's inside my throat, doing things.
Because if I'm quite calm and talking it's quite level,
whereas I get a bit excited it will suddenly squeak.
And it is very, very bizarre
because I don't know, sometimes from one day to the next, what it's going to do.
But I'm really, really hoping that in the next couple of years –
it's only been three years – I'm hoping it's going to have levelled off
and not keep cracking when I get excited.
When I show more emotion that it's not going to suddenly squeak
and then people question me, "Why is your voice doing that?"
Because I have had people look at me who don't know that I'm transgender,
"Why does your voice keep squeaking?"
(CHUCKLES) It's a hard thing to explain to someone.
When we think about a perceived male voice and a perceived female voice,
what is it we mean?
The research suggests that the male voice is around 40 hertz lower, on average,
in terms of pitch, than the female voice.
However, in reality, what we have is a whole spectrum of pitches
in between those two points,
across which men's and women's voices are spread.
In fact, voice is just one indicator of gender.
In terms of communication, other indicators are our body language,
our presentation, our posture, our facial expressions.
So, voice is one element that creates a perception of gender –
but it's one of many elements that creates that perception of gender.