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Cisnormativity is Garbage: Voice Edition
Jul. 26th, 2022 09:52 pmOn EVERY 'MtF Voice Feminisation' youtube video I've ever watched, there are comments like this:
"I'm a cis woman with a really deep voice and it makes me super self-conscious, so thank you so much to the transfemme community for making these guides!"
We're all being conditioned to speak in a certain way to fit in with gender norms - praised for having a voice that's very manly or womanly, punished for sounding like something you shouldn't. In writing, women squeal or shriek, men shout or bellow, unless you're queercoding them or specifically othering them in some way.
In media, too, you must have noticed that there are plenty of female characters or voices that sound artificially high pitched and breathy (and vice versa). Cartoon characters, announcer voices, voice actors... etc. There are few deep female voices represented in media, which gives a false idea of what a female voice SHOULD sound like. (and I'm sure many people are still unaware that their faves are voiced by women... like Naruto, Ash, Goku to name a few...) Rough, deep female voices tend to be reserved for villains and obviously high, effeminate voices are reserved for coding men either as villains or to be mocked.
This is an active process that's so pervasive it's become invisible, like so many other aspects of cisnormativity.
So cis women do vocal feminization training AND GET voice feminization SURGERY (and if you look at VFS sites, it is explicitly aimed at both trans and cis women). For context, this is a surgery in which - I as going to add a spoiler with the details but for some reason I can't get it to work, so let's just say it's INVASIVE and you can look up the details if you want to.
If cis-normative standards are so strict that there are lots of women, trans and cis, getting invasive surgery because our voices don't SOUND feminine enough, what the fuck is the point? It's a pretty extreme thing to do in order to simply live without the fear of violence/just to fit in, but then, the world is full of things like that.
Not only is this another example of how cisnormativity just hurts and makes life shitty and awkward for EVERYone, it means we are losing the beautiful diversity of voices we could have if people were just allowed to sound however they naturally sound, or would like to sound!
There's so much creativity that has gone unexplored. Like, one of my favorite parts of DMing is doing ALL the voices. Because I've been training my voice for almost ten years I've got ridiculous range and I can switch from All Might to Erza Scarlett mid-sentence. That's fun and rewarding, and because I only play with queer and trans people I have the freedom to do that without being ridiculed or punished.
Imagine how much more fun we could all be having, and how many more beautiful voices we could hear, if we didn't have to worry about conforming.
"I'm a cis woman with a really deep voice and it makes me super self-conscious, so thank you so much to the transfemme community for making these guides!"
We're all being conditioned to speak in a certain way to fit in with gender norms - praised for having a voice that's very manly or womanly, punished for sounding like something you shouldn't. In writing, women squeal or shriek, men shout or bellow, unless you're queercoding them or specifically othering them in some way.
In media, too, you must have noticed that there are plenty of female characters or voices that sound artificially high pitched and breathy (and vice versa). Cartoon characters, announcer voices, voice actors... etc. There are few deep female voices represented in media, which gives a false idea of what a female voice SHOULD sound like. (and I'm sure many people are still unaware that their faves are voiced by women... like Naruto, Ash, Goku to name a few...) Rough, deep female voices tend to be reserved for villains and obviously high, effeminate voices are reserved for coding men either as villains or to be mocked.
This is an active process that's so pervasive it's become invisible, like so many other aspects of cisnormativity.
So cis women do vocal feminization training AND GET voice feminization SURGERY (and if you look at VFS sites, it is explicitly aimed at both trans and cis women). For context, this is a surgery in which - I as going to add a spoiler with the details but for some reason I can't get it to work, so let's just say it's INVASIVE and you can look up the details if you want to.
If cis-normative standards are so strict that there are lots of women, trans and cis, getting invasive surgery because our voices don't SOUND feminine enough, what the fuck is the point? It's a pretty extreme thing to do in order to simply live without the fear of violence/just to fit in, but then, the world is full of things like that.
Not only is this another example of how cisnormativity just hurts and makes life shitty and awkward for EVERYone, it means we are losing the beautiful diversity of voices we could have if people were just allowed to sound however they naturally sound, or would like to sound!
There's so much creativity that has gone unexplored. Like, one of my favorite parts of DMing is doing ALL the voices. Because I've been training my voice for almost ten years I've got ridiculous range and I can switch from All Might to Erza Scarlett mid-sentence. That's fun and rewarding, and because I only play with queer and trans people I have the freedom to do that without being ridiculed or punished.
Imagine how much more fun we could all be having, and how many more beautiful voices we could hear, if we didn't have to worry about conforming.
