Social and Biological Factors in the Transgender Male Voice

Name of the project

Social and Biological Factors in the Transgender Male Voice

Collaborators/Participants

Dr. Remco Knooihuizen ( r.m.knooihuizen rug.nl ) and Max Reuvers ( m.l.r.i.reuvers student.rug.nl )

What are you currently working on? And how is a gender and diversity perspective important in your research?

Transgender men who undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT) will experience changes to their voice and speech. Due to the physical effects of testosterone, their overall pitch falls to levels within the range shown by cisgender men. The linguistic construction of gender, however, goes well beyond pitch and its direct knock-on effects: women's speech is typically associated more with standard-likeness than men's speech is, and women are generally the innovators in language change.

In our study, we chart the real-time changes in the voice and speech of one of the researchers, who is himself a transgender male who has undergone HRT. Our data consists of vlogs, public speaking and conversations recorded over a long time span from before realising he was transgender to the present day, some four years after starting HRT. Because these were recorded independently from the project, this is guaranteed to be naturally occurring data --- but of course we have no control over what features are present in the data.

By analysing changes not only in pitch, but also in other linguistic features typically associated with gender (e.g. high rising terminals or 'uptalk', the Dutch 'Gooise R', etc.) as well as changes in progress, we hope to tease apart the social and the biological in the transgender male voice. In particular any differences between Dutch --- a language in which he is thoroughly aware of social conventions --- and English --- a language in which he is much less so --- should be very informative to this end.