u/hassledseneschal

I started seriously voice training a little under 2 years ago and transitioned just a little over 6 years ago. I (trans woman) have always had a voice on the higher end of the "male range" at about 160hz before I started training and probably, conversationally, about 190hz now.

I'm still not where I want to be and I feel self-conscious about it. I work adjacent to in-person events so earlier this year and a year ago as well I traveled for work.

I printed ID badges for event attendees and interacted with probably 100+ people a day without being misgendered or looked at weird, but I strongly suspect my actual coworkers know I am trans, and I think they have misgendered me once or twice, but I am sort of unsure because people tell me I imagine being called sir when no one's said it, and if/when I am misgendered, I guess it's like cringe to say but everything feels like it's spinning and I genuinely kind of get faint. So I'm not totally in the moment and get so thrown off that I just pretend I didn't hear it. At times, I'm genuinely unsure, because it has been over a year now since the last time someone aggressively and pointedly misgendered me.

About a year ago I went on a date with someone for the first time without saying anything about being trans and everything went well except for the fact I wasn't into the guy. I worry I passed to him because of how much older than me he was (29F, 41M).

My guy friends are very supportive of my transition and I'm a little bit of a tomboy/band boy groupie, and I worry this holds me back vocally because I am not practicing my "public voice" with these regular hangs, I'm just being myself. I am confident I talk at a higher pitch in all contexts than I used to, but it feels like it's not enough.

In addition to reading the rainbow passage I will read books aloud to myself to practice spontaneous speech. I regularly get in at > 200hz when I do this. I haven't been clocked ordering food from a drive thru in some time, either, but I hate my voice so much it keeps me introverted and indoors.

Any advice? 🥺👉👈

I just spent basically my whole Saturday looking up openly trans social media personalities and content creators and reading the most hateful comments I can find.

Genuinely feel like I'm not really in control of this behavior and I'm unsure what to do. I know other trans and even LGB people in my life find my self-hate difficult to be around.

Anyone felt this feel before? 🦌

Do you ever feel like a gross person trying to make other people say, do, and feel things toward you against their will?

I start to get kind of envious - I realize this is ridiculous - of Muslim women in religiously authoritarian environments where the niqab is mandatory. For it to be normal to cover up your whole body so it's that much harder for men to project sexual desire on me.

If I can't be "chosen" as a partner in a straightforward and honest way, I'd rather have nothing sexual in my life at all.

Thoughts?

A big reason, maybe the biggest reason, I keep coming back to this sub again and again is because of the sentiments expressed that transsexuals (men and women) are erased and even put under social pressure to disidentify from manhood and womanhood by queer communities. This is something I've experienced in my own personal life as a "softboy" college student orbiting what I now understand were crypto-TERF feminist circles, where I was told that my gender-nonconformity could not coexist with dating women, as it was deceptive. If I was really GNC, or trying to embody an alternative masculinity, I would date men. For the record, I now exclusively date men, and consider myself a straight transsexual woman. Lol.

I hear again and again from the more hacker, crunchy, "AGP" and anarchist-coded trans women I interact with that "not all queer people are like that" and "you are being phobic when you talk this way about queer people as a group."

I think that once upon a time, as much as 20 or more years ago, it made sense to feel that the "transsexual" label was elitist and colluded in denial of care. Particularly for women, the pressure to undergo SRS in order to change the sex marker on one's driver's license and birth certificate, and the relative difficulty of accessing hormonal transition and "sex change surgeries" compared to now, created a situation where people who were able to take hormones for years at a time and access surgeries to change their sex characteristics were using "transsexual" as a term to imply people who could not get "the surgery" or DIYed, etc., were not "really trans." That you were only trans if you had gone to the right doctors, received therapy letters of support, and jumped through all of the financially prohibitive hoops of the pre-informed consent transition care paradigm.

Now that care and institutional medical support is more freely available (but not for long?) I think it's becoming clear that a lot of the anti-transsexual rhetoric was not really about bringing down the barriers to medical transition, there were many people engaged in smearing the term and the people who felt represented by it because they did not, and do not, want trans people to be able to actually transition, to be able to actually "change sex." I feel this is what is at work in the degendering and regendering of trans women and trans men respectively by cis queers, who seem to feel that the mere existence of sex change technologies places pressure on them to change sex, or that these technologies erode the cache and cultural power of homosexuality and gender-nonconformity. Like the Judith Butler line, they have to "resist transsexuality."

I see a lot of posts about the pressure that trans men feel to identify with the label "transmasc" and disavow manhood and the existence of a sex change process in order to retain access to, and respect in, queer social scenes. At every stage of my process of coming out as a trans woman, I was told by these types of queers that because I was AMAB, I needed to be aware that choosing femininity could make people feel unsafe, that I had no right to think of myself as feminine, and no place speaking on anything to do with women's issues.

Do you feel like these are negative stereotypes directed at cis gays and gender-nonconforming trans people? Are these archetypes overhated, or do you think this is a real tension in "the community?" Am I just obsessed and hateful? What gives?

I really have no interest in outing myself to guys again and again and again, taking on what feels like a large amount of risk, just for a shot at sex and romance. Nor do I want to be in a polycule or a queer relationship with a bi or pan guy who sees me as "the best of both worlds."

Where are my perpetually single stealth queens? What are you filling your days with to stay strong and "de-center" men?

🐈

What's your personal social scene and professional environment? Do you feel taken seriously at work and respected by your peers? How limited do you feel, either by being known to be trans, or by having to maintain distance between some people and environments to remain "stealth" or "low disclosure?"

Interested to hear especially from women who are entering their 30s 🫣