When Does Your Voice Change On Testosterone

How Testosterone Changes the Voices of Trans Men

In spring 2015, Graham Grail, and so a sophomore at Boston Academy, approached one of his professors with an thought. One twenty-four hours after class, he walked up to Carolyn Hodges-Simeon's podium and explained that he wanted to enquiry voice, specifically how information technology changes in transgender men who take testosterone. Hodges-Simeon, a biological anthropologist who researches sex differences in speech and the voice, was immediately on lath.

"I was very surprised to run across that at the time there was so trivial research in this area, and it got me thinking, how do physicians know the proper dosage? How do people starting testosterone therapy know what to look?" says Hodges-Simeon, a BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of anthropology.

Grail had personally encountered the impact of those knowledge gaps, and he felt motivated to find answers that would exist meaningful for himself and the trans community at large. When he first came out as trans, Grail knew that his voice was one of the about of import physical changes that he wanted from starting testosterone (T) therapy. He did his research, merely was still left with unanswered questions and concerns that seemed to exist echoed past others throughout the trans community.

"When y'all go to your doctor, all they can really tell you is that your vocalization will alter—most likely—and it will probably get lower…but also that, that's all we know," Grail says. "And I like to know everything."

A portrait photo of Carolyn Hodges-Simeon in her office — Carolyn Hodges-Simeon, co-lead author of the study and BU College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of anthropology, is working to go on research on vox modify in trans men. Photo by Cydney Scott

Six years since they get-go talked after course that solar day, Grail, Hodges-Simeon, and a team of research collaborators accept published the first study to delve into the subtle effects—beyond vocal pitch—that T therapy has on vox. Their findings announced in Scientific Reports. They likewise found, in their interviews with trans men undergoing T therapy, that the voice is 1 of the near profound and of import physical changes they experience.

"The voice is one of the aspects of the body that is most sexually dimorphic," Hodges-Simeon says. In other words, the average difference in the sound of the voice between men and women is very large, dissimilar the average difference in, say, height—there are a lot of alpine women and tall men, shorter women and shorter men, and many who fall in between. Merely when it comes to the voice, gender differences are more distinct, and there are fewer people who fall outside of the average.

In their study, Grail recruited 30 trans men from the Boston area who had been on T for nine months or more. Over a two-twenty-four hour period menses, the study participants provided saliva samples, voice recordings, and other physical measurements, and completed a survey asking questions well-nigh their gender identity, and importantly, about which physical characteristics they were most content or dissatisfied with before and subsequently starting T. From the survey results, the researchers found that across the lath, voice was rated most highly as something they wanted to see alter from T therapy, ranking the highest out of the other physical traits included on the survey.

"The matter people indicated they were near unhappy with prior to starting T was their voice and other highly sexually dimorphic traits, which makes sense because those are things people use to gender you lot," says Grail. "And since bringing your gender presentation in alignment with your identity is the goal, the traits that most strongly signal gender presentation are often going to be the most impactful. We showed that is in fact the example."

The voice, as opposed to beingness a pure tone, has many layers. The most obvious one nosotros hear is the pitch of someone's vocalization, made up of what's called the key frequency. This corresponds to the vibrations of the vocal folds, like the strings on a violin, Hodges-Simeon says. The more subtle layers are the vocal formants, which are like the resonating sounds that would bounce around in the body of the violin. Song formants are determined past the length of the vocal tract, which is larger on boilerplate in those who are natally male and therefore makes a deeper sound. To analyze the collected song samples, Hodges-Simeon and Grail partnered with researchers in BU's Stepp Lab for Sensorimotor Rehabilitation Engineering, led by Cara Stepp, a BU College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences.

"We found that testosterone does a very successful chore at bringing the voice into the average cis male range," Hodges-Simeon says, cis meaning a person who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth. Simply, they establish T didn't fully masculinize the more subtle sounds in the vocal formants, she says.

"This underscores the need for more handling options and that, when it'south a priority, the voice needs to be more closely monitored," Grail says. "At that place should be more of an open consideration of calculation in vocalization therapy inside a treatment plan, because the assumption right now is that T is going to do the job all by itself."

Despite this discrepancy, most of the participants in the report rated vocal masculinity as i of the physical characteristics that they were most satisfied with after existence on testosterone for more than than ix months.

"That is a hopeful tidbit that'south really important to decreasing some of the unnerving uncertainty for people merely going into this process," Grail says. Nearly a year before he kicked off his inquiry collaboration with Hodges-Simeon, Grail founded BU's Trans Listening Circle, a group for trans students to discover community and advocate for gender-inclusive changes on campus. In 2018, he graduated from CAS and BU'southward Wheelock College of Education & Human Development with a dual degree in anthropology and deaf studies, equally well every bit a minor in biology. Grail is at present pursuing a main's in crime scene investigation at George Washington University. He plans to use to medical school side by side year.

"Graham, as the incredibly brilliant student that he is, was able to pull together our expertise to address a problem in his community and bring this projection to life," says Hodges-Simeon. She and Stepp are working to revise a grant to go along researching voice modify in trans men and promise this line of research continues.

"I never expected that I would observe things that are so articulate and powerful," Grail says. "To find them in an empirical way that can positively impact the trans customs—I am very grateful for that."

This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Development Grant.