For trans people, getting comfortable with your voice at any stage can be a challenge. Going on HRT can help us feel affirmed in our gender, but when voice training is often a more fraught part of the equation. Too many speech pathologists still used a dated, binary gender model for voice training that can make the problem worse while costing a fortune.
But for one company, the trans-led speech service Undead Voice, thinking differently has yielded gamechanging results.
Undead Voice founder Nicole Gress knows it doesn’t have to be difficult to find a voice you’re comfortable with. She’s also dedicated to making her services affordable, and easy to navigate for folks at every stage of their transition. Her Jumpstart program, a three-week course with open enrollment, makes the work radically accessible, is just gaining ground, ushering in a new era of voice training for folks at every point in their transition.
Queerty spoke to Gress about her commitment to changing the field of voice training, helping incarcerated folks gain access, and teaching people to think different about voice, gender, and care. Here’s what she had to say…
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QUEERTY: Can you tell us about how you started working to help trans folks with voice transition on this scale?
NICOLE GRESS: I started the company about six years ago. So, I’ve been doing this work through this company for that long. But I’ve been working in trans voice for about 12 years and started in more
traditional health care.
I built trans voice for because of a need for [a service like this] that provides access and affordability, which unfortunately is not how it [goes] in more traditional health care settings.
Trans voice care is not an emerging category. It’s something that has always been part of the transition experience. 85% of trans people say they experience voice dysphoria and are in search of a more affirming sound that they connect with and love. There just really wasn’t anything that existed that was built specifically to meet that type of a need.
Since starting out, we’ve worked with over 100,000 people across more than 20 countries, and 27,000 incarcerated folks.
How did your work with incarcerated folks come about?
I had a neighbor who was volunteering to do some teaching within a facility when [I lived] in Washington. There was a law there that anybody who was incarcerated was expected to have access to any sort of medical care that Medicaid or Medicare were covering. At that time, Washington State provided a good amount of gender-affirming resources, including voice training. But they couldn’t find any providers.
I ended up connecting with a company that is responsible for providing educational content through tablets across the country. We came to an agreement where we decided to give them free access to our kind of the curriculum that we put into our intro program. I did a whole recording session, gave them all of that information, and they created two different courses, an intro to a dark voice, an intro to a bright voice.
Can you talk more about the non-gender-specific terms you use in coaching?
We actually have a mantra: voices don’t have gender, people do. One of the torches that I will carry infinitely is this that we don’t use any gendered language. We’re not saying we “feminize” a voice or “masculinize” a voice, because if I say that, 10 people hear that and they have 10 different ideas of what a “feminine” voice is, and none of them are the same. What ends up happening [with that] is you pigeonhole people into a stereotyped expectation of what that voice is, as opposed to just giving them the tools and the agency to create the voice that most affirms them.
Also, if we’re using binary terms like feminine and masculine, not only are we recreating this cis het binary norm… we are leaving out anybody who does not identify as masc or femme.
Why is it important to focus on trans voice training?
Voice [tends to] get buried in conversations about trans healthcare, even though it’s the one part of our identity that we don’t have a choice but to express every time we openour mouth to speak. Because [Undead Voice has] such a large community, we’re uniquely positioned to do a lot of research because we’re always asking questions about access to care that drive our decisions of what we’re offering and how we’re getting it out there. We found through our research that 79% of people that have come across our desk have said that they are receiving access to some sort of gender affirming healthcare and less than 7% said they have ever found access to voice care.
A trans or gender diverse person trying to access or navigate voice therapy through their insurance [has challenges.] First, they usually have to come out to their provider as gender diverse to get a gender dysphoria diagnosis. Then they have to ask for a referral. [Then they] wait months and sometimes years for care. So on average, it’s over a year they’re waiting to finally see a speech therapist. When they finally get into that room with that individual, most often that speech therapist is not specialized in trans voice work.
After spending the first six years of my career as a speech pathologist in that system myself, I have seen that path fail over and over again, consistently, which makes sense. We can’t take techniques that were created for a vocal injury and think that they’re going to change gender perception.
You’ve found a different approach that’s actually based in trans experience.
I do provider education training. I teach providers who do gender affirming care what language to
use, whether they’re a therapist or a general practitioner or an endocrinologist. It really comes down to this idea of teach[ing] people to control their entire vocal instrument so that they have the freedom and agency to create the sound that most affirms their identity.
That’s what happens whenever you have people who have lived experience creating the methodology and the system and the framework, instead of just trying to take something that does not relate…and retrofit it. And that is true liberation. That is true care.
Learn more about Nicole’s work with Undead voice here.
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