Trans+ voice training; metaphor we found helpful from a Renée Yoxon video
#voicetraining
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Post about a video that might help some other trans+ people who are also struggling with their voice and with finding a method of voice training that works for them; CWs for voice dysphoria and voice training, as well as mental and physical health struggles, disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, etc.
Follow-up to post about NHS IFR submission for VFS; negative (please only read if in a good state of mind)
In relation to the voice clip in our most-recent Trans Voice Friday post, for context this is what we sounded like in early 2022. It's a snippet of our side of a conversation with our then voice coach (Louise Milner-Smith) during our second session with her.
We just picked that section cos it's kinda funny to us out of context how we ramble during conversations 
#TransVoice #VoiceTraining #VoiceFeminisation #VoiceDysphoria #trans #transgender #TransFem #TransWoman #transition #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+ #PreTransitionVoice #YesWeActuallyUsedToSoundLikeThat
Hey folks 
We did the #TransVoiceFriday thing 
Once again, cos of the stupid alt-text character limit, we've had to put the transcript within the post.
#TransVoice #VoiceTraining #VoiceFeminisation #VoiceDysphoria #trans #transgender #TransFem #TransWoman #transition #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+
Transcript
Hey lovelies, loveliers and loveliests. We're going to try to do a quick voice recording while it's still Trans Voice Friday, because we haven't done one in a while, and we feel like we should try to whilst we can. We haven't exactly made a breakthrough as such with our voice or anything, but we have begun to feel like maybe it's not as awful as we'd started to believe it must be, due to the frequent misgenderings we've continued to have in recent months. Part of this was from realising that we actually do have limited recordings of our pre -transition voice, going at least as far back as about 2004, which was during our uni days. We actually have even older recordings going as far back as 1999, but those are in digitised versions of family video recordings and lower audio quality. Listening to those made us realise that we have gradually feminised our voice over the last four plus years, which kinda helped us to stop completely hating our current voice. Don't get us wrong, we still don't like our current voice, and very much want to improve it. However, it softened the feeling of cringe we'd been having whenever listening back to ourselves. We've also realised that, from others' point of view, we actually don't have a bad voice or vocal range. For example, if we work our way gradually into it, we can raise our pitch and hold it higher like this more-stereotypically-femme head voice. It doesn't sound particularly awful to us, but it also doesn't sound quite like how it should sound. So we tend to let it sit around this level instead. By the same token, if we focus on our voice, we can gradually push it lower and lower and keep using this deep chest voice. But the moment we stop holding it down here, it naturally floats back up to this point we've got ourselves to. Once we've got more time and energy, we'll try to do more recordings and share thoughts, but for now, this will sadly have to do. Ta-ta for now.
Edit: In case anyone's interested, our pitch range was about as low as 81 Hz and apparently as high as 274 Hz, but we're not 100% sure. However, given that we were given a pitch target of A#3, which is about 233 Hz, ages back, it's not impossible.
Queries over audio tools for the purposes of voice pitch analysis
Just now during voice training, I said out loud, "What the fuck?; I sound like an old Black lady!" then immediately followed it with, "Oh. Right."
#VoiceTraining
RSD and anxiety over first NHS-funded voice training appointment (initial assessment)
tips for voice training? 
#voicetraining #pleaseboost ideally i'd like to make my voice more flexible, not just change my default to a more androgynous/fem voice
@newo Without going into techical stuff, voice training theory can be complex.
We found this fairly-recent (May 2025) video by a gender-affirming voice coach who really isn't a fan of Voice Tools, but also has advice on how to use it in a way that won't crush your soul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QrpDpVQMPs
It's honestly refreshing to see a voice coach who has multiple issues with multiple aspects of Voice Tools, and how ridiculous it is to gender a voice solely based on its fundamental frequency.
Here's a snippet from the description of the video:
Whether you're brand new to trans voice work or you've been practicing for years, this breakdown covers:
- Why the pitch ranges in Voice Tools are misleading
- Why "percent male/female" scores can be actively harmful
- What features are actually useful (and how to customize them)
- How to use the spectrogram for resonance training
- What to avoid completely if you want to stay confident in your journey
It's basically a hack for how to make Voice Tools a bit less cursed, and actually useful for some specific things.
FYI, if you ever want to know what we sounded like back around 2004-2005 ish, the audio from the video within this post will give you a good idea.
We've not had the necessary combination of time, spoons, focus, motivation, and privacy to do a trans voice recording recently, so the last one we did was this rant / vent back at the end of January 2025.
(Polite request: even if you think our current voice sounds nice or femme, please don't comment that, as it really doesn't sound that way to us, to most other people on the phone, or to a lot of cis strangers 
)
Update on NHS gender-affirming care stuff; largely negative, with a teeny-tiny bit of good; here be trauma dragons!
omg fam—
a cis lady who i have absolutely no reason to believe clocked me complimented me on my voice today. i didn't even know that was an unlockable achievement.
had me on cloud nine the rest of the evening!
I haven't formally voice trained in a while, so this maybe a better version of my every day voice spurred on by trying to record and listen back to myself. I honestly feel like I'm not great at judging myself, so I'd like to hear any opinions on the voice as it stands today.
I just released Version 2.1.0 of “Free 
Voice Training”, the privacy-focused voice-training software I’m developing.
You can try it out on the current flag-ship instance.
As with every previous version, it will never contact any webserver except to download the source-files and it is intentionally possible to download the html-file (that contains all necessary resources) and open it as a file on your device without internet.
If you don’t want to go that far, but still have offline-use you can install it as a progressive web-app, and enable caching in the settings-menu. (If you have done so already, go there, press the “Attempt Update”-button and reload to get the latest version.)
Those things aside, here are some of the new features:
Most importantly, you can now save recordings. Just enable the “Store settings” and “Store data”-checkboxes in the settings menu and all recordings will be stored until you manually delete them.
Be warned that unchecking the “Store data”-checkbox won’t delete old data, it will just stop new data from being stored! If you want to delete old recordings you can either use the delete-buttons in the results-table or delete all local data (but not settings) with the “Delete Stored Data”-button.
The second big new feature is that you can now add your own texts: Press the “
”-button below the text-box and you will get a dialog in which you can select the language, the name and the contents of the new text. Once you’ve done that, you can add it to the text-storage with the “”-button of the dialog. If you have data-storage enabled, this will be stored in the same database as your recordings and persist after reloads.
If you want to add a text in a language that is not yet in the system, you can use the “”-button of the language selector to add a new one. You have to give a name (e.g. “Malti” for Maltese) and a language Code (e.g. “mt”) and confirm. This will both be used to sort your text in the text-display and to mark it in HTML as having that language so please use standard codes.
That said: If you have good public domain texts, especially in languages that are not yet listed, PLEASE submit a feature-request to add them on the project-page on gitlab. And this does not just apply to extremely widely used languages like Spanish and Polish, but also to smaller languages like Catalan or Danish! (Looking at various people here. 
)
If you want to delete a custom text directly, you can select it in the display-section and press the “
”-button. This does not work with default-texts though.
If you want to delete a custom language, the only way is currently to delete the entire database of custom data; That’s not ideal, and I hope to change that in a future version, but for now just don’t create too many languages that you want to get rid of afterwards.
There is now an easy-way to provide site-specific legal information regarding data-protection, which can be found in the legal-dialog (“
”-button).
If you want to run a mirror (PLEASE do!), I’m happy to provide you with assistance in setting that up.
With that we get into the smaller features:
Starting and stopping a recording will now draw a vertical line on the spectrogram, just like playing back an old recording does.
The target-frequency-selector now displays the musical note and “gender” of the chosen frequency.
The results table stores date and time of the recording.
And several minor improvements to eye-candy. 
Please share and do your voice-training! (if you want to. )
#trans #transfem #transVoiceTraining #FreeTransVoiceTraining #VoiceTraining #transition #floss #foss #FreeSoftware
ftvt.fiona.onlFree 🏳️⚧️ Voice Training
I’ve now set up dev.ftvt.fiona.onl to serve the latest development version of #FTVT, my free voice training software; ftvt.fiona.onl is meant to from now on only serve the latest actual release, making it less likely to be sporadically broken.
If you want to run a mirror (please feel actively encouraged to do so!), get into contact with me, I’ll gladly explain everything to you. (It’s literally just serving a few small files from a URL, there is literally no server-component, which is largely intentional!)
#voicetraining #trans
dev.ftvt.fiona.onlFree 🏳️⚧️ Voice Training
Without claiming that there aren’t obvious things to improve or that it is “finished”, I just decided that the current version of my “Free Voice Training”-software (FTVT) is ready for a 2.0.0 release:
You can find my instance of it here.
This version is essentially an improvement over what was there before in just about every way:
First of all, it actually has a version-number! The reason this is version 2.0.0 and not 1.0.0 is simply that the older version of the software was for so long in actual use that calling it anything less than 1.0 would feel wrong, but there were also significant enough changes to make this a major release. That’s why it is 2.0.
On the user-facing side the most obvious change is the massively improved design. Just compare the version on the flagship-instance with the older version that is for now still available here.
But that’s not the only thing: There is now explicit support for this to be installed as a progressive web app (PWA), which makes it almost like a normal app on mobile devices. In particular this also means that it is now much easier to use it offline: While it was always intentionally possible to download the files and open the entire thing via file:///…, installing a PWA might be a bit easier on mobile, improving the accessibility. (It might also allow to add it to fdroid, I’ll see about that at a later point in time).
Now, a PWA of course has the issue that it leaves traces in the browser, but it may reduces traces left on the web, and if you don’t religiously clean your browsing history anyways, it’s possible to see where you were if you get access to it, so it’s not too bad of a trade-off.
Speaking of traces: It’s now possible to store settings in the local storage of the browser. So far this is largely inconsequential, but for a future version I want to add the ability to store the recordings as well! Of course all of that is strictly opt-in. If you don’t do anything the app won’t leave any traces on your browser that your browser doesn’t create anyways.
That said, there are also significant improvements on the software-side of things: Not only did I improve the quality of the code-base by a lot (still not great though!), I also replaced most of the previous super-sketchy build-system with something slightly less so to the point where others might even be interested in having a look at it: esbuild for bundling, currently run by makefiles. I still refuse to let most other javascript-code near it, but esbuild seems established enough for me to be willing to risk using it.
So, if you need a voice-recorder that is specifically made for trans voice training and puts a huge focus on user privacy, give it a try, for example on the next #TransVoiceFriday!
#trans #transgender #voicetraining #transvoicetraining #transfem #transmasc #FTVT #FreeTransVoiceTraining
ftvt.fiona.onlFree 🏳️⚧️ Voice Training
Hey folks
We've actually done a #TransVoiceFriday recording for the first time in ages 
Please note, however, that the topic of our recording is voice dysphoria, so please don't listen to it if doing so well cause you anxiety or stress
It ended up a bit longer than our typical ones, so we can't put the transcript in the alt text, due to the stupid alt text limit that not even Glitch-SOC will let us increase 
As such, we've added the full transcript below within this post
#TransVoice #VoiceTraining #VoiceFeminisation #VoiceDysphoria #trans #transgender #TransFem #TransWoman #transition #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+
Transcript
Hey lovelies. It's just about still Friday, so we thought we'd try to do a Trans Voice Friday recording for the first time in... so long that we literally have no idea when we last recorded one! Honestly don't even remember if we've even done one this year! We're recording from our phone, rather than our desktop microphone, so apologies if the quality is shitty. Please note that any perceived poor quality might just be our shitty voice.
Okay, so for anyone who doesn't already know, our voice has been and sadly continues to be a constant source of gender dysphoria for us. Our voice dysphoria negatively impacts us perhaps a level of magnitude more than facial dysphoria, which in turn is noticeably above genital dysphoria for us. And sadly it's been getting worse for us over time.
Back when we first started voice training in December 2021, we were cautiously optimistic that maybe, just maybe, over time we'd manage to achieve a voice that sounded at least tolerable to us, and which didn't constantly get us misgendered. For a while, it felt like we were even making progress. However, we've been increasingly misgendered not just on the phone but in person, and honestly we're really struggling with it. It's not like we can afford voice feminisation surgery like endoscopic modified Wendler Glottoplasty, and despite multiple requests and complaints, our shitty NHS gender clinic won't even meet with us to let us plead our case for them to request funding for it. Even if they agreed to submit an Individual Funding Request for us, which they refuse to do, it would still ultimately be up to our local Integrated Care Board to review and make a decision on whether to fund it or not, and their answer would almost certainly be "no".
We're trying to find a way forward, but honestly we're kind of just holding on right now. Please, please kindly don't tell us that we'll get there in time, that we just need to work harder, or that our voice sounds fine to you. We've worked as hard as we can for over 3 and a half years, and we've not only plateaued, but seemingly gone backwards, based on the increased frequency of misgenderings. We currently don't know where to go from here, but it won't be something that we can easily or quickly achieve. Voices are instruments, and not everyone has a good one, nor the ability to achieve a voice that makes them happy and gets them correctly gendered at least most of the time.
The only joy we have had with our voice at all recently was making our electrologist laugh by dropping our voice down to approximate how we used to sound. It was genuinely lovely to hear her say that she can't believe we used to sound like that, and how it doesn't sound to her like it's us speaking. For those of you who want to hear that voice, {drops voice} it roughly sounds like this. It's not exactly how we used to sound, as we don't ever use our pre-transition voice except as a gimmick to make people laugh, but it's about as close as we can get now, and it highlights the progress we have made, even though it's not enough for us to feel content or get consistently gendered correctly. {restores voice}
Please be mindful of survivorship bias in online voice training videos, as well as the culture of toxic positivity that is sometimes associated with it. We don't want people to give up, but it's really important to have realistic goals and know that not everyone will succeed by voice training alone.
But anyway, we've talked far too long, and that's more than enough voice dysphoria discussion for a while. Take care of yourselves folks.
ok. I definitely need to get back to voice training. I got to sorta head voice and stopped. And whatever I'm doing, is really straining my voice. By the evening my throat feels really straining.
