Voice Lessons

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By JENNIFER K. RUARK

Washington

Every Wednesday afternoon this past summer, a retired Army colonel named Jeff left his consulting job at a military base and headed to George Washington University. But first he stopped at home to change into a skirt.

By the time he arrived at the university's Speech and Hearing Center, Jeff was Sheri, one of several transsexuals undergoing therapy at the clinic to make her voice sound like a woman's. Although Sheri (who, like the other clients interviewed for this story, asked that her last name not be used) was still presenting herself as a man while at work, wearing something feminine to the clinic was not merely her preference; it is a hard and fast rule there.

"It could be just a scarf or a necklace you pick up on the way from work," explains Mary Elizabeth Moody, who runs the voice clinic. "But you have to get into that frame of mind."

The center treats deaf children, stutterers, and people with all sorts of communicative disorders, but at least a third of Ms. Moody's clients at George Washington are men at some stage of transforming themselves into women. Few female-to-male transsexuals seek voice therapy, because the male hormones they take naturally lower their voices. Since female hormones don't have that effect, Ms. Moody (who goes by "Tish") uses exercises to raise the pitch of her clients' voices gradually. A women's larynx tends to be shorter than a man's, so the exercises strengthen the muscles that support the larynx, lifting it physically inside the throat. "It's like going to the gym, for your voice," says Ms. Moody.

One recent afternoon, she sat in the clinic's tiny, dark observation room, watching Sheri through one two-way mirror and another client, Jenna, through a second one, as graduate students led them through different exercises. A set of speakers brought the clients' voices into the room, a breathy "Fee, fi, fo, fum" from one side competing with a carefully cadenced "Rain-bow, sail-boat, pot-tery" from the other. Ms. Moody scribbled notes about both.

Then, abruptly, she focused on Sheri, who was trying to get her voice to vibrate toward the front of her mouth, rather than in the larger space of her throat, where a man's voice tends to resonate. "Mmm," Sheri hummed in a monotone, placing her fingertips on her nose, then moving them to her lips. "Mmmeee ..." Her gestures were feminine: the way she brushed her hair out of her eyes, the way she held the fingers of one hand in the other as she listened to her coach, Ashley Orgel. With her soft bangs, subtle make-up, and delicate jewelry, Sheri looked like a woman. But someone hearing her on the phone would probably still call her "Sir."

"She's very rough," said Ms. Moody, jumping from her chair and entering the room where Sheri sat at a table with Ms. Orgel, watching herself in the mirror.

"Sheri, be sure that you're not pushing your voice," said Ms. Moody. "You're tightening up at the base of your neck." Sheri tried a few more "Mmmeees," but Ms. Moody didn't like what she heard. "Put your hand about on your waistline," she said, trying to get Sheri to breathe from her diaphragm. "See if you can get your inhale so that your hand is just slightly moving, then relax everything on the exhale. Let yourself just dissolve into that chair. Now, let's hear a breathy, "Whoa."

Sheri complied.

"Good!" said Ms. Moody. "I know it sounds deep, but it's produced without a lot of strain and effort, and good airflow. That's the basis of your voice."

***

Ms. Moody, who as an undergraduate double-majored in speech/theater and English, has the sparkle and physical expressiveness of a stage veteran. In her private practice she works with actors and singers as well as transsexuals. Early in her career she focused on helping people with damaged nervous systems, doing things like teaching stroke victims how to swallow. But in the early 1980s she filled in at the voice clinic for a professor on sabbatical. "I fell in love with it," she says.

Her clients appreciate her enthusiasm. "Tish barges in a lot," Sheri says, smiling. "She's pretty passionate." And she has strong opinions about the ways transsexuals should not try to change their voices.

One way is through operations. Twenty or 30 years ago, "the approach was more surgical than clinical," says Ms. Moody — shaving the Adam's apple or clipping the folds of tissue that extend from either side of the larynx. Women's smaller vocal chords produce a higher pitch, like the thinner strings on a guitar. "Even today there are physicians who will clip the vocal folds," she says. "But though the pitch may be higher, it goes back. You can't take away the mass or surrounding structure." Ms. Moody once saw a doctor give a conference presentation about a patient who had undergone seven different surgeries, including one to thin out the tissues above his larynx. "His voice still sounded like Minnie Mouse," she says with a grimace. "That's my big bias. I hate the Minnie Mouse voice."

She also hates self-help tapes, which transsexuals have often used before starting therapy at the clinic, resulting in swollen or otherwise damaged larynxes. Ms. Moody says she must undo the damage before starting to make any changes.

To help her clients avoid injuries, she works to raise the pitch of their voices bit by bit, in increments of just five Hertz, or cycles per second. The goal, she says, is to achieve a voice in the range of 160 to 180 Hertz, which is about half an octave below middle C, a sort of gender-neutral territory. After a semester's worth of work, Sheri's voice ranges between 145 and 150 Hertz. She must be able to maintain that pitch in conversation without getting tired before Ms. Moody will try to take it five Hertz higher.

"For a lot of us it's frustrating to move so slowly," says Sheri. "So you work on other things like resonance, intonation — little tricks of the trade." Lots of adjectives, for example, or tag questions like "isn't it?" and "don't you?" are cues to listeners that the speaker is female. And the way a person's voice resonates­ — as in Sheri's "mmmee" exercise — is even more important than its pitch, Ms. Moody believes.

Getting intonation right is not much easier. In a phrase like "the two oceans," a man will intone downward on "the"; a woman will lift that first syllable. "That initial rise is very hard to produce," says Ms. Moody. It's much easier to lift the intonation at the end of a sentence, as in a question, but too much of that makes clients sound like Valley Girls.

Another strategy is known as "easy onset." As Sheri recited "Fee, fi, fo, fum," her aim was to almost blend one syllable with the next, producing each sound as if it were turned on with a dimmer, rather than an on-off switch.

It's a lot to concentrate on, and for clients who are still living as men most of the time, hard to maintain. Jenna, a 61-year-old federal worker with dark-blond hair, first visited the clinic two years ago, after hearing about it from her psychotherapist. At the time, she was dressing and acting female only occasionally. Ms. Moody told her she was not ready for voice therapy. "I felt really shot down," Jenna says. Looking back, though, she is glad she waited. Since May, she has been female full time, and her voice is approaching what she'd like it to be.

Of course, Jenna's and Sheri's transformations involve much more than lessons at the clinic: psychotherapy, hormones, electrolysis, various surgeries. A more feminine voice sometimes seems like a bonus. "I don't know if I'll ever get there," says Sheri.

But Ms. Moody says that once a person establishes a higher pitch, it will last.

"The best thing I ever hear," she says, "is, 'I can't find my old voice.'"