Who Is Your Voice For?
Most people are already performing gender.
They just call it normal.
A man learns to flatten softness because softness gets read as weakness.
A woman learns to temper warmth because warmth gets mistaken for incompetence.
A trans person discovers that a tiny change in resonance changes how strangers respond to them.
An autistic person rehearses cadence until nobody notices they're rehearsing.
A performer learns which parts of themselves get hired.
A child discovers which sounds make the adults in the room uncomfortable.
Do something often enough and eventually you stop experiencing it as something you're doing.
You experience it as yourself.
Judith Butler famously described gender as a “stylized repetition of acts”: something constituted over time through repeated ways of moving, speaking, gesturing and being perceived.
I keep coming back to that word: repetition.
Because repetition doesn't only describe gender. It describes much of what we do with a voice.
Eventually, what we've practised can become so familiar that it stops feeling practised at all.
That doesn't make it false.
But it doesn't necessarily mean you chose it either.
Those are different questions.
And lately, I've become fascinated by the space between them.
I spent much of my life learning how to make the "correct sound"
I'm a singer, a voice teacher, a trans person, a drag performer, and a sex worker.
All of those things have taught me something about what happens when a body is being listened to, watched, desired, evaluated, rewarded or misunderstood.
And I've spent years changing my voice.
For a long time, unbeknownst to me, much of my formal singing life was organized around masculine structures of voice. I learned to push chest voice upward. I learned to inhabit masculine roles. I learned to make sounds that were technically accomplished and, at times, genuinely thrilling.
I loved parts of it.
But there was also something strange about it.
Looking back, it sometimes felt like drag.
Not the drag I do now.
The drag I did at the time was surrounded by coping mechanisms that felt like breaks from a routine of self-silencing.
I became extremely capable of creating a character I didn't entirely recognize. and didn't have the supports at the time for this type of industry-forward self-compartmentalization.
What's funny: now I can put on enormous hair, lashes, paint my face away, become Oceana Dix and feel less like I'm pretending.
authenticity has a sense of humour.
My voice changes constantly now.
Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes because of the person I'm talking to. Sometimes because I'm tired. Sometimes for gender. Sometimes for sex. Sometimes for performance.
Sometimes I hear myself make a sound and think:
Where the fuck did that come from?
It's all my voice.
That has become much more interesting to me than finding the correct one.
Technique gave me possibilities. It didn't give me permission.
For nearly five years I've been doing many of the same vocal exercises.
At different points, I pushed through them. Analyzed them. Corrected them. Tried to make my body accomplish what I understood intellectually.
Slowly, my technical limitations became less restrictive. My understanding of the instrument got larger. My body began catching up to an idea of my voice that had once been bigger than what I could physically do.
Recently I was making music with a friend.
I didn't know what key a song was in. I didn't plan where I was going to put it.
I just started singing.
And my voice went.
Through the song. Through the range. Through me.
There wasn't time to construct it first.
I don't think the lesson is that analysis is bad. I'm a teacher. Analysis is useful.
Technique matters.
Practice matters.
Limits matter.
But technique and self-surveillance are not the same thing.
Sometimes we become so good at watching ourselves make sound that we forget to experience it.
“Just use your voice.”
Someone I love recently went through a series of high-level auditions.
She's an extraordinarily accomplished performer and voice teacher.
They kept asking her to sing.
Five songs. More than they would normally hear.
And they kept giving her essentially the same direction:
Just use your voice.
She didn't know what they meant. It was deeply frustrating for her.
Here was somebody with years of training, professional success and a sophisticated understanding of voice being asked to use her voice and realizing that this was not a simple instruction.
Now she understands it differently.
Part of what changed wasn't vocal at all.
She began validating herself. She stopped endlessly editing her beliefs according to how other people might receive them. She reconsidered relationships in which other people had been given too much authority to tell her whether she was right or wrong. She created boundaries. She began recognizing some of the extraordinary things she was already offering other people.
She described it to me as learning to live more from the centre of herself.
And then people heard it.
I find that beautiful.
But “just be yourself” can also become another impossible instruction.
Sometimes people adapt because they need to.
Sometimes the version of yourself that keeps you housed, employed, safe, loved or intelligible is doing important work.
Survival is not a failure of authenticity.
But when choices become available, another question becomes possible:
Do I still want this?
The problem isn't adaptation. The problem is losing authorship.
Human beings adapt.
A singer changes a vowel because another shape works better at the top of their range. An actor learns what gets them cast. A child learns how loudly they're allowed to speak at the dinner table. A trans person notices which sounds change how strangers gender them. A worker learns what “professional” sounds like.
Sometimes we choose those adaptations.
Sometimes we recognize them years later.
I'm not interested in turning adaptation into another thing marginalized people are doing wrong.
I'm interested in authorship.
Who gets to decide what happens next?
One of the places where this became clearest to me wasn't the singing studio.
It was sex work.
Sex work taught me something about voice
Sex work has forced me to think very precisely about desire, feedback and authority.
Someone can desire me.
Someone can offer me money.
Someone can prefer one presentation of my gender to another.
Those responses are real.
They still don't determine what happens to my body.
Sex work makes certain kinds of feedback unusually measurable:
Messages.
Money.
Bookings.
Rejections.
Compliments.
Repeat clients.
Suddenly there are numbers attached to desire.
And as a trans person, it would be easy to start asking those numbers questions they cannot answer.
If more people want me when I present myself one way, does that make that version of me more beautiful?
More feminine?
More convincing?
More real?
No.
It tells me something about what produced a response from a particular person under particular conditions.
Response is real.
Response is not authority.
The market can tell me whether an advertisement converts.
It cannot tell me who I am.
And once I understood that clearly in one part of my life, I started hearing the same question everywhere else.
Singers live inside feedback too
The teacher likes this sound.
The casting director likes that one.
This gets applause.
That gets corrected.
This sounds “professional.”
This sounds “natural.”
This reads as feminine.
That reads as masculine.
This gets you hired.
This doesn't.
That information can be useful.
I'm a performer. Of course the audience matters.
Gender perception matters too. If someone comes to me because they want their voice to be consistently perceived as feminine, telling them other people's perceptions don't matter would be ridiculous.
They matter because that person has decided they matter to them.
That's different.
The listener can tell us what they heard.
The industry can tell us what it rewards.
A teacher can tell us what they observe.
Technique can expand what becomes possible.
But none of those things, alone, gets to decide what the voice is for.
That authority has to include the person making the sound.
Consent starts before “no”
One of the things sex work has taught me is that consent isn't simply the ability to say no when somebody crosses a line.
It also requires being able to notice what you want.
I get to notice what I want.
I get to decide what I exchange and what I don't.
I can change an arrangement that no longer works for me.
Someone else's disappointment does not automatically become my responsibility.
I can enjoy being desired without making desire evidence that I exist correctly.
Those statements came from thinking about sex and work.
But I hear voice in them.
Because my voice is not floating somewhere outside my body.
My voice is something my body does.
So how much of voice training is helping people hear themselves?
And how much is making them extraordinarily good at anticipating everybody else?
Anticipation can be useful. I'm a professional performer. Reading a room is part of my job.
But if I can hear everybody except myself, something has gone wrong.
This is where pleasure enters the methodology
Not as a cure.
Not as proof.
Not as a mystical detector of your authentic self.
Pleasure is information.
Audre Lorde wrote of the erotic as a resource rooted in our “unexpressed or unrecognized feeling,” and argued for it as a source of power and information in our lives.
I don't mean that pleasure is always right. It isn't. I mean that what we experience inside our own bodies deserves a place among the things we listen to.
And for something so fundamental to singing, I'm struck by how rarely we treat it that way.
We ask:
Was it supported?
Was it in tune?
Was the vowel right?
Was it stylistically appropriate?
Did the resonance change?
Did it sound feminine?
Did it sound masculine?
Could you sustain it?
All useful questions.
Here's another one:
Did that feel good?
Not good as in correct.
What happened in your body?
Did you want to do it again?
Did something release?
Did something resist?
Did it make you laugh?
What happens if you make it tiny?
What happens if you glide?
Flick?
Punch?
What happens if you let the gesture happen without voice at all?
These aren't questions designed to uncover some secret pure voice underneath all the conditioning.
They're invitations to notice.
And noticing creates options.
I don't want liberation to become another command
There is a vocabulary around queer and trans liberation that I love and sometimes find exhausting.
Find your voice.
Use your voice.
Speak up.
Take up space.
Be loud.
Be unapologetic.
Come out.
USE YOUR VOICE.
Sometimes, absolutely.
And sometimes I don't want to use my voice.
Sometimes I want to have one.
There is a difference.
Queer and trans people already live with enormous pressure around expression.
First we're told to suppress ourselves.
Then liberation can arrive with another instruction:
LOUDER.
PROUDER.
MORE AUTHENTICALLY.
I don't want freedom to become another performance standard.
Sometimes liberation is an enormous sound.
Sometimes it's refusing to make one.
Sometimes I want to belt.
Sometimes I want to hum.
Both count.
Make a tiny sound
Hum.
That's it.
Don't make it impressive.
Don't make it pretty.
Don't demonstrate anything.
Just hum.
Quietly, if you want.
Notice whether you feel it anywhere.
Lips.
Teeth.
Face.
Chest.
Maybe almost nowhere.
Now change something.
Move your head.
Change pitch.
Get quieter.
Slide.
Stop.
Start again.
You haven't achieved anything.
Good.
For a moment, the sound didn't have to earn applause, communicate gender correctly, demonstrate technique, make money, get cast, improve your range or prove your confidence.
You made it because making sound is something your body can do.
And perhaps because it felt interesting.
Maybe even pleasurable.
Pleasure doesn't eliminate limitation
I don't want to replace:
Your voice should be able to do this
with:
Your liberated voice should be able to do everything.
Bodies have limits.
Voices have limits.
Limits change.
Some don't.
Technique has expanded my possibilities enormously.
But limitation itself is useful information.
So instead of immediately treating a limit as failure, I'm interested in asking:
Is this where my voice ends today—or is this where I learned I wasn't supposed to go?
Sometimes the answer really is:
this is where it ends today.
Good.
Now we know.
Freedom requires reality.
Otherwise we're just handing people another impossible standard to fail.
Once I know where I am, I can become curious about where I might go.
This changes what gender-affirming voice work means to me
Gender-affirming voice work is often imagined as specialized work for trans people.
Trans people absolutely have particular needs that deserve knowledgeable and competent care.
But the underlying questions are bigger.
Research also supports looking beyond how a voice is perceived by others.
A 2023 study of 74 trans women found that gender-affirming voice training improved not only how listeners perceived participants' voices, but participants' own vocal satisfaction and voice-related social participation.
Those effects were maintained three months after training.
Oates, J., Södersten, M., Quinn, S., Nygren, U., Dacakis, G., Kelly, V., Smith, G., & Sand, A. (2023). Gender-Affirming Voice Training for Trans Women: Effectiveness of Training on Patient-Reported Outcomes and Listener Perceptions of Voice. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 66(11), 4206–4235.
That distinction matters to me.
A voice can be heard by other people. It is also lived by the person making it.
And more recent acoustic research from the same research program makes the point explicitly: acoustic measures are valuable, but client perspectives are also necessary for a comprehensive understanding of whether gender-affirming voice training has actually been successful.
Who taught you what you're supposed to sound like?
Which sounds get rewarded?
Which get punished?
What have you practised so often that you now call it natural?
What do you want other people to hear?
What do you want to hear?
What do you enjoy?
What are you capable of today?
What might become possible tomorrow?
A cis man discovering that tenderness doesn't make him less authoritative is doing voice work.
A woman discovering that competence doesn't require flattening every trace of warmth is doing voice work.
An autistic person deciding which forms of vocal adaptation are useful and which are exhausting is doing voice work.
An actor trying to stop giving the panel the version of themselves they imagine it wants is doing voice work.
A trans woman deliberately developing a voice that strangers reliably perceive as feminine is doing voice work.
They don't need the same destination.
That's the point.
The goal isn't to make perception irrelevant.
It's to stop confusing being perceived with being known.
Drag taught me this before theory ever did
Drag is supposedly artificial.
That's the joke.
Hair.
Paint.
Padding.
Costume.
Voice.
Gesture.
Everything manipulated.
And yet drag has repeatedly allowed me to recognize things about myself that supposedly more “natural” forms of presentation didn't:
Sometimes performance reveals the truth faster than realism does.
That doesn't mean the performance was secretly my authentic self all along.
It means experimentation creates possibility.
You can put something on.
Exaggerate it.
Enjoy it.
Hate it.
Keep part of it.
Throw the rest away.
Change again.
Performance doesn't have to be the opposite of authenticity.
Sometimes performance is how we discover what else is available.
I am becoming less interested in finding the voice underneath everything
I used to understand vocal freedom more as uncovering something.
Strip away tension.
Expectation.
Gender.
Bad technique.
Eventually, presumably, there would be a person underneath it all making their authentic sound.
I don't think that's what I'm looking for anymore.
I don't want to help people uncover one true voice.
I want to help people develop enough technique to have options.
Enough awareness to notice what those options feel like.
Enough curiosity to discover more.
Enough permission to change their minds.
The world will respond.
Let it.
Feedback matters.
Pleasure matters.
Gender matters.
Technique matters.
Limitation matters.
They tell us different things.
None of them, alone, is the author.
You are still here.
Because perhaps vocal freedom isn't finally sounding like yourself.
It's knowing that this is still your voice when you change it.
Explore your voice with me
If this brought up questions about your own voice, I create spaces to explore them through one-on-one voice work, group programs, workshops and community-based offerings.
My work brings together vocal technique, gender-affirming practice, embodiment, experimentation and performance — whether you're a singer, performer, exploring gender and voice, or simply curious about what else your voice can do.
Some offerings are intimate and individualized. Others are designed to make this work more accessible through group practice, creativity and community.
Want to find the right place to start?
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