Whether you are a crossdresser or transsexual, developing a truly FEMALE voice - not just a feminine one - is of paramount concern. When I began my transition, there was electrolysis to worry about, mannerisms... but it was voice that seemed to me the greatest obstacle.

Like most, I tried simply feminizing my voice, softening the voice I had. I tried raising my pitch artificially, arriving at that bad falsetto that forms the stereotype of the transgendered marking them as parodies rather than the real thing. Eventually I even consider vocal chord surgery as a last resort.

Voice surgery made me nervous though. I had a fairly decent singing voice, I like to do character voices, I liked to sound dramatic when I spoke. But the thought of being read every time I uttered a word was enough to tip the balance to consider voice surgery, even though all end-results I had heard were not very convincing AND I had heard horror stories of those who as a result of the surgery lost their voices completely!

I had just about resigned myself to that risk when, a few months into full-time, I stumbled into something quite by accident that has made the difference in my career, my relationships, in my life as a whole: I learned to sound female.

Notice I did not say "to talk like a woman", but rather "to sound female". This is because the secret I found is not in the way one speaks but the way one sounds. I had been trying out different voices that day (as I did most days), sometimes trying to sound like a squeaky teenager, other times like a mature matron. For weeks I had been struggling with no progress to speak of. And then, this one day, suddenly something happened. My voice "slipped gears" and came down in a different place than it had ever been. All at once, in one broad stroke, the TIMBER of my voice had turned female. I couldn't believe it! I actually SOUNDED female! I tried saying this and that and EVERYTHING sounded female. This was incredible! After all my fears and yearnings... well, it was almost like magically being transformed into a woman!

It was just about quitting time when this happened. At the time, I was working as Melanie, but still going home to my wife as Dave. The kids did not know about my transition yet. So each night, I would leave work, take off the nail polish and make-up, change my clothes and go home. So, I decided it was time to go back to my "drab" voice and do Dave again for the night. But when I tried to revert, I couldn't find my old voice. I tried again -nothing! Suddenly I felt that I really HAD been transformed! That somehow my whole voice box had been changed to a female form! But this was terrible!!! My wife was going to kill me!

After half an hour of unsuccessful attempts to get out of voice, there was nothing left to do but face the music. I drove home, stepped inside. Mary said, "How was your day?" I replied, "Fine", but it wasn't Dave's voice, it was Melanie's voice, and Mary threw a fit!

"What's wrong with your voice?!", she demanded. I explained what had happened and how I got stuck. She told me I had darn well better figure out how to get my old voice back before the kids woke up in the morning. Try as I might, I met with no success. But then, over the course of an hour or so, my voice relaxed and the old voice came back. I was saved!!! But then, I worried that I couldn't get the new voice back again. After all, it happened by accident, and I really didn't know what I had done. At first, I DID lose the new voice. But then, I found it again, and practiced and practiced going in and out all the rest of the night. The next morning, the first thing I did when I woke up was try to find the new voice again, and there it was, mine to command! Over the following months, I worked on the fine points of my voice, adding all the incidental elements that affected not only my sound, but the manner in which I spoke. And now, over four years later and two years after SRS, I can report that my new voice is fine. If I choose I can still slip in and out of it at will. This voice has been crucial in my career advancement, relationships and ,best of all, my female voice has helped developed my sense of self as Melanie.

In this article, I will share with you how I did it and provide all the steps you need to find your own female voice.

To begin, as I looked back over the path I had taken, I discovered seven important tools for developing a feminine voice. Six of them work on the femininity but the seventh is the "secret" that actually makes one SOUND female. I'll describe each briefly, then cover them all in greater detail. By name, the seven tools are Pitch, Resonance, Dynamic Range, Annunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, and Body English.

PITCH:
Most people assume that the primary difference between men and women's voices is Pitch. But we shall see that the actually difference in pitch between the sexes in minimal. In fact, the overlap of range between the sexes allows for almost ANY individual to fall well within accepted norms of pitch.

RESONANCE:
Resonance is the real secret of this method. Resonance is the modulation of whatever pitch you have. It puts the envelope on the voice that takes the pitch and assigns it Timbre. In the course of this article I will describe a simple exercise anyone can do to find that special place in their voice and develop a truly FEMALE resonance.

DYNAMIC RANGE:
Dynamic Range describes the difference between the highest highs and the lowest lows that a person uses while speaking. Men use a very narrow dynamic range, even though they are quite capable of extending that range. It is simply a matter of training, not physiology. In contrast, women use a much WIDER dynamic range, which is what gives their voices more of a "sing/song" effect.

ENUNCIATION:
Enunciation is the way you pronounce your words. Just as one might do a dialect, there is a female dialect that transcends languages and cultures. I will describe a means for developing a fully feminine enunciation.

VOCABULARY:
Yes there are masculine and feminine words. in our culture, certain words are almost exclusively reserved for males and others for females. I will cover some of these and show you how to be on the lookout for more.

Being masculine or feminine has a lot to do with brokering power. When one forms words into sentences, the ORDER of words as well as modifiers and parenthetical change the position of power of the speaker. We'll look into ways to adopt the "power level" appropriate to the many roles played by either sex.

BODY ENGLISH:
Body English is they way you move while you talk. In fact, it has an actual impact of how the voice itself will sound. By using the proper Body English while you speak, you can improve the femininity of your voice - even on the phone!

Now that we've seen the overview of what will be covered, let's move on to the first of these areas in depth.

PITCH:
What do Susanne Pleshette, Marline Detrich, Cher, and Bea Arthur have in common? They all have VERY low voices! In fact, they have voice LOWER in pitch than most of the male population.

However, we would never mistake them for men! In fact at least three of the four are generally considered rather sexy. When women have low voices they are not considered masculine. Rather, their voices are referred to as "husky"

How can they get away with that? Because the difference between the average male voice and the average female voice is only about 1/2 octave. That's right! Just 1/2 octave! It is not the pitch that makes them sound female, but the Resonance!

Because each of us has at least a 1 1/2 octave range to their voice and most of us have two octaves or more, there is a lot of overlap wave forms with many striking and identifying harmonics.

That chamber is like our own voice box. Men have a larger voice box. That's what makes their Adam's apple larger and their voices add more low-end resonance. Women have a smaller voice box and as a result have less low end resonance. So, in a sense, men have MORE harmonics than women. This is fortunate for those in the masculine gender who wish to be perceive in the feminine. The whole trick is to learn to us LESS of your voice. You've got it already, you are using it already. Its not something you have to add to sound female, but something you need to suppress. The problem is, that when men go into a falsetto, they suppress ALL of the harmonics, resulting in that silly high-pitched voice that is surely a dead give-away.

Let's try an experiment to drive the point home. Put your finger of one hand on the top of your larynx, at the top of your Adam's apple. Place the fingers of your other hand at the very bottom of your larynx, below the Adam's apple. Now, speak aloud in your normal masculine voice. You will note that both the top AND bottom of the larynx vibrate almost equally as you speak.

Keeping your fingers in place, go into a falsetto and speak. You will note that there is hardly ANY vibration in either the top OR bottom! The exercises we are going to learn will allow you to create a voice that vibrates ONLY at the bottom and NOT at the top. This effectively cuts the part of the voice box used in half and thereby loses the lowest of the harmonics, leaving almost EXACTLY the same range of harmonics as a genetic female voice.

Exercise #1:
The female voice I've discovered feels like it sits "behind" your normal speaking voice. After I had used it for a while, I found there were two easy to get to this place a place your voice does not usually go while you are speaking. The first way is with Falsetto, the second way is by gargling.

A. Falsetto:
Start with your highest falsetto. If you sound like a cartoon character with big round ears that lives in Anaheim, you've got it! Now take that voice and bring the pitch down as low as you can WITHOUT BREAKING YOUR VOICE. You see, if you break your voice it will "come out front" again, and you'll be using the full voice box for modulation - just what you don't want.

Take your voice down as low as you can go in falsetto. That's the spot. You will notice that neither the top nor bottom of your larynx is vibrating very much, if at all. Now, before I explain what to do once you get to that spot, let's examine the other method of arriving there. If you try both methods, one will work best for you. Also, by trying both, you will have a better sense - a "cross reference" of where your voice needs to be.

B. Gargling:
Just go back in your throat the way you do when you gargle and make that standard gargling sound. when you do, you will automatically tighten up your throat. You will find that your voice is resonating from exactly the same place either with the lowest falsetto or the gargling. However, with the gargling, you can actually feel both the top and bottom of your larynx vibrating.

The point you want to reach for this voice is the center between where you put your voice to gargle and the lowest falsetto you have. Some people like to do character voices for fun. If you can do a little old man or old woman, say "The Mludium Q38 Space Modulator, or do the Wicked Witch of the West, you are very near the spot.

As I mentioned before, the first time I found this voice I hit it by accident. Then I got stuck. So if you try this exercise and are not living full-time as a woman, make sure you have an hour or so to find your way back to male voice just in case.

Now, what you are actually learning to do is develop one set of the muscles on your larynx while not using the others at all. This is a tough trick - kind of like wiggling your ears or patting your head while you rub your tummy. It takes practice - LOT'S of practice.

But don't practice too much right at the start. Once you find the voice it is such a magical experience that you want never to come back. But you will find that using the lower set of muscles to do all the work leads to hoarseness at first. This is your body's way of telling you that you should knock off for a while.

I found that during the first week I used this voice, I could only go about half an hour or so before I got hoarse. Then, I had the good sense to rest my voice. Just like doing exercises for the body, you don't want to do too much too fast of you will injure yourself.

For me, it took about six months to fully develop my voice to the point I could use it all day long. Then, it took another six months to fully develop loudness and dynamic range. But these things did come with practice and patience. I imagine that eventually, the other muscles at the top might atrophy if, like me, you just don't use them at all. However, for those of you switching back and forth, both will stay in tone and like me, even now after four years, I can still call up the old voice if! have to. For me, that's about once a year when I need to demonstrate to a friend that it is possible to do this.

So, don't push it. I'm no medical doctor. I can't tell you exactly what's going on physically, nor can I guarantee you won't cause yourself problems. I can merely say that for me, I have been using this voice for over four years with no apparent ill effects.

Now, trying to describe a voice in a text article is a bit difficult. I understand this. That is why I've created a VHS video tape called "Melanie Speaks!" where I demonstrate these techniques so you can hear them, copy them, and learn to do them on your own. The tape runs 49 minutes long and is available for only $20 in cash, check or money order, post paid, by writing to me at:

Melanie Anne Phillips
P.O. Box 295
Burbank, CA 91503

And, if you want to hear a sample of my voice, you can dial my business phone which is always on an answering machine at (818) 840-0381.

Now that we've had this word from our sponsor, we return to our regularly scheduled program.

Having covered Resonance, and discounted pitch, its time to move on to the other five steps that can feminize your voice. Remember, Resonance creates a FEMALE voice, these other well- known steps are useful in FEMINIZING whatever voice you have.