I took voice lessons in person (my health insurance covers most of that) and i’ve never struggled with the usual stuff like dysphoria from listening to the recordings, i view my voice as an instrument and not as something that’s inherently part of me. But i had a breakdown at some point where i didn’t know if i want to go on and another moment where i really questioned which voice goals to set. I just reached the point eventually were i seriously wondered how much effort i want to put into passing when it isn’t needed for my own comfort - i don’t get dysphoria when my voice is in an androgynous range, so if i would go further than i am now, i would only be doing it for cis people, to assimilate into their weird, butchphobic notion of womanhood, and that just destroys all of my motivation to keep actually working on my voice, even though i’m one of the few trans people who actually enjoys voice training.
Damn, that’s pretty awesome. In that you never got dysphoria for doing it and that your insurance paid for it. That’s gotta be rare as hell.
Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy training it, but the videos would highlight my shortcomings and it would get to me from time to time. The actual changing the voice part was an interesting experience where it was fascinating to see how my voice would be altered with each added technique of modulating everything. However, I will say that I oft got mad at myself for missing the mark or dropping the new technique or what have you. Even to this day, where I’m probably a year past having reached where I needed to be, I’m still paranoid about failing to pass with my voice.
Speech therapy is actually one of the very few areas in German trans healthcare where accessibility and coverage aren’t a problem. But don’t get me started on laser hair removal.
Damn. That’s actually really cool. All insurances I’ve come across here in the States straight refuse to cover speech therapy. Laser hair removal is very iffy. Mine doesn’t, but my puppy wife’s did but only to remove hair for the bottom surgeries that required it.
I took voice lessons in person (my health insurance covers most of that) and i’ve never struggled with the usual stuff like dysphoria from listening to the recordings, i view my voice as an instrument and not as something that’s inherently part of me. But i had a breakdown at some point where i didn’t know if i want to go on and another moment where i really questioned which voice goals to set. I just reached the point eventually were i seriously wondered how much effort i want to put into passing when it isn’t needed for my own comfort - i don’t get dysphoria when my voice is in an androgynous range, so if i would go further than i am now, i would only be doing it for cis people, to assimilate into their weird, butchphobic notion of womanhood, and that just destroys all of my motivation to keep actually working on my voice, even though i’m one of the few trans people who actually enjoys voice training.
Damn, that’s pretty awesome. In that you never got dysphoria for doing it and that your insurance paid for it. That’s gotta be rare as hell.
Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy training it, but the videos would highlight my shortcomings and it would get to me from time to time. The actual changing the voice part was an interesting experience where it was fascinating to see how my voice would be altered with each added technique of modulating everything. However, I will say that I oft got mad at myself for missing the mark or dropping the new technique or what have you. Even to this day, where I’m probably a year past having reached where I needed to be, I’m still paranoid about failing to pass with my voice.
Speech therapy is actually one of the very few areas in German trans healthcare where accessibility and coverage aren’t a problem. But don’t get me started on laser hair removal.
Damn. That’s actually really cool. All insurances I’ve come across here in the States straight refuse to cover speech therapy. Laser hair removal is very iffy. Mine doesn’t, but my puppy wife’s did but only to remove hair for the bottom surgeries that required it.