Voice challenge in transgender women: trans women self-perception of voice handicap as compared to gender perception of naïve listeners

ABSTRACT Purpose: to analyze the self-perception of transgender women’s voice handicap in comparison to the voices’ gender perception by naïve listeners. Methods: 31 transgender women, who were first submitted to vocal acoustic assessment and had their voices recorded to measure fundamental frequency and standard deviations, were eligible to the study. Next, they answered to the Voice Handicap Index protocol, from which, at the end of data collection, the most suited questions to the daily demands of this population were selected. Subsequently, 50 naïve blindfolded listeners were exposed to the recordings and had to identify the voices as males, females or undefined. Descriptive statistics were applied to speakers’ characteristics and the Spearman's correlation coefficient was applied to the protocol scores and the speaker's voice identifications. Results: the mean fundamental frequency found was 172.40 Hz (SD=4.8Hz) and one third of the transgender women reported being satisfied with their voices. A moderate positive significant correlation was found in voices considered as males, and strongly significant and negative in voices considered as females. For the voices considered undefined, however, no significant correlation was found. Conclusion: transgender women’s self-perception of voice handicap is directly related to naïve listeners' perception of their voice gender.