Out of the Mouths of Babes

How do people who don’t know Stana react when they first hear your voice? In other words, how feminine do you think you sound to strangers?

I’m soft-spoken. I don’t have anything even remotely resembling a deep, booming, “command the room” kind of voice.

But pitch isn’t really the main event. The real giveaway is how I talk.

I use a feminine vocabulary and, more importantly, feminine phrasing. I tend to ask rather than announce. I hedge, soften, qualify, and generally make myself agreeable. This has been my natural speaking style for as long as I can remember.

Take the classic coffee order.

A man will usually say, “I want a large coffee with cream and sugar.”

A woman is more likely to say, “I would like a medium coffee with cream, no sugar,” or “May I please have a medium coffee with cream, no sugar?”

Same beverage. Very different energy.

“I want” sounds like a demand. “I would like” sounds like a polite suggestion that could, in theory, be withdrawn if it turns out to be inconvenient for everyone involved.

I have always spoken in the latter mode. Soft-spoken, deferential, and mildly apologetic for taking up space at all. The upside is that my voice often “passes” without any special effort on my part.

When I’m out, strangers almost always address me as a woman. I get “Ma’am” routinely, “Miss” now and then, and I can count the number of times I’ve heard “Sir” on two fingers—with one left over just in case.

To be fair, sometimes people are being polite. They may see a man, or someone they’re not quite sure how to categorize, and they decide to follow my lead. I’m presenting as a woman, so they roll with it.

But other times, I’m pretty sure my voice is doing real work. While it’s certainly riding along with the rest of my presentation, I’ve rarely had the experience of feeling like I was passing perfectly—right up until I opened my mouth.

I’m never satisfied and always think I can do better, so at one point I bought a female voice-training videotape.

I copied the audio from the videotape onto a cassette and took the course in my car during my half-hour commute to and from work—every day, for weeks.

(“Videotape.” “Cassette.” Wow. How old is this woman?)

Then, one day during the third week, everything clicked. A voice I had never heard before came out of my mouth.

Wow.

It was actually a little unsettling to hear that woman’s voice. Was that really me?

Of course, to keep a trained voice, you have to use it. And that’s where things fell apart. Since my naturally feminine voice already works most of the time, I’m strangely reluctant to practice the “improved” version.

So I’ve drifted back to square one—which, in this case, really isn’t a bad place to be.

And so it goes.

Wearing Paige

Paolo Ballesteros and Martin del Rosario femulating in the Filipino film Born Beautiful.
Click here to view a scene from the film on YouTube.