The perception of (trans)masculine speech: Effects of stimulus acoustics and rater identity

Abstract

A large body of work has examined the acoustic characteristics of cisgender, heterosexual (cishet) men and women’s speech, and the acoustic features that predict listeners’ judgments of binary gender through speech. Considerably less work has examined the diverse ways that non-cishet men, non-cishet women, and people whose gender is neither exclusively male nor exclusively female express gender through speech. Moreover, there is relatively little work on how gender-diverse listener groups perceive gender through speech. This poster presents the results of a perception experiment designed to fill those gaps. Stimuli were multiple sentence productions of 20 masculine-presenting individuals, including cisgender men, transgender men, and transmasculine nonbinary people. These are described and analyzed acoustically in Dolquist (2023). Listeners were 88 cishet men, 62 cishet women, and 50 gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) individuals. Listeners identified gender identity, gender orientation (i.e., cisgender or transgender), and a variety of attributes for each stimulus. GSD listeners were more likely than cishet men and cishet women to identify voices as transgender or nonbinary, and were more likely to evaluate those voices favorably. Moreover, cishet men and women’s judgments of gender were more strongly predicted by sex-dimorphic acoustic characteristics like f0 than were GSD listeners’ judgments.