The weight of the voice: gender, privilege, and qualic apperception

Abstract

For transmasculine individuals who undergo testosterone therapy, a lower pitch is often one of the most desired results, both for personal affirmation as well as for how a low pitch is gendered by others. This paper explores how members from a peer support group for transmasculine individuals articulate their experiences taking testosterone. During interviews participants discussed their apperception of the acoustic changes in their voices (Zimman 2012, 2018) as well as the recognition of this change by others. In this paper, I explore how their apperceptions of their voices are organized around a cluster of related qualia of the voice (Harkness 2014, 2017) such as “heaviness”, “deepness”, “resonance”, and social “weightiness”. As their voices lower in pitch over time and they are more frequently gendered as men in social spaces, they navigate shifting positionalities of privilege, and I show how their descriptions of their voices naturalize various qualia of the voice, linking “deepness” to the social “weight”, or power, of a voice.