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voices

i saw this post yesterday (i wish i had grabbed the URL) about how this trans woman”s brother was being a shitty transmisogynist about some trans woman he felt wasn”t putting enough effort into ~being~ a woman or some such nonsense.

why? because she didn”t work on her voice or something.

it is an issue i know i”m pretty sensitive about. i get no dysphoria from my voice ‘cause, well i don”t have much in the way of physical dysphoria. i do, however, have a lot of social dysphoria and my voice makes a really big fucking difference for how people read my gender.

the thing is…

is that i don”t want to change my voice.

my voice is a woman”s voice because i am a woman.

end of the fucking story.

despite all this…….

i still feel like i”m being robbed of my voice

nowadays, when i”m in public and i can see that people are correctly reading my gender…..

i try not to speak aloud because i don”t want to ruin it.

because i don”t consistently read as a ~real~ (re: cis) woman. and it isn”t a goal of mine. so the relatively rareish times when i”m encountering someone who doesn”t misgender me, i just want the moment to last.

but not only then… just like in general. i feel this urge to either modify my voice or just stay silent.

it is funny/not funny when cis women talk about how they are figuratively silenced (in most cases) by misogyny and the expectations that women are silent or defer to men….

transmisogyny

literally steals our voices1

literally silences us2

‘voice” and the discourse around being heard and silencing

is a central idea to liberatory discourse

but in most of the discussions of this as abstract idea, as metaphor

rarely take into account things like the embodied, physical realities of trans women

for whom the very act of speaking could mean violence, assault, death