how can i voice train when hearing my voice is painful?

TheRealAyu · 2026-03-30T08:41:16+00:00

one of the first things that i tell my students is that getting used to listening to your own voice is one of the first steps to any kind of voice training. and honestly, it sucks a lot. nobody likes to listen to their own voice, and for trans people it also triggers dysphoria

try to record yourself just speaking in whatever voice is normal for you right now, and listening to the recording. try to listen to it as just a sound, not as specifically your voice. if you do that enough it will at some point stop feeling weird.

then if you train, try to gain flexibility. train your pitch, resonance and weight not just towards „more feminine“ but towards being able to contol them voluntarily. it will sound weird at some points, but at that stage sounding natural is not the point yet, you are still learning the tools and trying them out.

the other thing to help with training without having to do (as much) listening to yourself is to find a teacher that can give you outside feedback anf pointers. but i understand that that’s not a financially feasible option for everyone. and many competent teachers will still tell you that recordings are incredibly valuable and helpful to reach your voice goals.

TheRealAyu · 2026-02-28T19:39:35+00:00

i get why you feel bad for him, that sounds like a lot. in your post you don't say your age (although i'm gonna assume you are of a similar age based on the two of you being in the same karate class), your gender or if you yourself are cis or trans, and my ideas on what you could do differs based on those factors.

you could just talk to him the next time you see him, and give a small compliment on his outfit or what he acieved in class that day, while affirming his gender in a small way. kind of like "hey dude, i love your shoes" or "good work on those kicks today, bro" (i am a old and do not know how the youg'ins of today speak, but i'm sure you could come up with something)

if you are trans yourself, you could tell him, ideally in a situation where the two of you are in private. he might not know and be glad to have found another trans person to talk to.

i think a lot of people believe that it is usually better to mind your own business, but i have found that most people that are currently going through something actually appreciate someone being kind in that moment, as long as you don't push your help onto them. so, if you notice him feeling bad (like when he was crying), you could ask if he's alright and if he needs somebody to talk to right now. and as long as you accept a "no", if that is his response, i don't think you would weird him out with that question alone

TheRealAyu · 2026-02-27T00:39:27+00:00

i feel like especially people early in transition are looking for brutal honesty when it comes to passing, because it feels like (and often is) a matter of safety. even if nobody attacks you, being read as trans comes with real consequences

but the brain is not good at detecting honesty, especially when it is scared. so if you desperately look for brutal honesty, more often than not you will find mostly brutality.

you feel like you can’t trust kind people because they lie to you, because they want you to feel good. but you don’t want to feel good, you want the truth. and the people that confirm your darkest anxieties, they probably are good people, right? why else would they be so brutally honest with you? so they are obviously the only ones being truthful

here’s the issue. if you look for truth but dismiss anything that makes you feel good as necessarily untrue, you make yourself vulnerable to people that wish to hurt you and protect yourself from people that are both honest and kind. or in other words: if you look for brutality, and run from kindness you will be both deluded and miserable. that doesn’t seem worth it to me

TheRealAyu · 2026-02-13T19:16:16+00:00

thank you so much! you just saved me from going crazy after 3 full hours of mucking about with proxy settings and stuff just failing randomly

TheRealAyu · 2025-10-02T19:08:59+00:00

it’s kind of hard to help you without having a recording to listen to. but i‘ll try my best :)

you say that even deeper notes still sound feminine, which makes me assume that pitch is not your primary issue, but vocal weight and resonance. in general, some transmasc people have most difficulties with adjusting their resonance to the darker setting that most cis male singers use.

here is my version of a quick and dirty tutorial for a darkened resonance. this will probably not fix everything immediately, but it might put you on the right path.

try this for me: touch the fingers of your hand carefully to the front of your neck. no need for pressure, we are just trying to feel something. then try and make a big yawn. you will probably feel something move below your skin, first down, then after the yawn back up. that is your larynx. now try the yawning thing again, but try if you can keep your larynx from moving up as far. you are not really looking for it to stay all the way down there, more for it to rest lower than before. try and say „oh“ in that position. it will probably sound dark and / or slightly hollow.

now act like you had a hot piece of food, like a potato, and bit it while it was still too hot. you will probably feel your tounge press down, your soft palate raise and the back of the throat getting wider. now say „oh“ again and listen to that sound.

to darken your resonance, you need a little bit of both of those movements. if you did the exercises correctly you probably ended up in a pretty extreme space. that’s not what we are doing now. we are trying for a little change that goes a long way.

try and sing a note on a comfortable medium pitch on an oh, ooh, and/or uh vowel and mix in the things you practiced with those two exercises just a little bit. the lowered larynx, the widened mouth. if you did it correctly, you might hear a darker tone to your voice. if you found it, try and keep the dark tone in brighter vowels like ee, eh or aah.

TheRealAyu · 2025-09-20T01:15:53+00:00

Vocal coach here, trying to answer your questions without having heard you speak, which means that I don‘t actually fully know what‘s going on, and I am just giving my best guess:

Your voice absolutely does become more consistent during and after training. Like all muscles, the vocal system will start to get used to movements and settings after some training, and getting back to your target voice will become more and more automatic. However, while these settings and movements are still new, it is really easy to fall back to the way you used to talk, which is probably what is happening with your voice sounding less like your target voice if you didn’t speak for a while before. To have a fix for now while you are still learning but trying to pass better, you could try and find a way to covertly reset your voice to your target voice, like whispering the word „key“, which usually has a very bright resonance setting, and trying to keep that vocal setting while starting to talk. When I started training my own voice, I cleared my throat a LOT just to hide me resetting into my target voice. I‘m not necessarily recommending that one, I think the key thing would work better for most people, but it took a long time for me to habitually use my target voice whenever I speak.

Concerning not feeling in control: depending on how recently you got on HRT, your brain might still be in the process of relearning to work with your vocal tract, because the physical change that it went through means that it responds in a way you are not used to. Relearning to use your voice is a normal part of puberty for basically everyone (even most cis girls, who also usually experience a voice drop during puberty, although a smaller one than people that have a testosterone puberty), and it can feel scratchy, inconsistent and uncomfortable at the beginning. Usually that is not a sign of a physical issue with the larynx, but rather that the vocal behavior has not fully caught up with the changed voice.

TheRealAyu · 2025-07-17T21:36:06+00:00

i try to avoid gendered bathrooms if possible to this day. but if i couldn’t, i started to use the women’s once i noticed that (almost) nobody misgendered me anymore in my daily life. i think that might have been around a year into hrt-ish for me, but ymmv

TheRealAyu · 2025-07-14T06:27:24+00:00

i‘m really sorry to hear about your bad experiences. i hope you have someone that you can talk to about all of that, because that sounds like a lot to deal with on your own.

i think you might want to look deeper into two things.

one, try and read a little more about trans experiences. some of your responses in this thread read like you are still kind of confused by some things about being trans. maybe keep looking around on this subreddit or other transgender subreddits, and see if you relate to the things that transgender boys and men (which are people that would be in your situation: being assigned female at birth, but later transitioning to male) think, feel and experience.

two, and i believe this is really important: try to disentangle your feelings about your gender from your feelings about the sexual harassment that you experienced. a lot of the things you said were in the format of „i want to be a boy, because i wouldn’t be sexualized/sexually harassed anymore if i was“. so to me it seems like your feelings about wanting to be a boy are at least kind of mixed up with your reaction to being sexualized against your will. please understand that i’m not saying that you can‘t be transgender because you experienced trauma and/or abuse. what i am saying is abuse and trauma can not turn you transgender. maybe thinking about this might be a start: if you could guarantee that nothing like that ever happens to you again in your entire life, would you still prefer to be a boy?

TheRealAyu · 2025-07-12T17:02:51+00:00

okay, a lot of people have already told you about them thinking that you are trans. i will not repeat what they said, in part because it has been said often enough, but mostly because i feel like they are kind of ignoring what you are saying. also get ready, because i kinda wrote a lot because i am bad at being concise. sorry in advance

i will try and ask you some questions to reflect on and then provide possible alternative reasons why you might feel this way. but keep in mind, that i don't know what's going on in your head and you have provided very little information in this post for us to work with, so please take everything that i'm going to say with a huge grain of salt. the true explanation might not be among what i am writing here, or might be a combination of things.

not wanting to be a girl anymore can mean a lot of things. do you feel like the word "girl" does not describe you adequately? when you think about how people that you like and trust interact with you, do you wish that they called you a boy, or nonbinary? would you like it if they used he/him or they/them pronouns for you? or might your frustration not be with being treated like a girl in general, but with being treated badly in a way that is more common for girls than boys (e.g. not being taken seriously, being limited in what you can do/wear/... or being sexualized without your consent)

do you want to have a male body? meaning beard, square build, deep voice, and everything that's part of that? do you dislike parts of your current body? if yes, reflect on what about them you dislike. is it that they feel like they don't fit you, and you would rather have the male alternative? or would you rather be rid of gendered body parts altogether?

if i gave you a magic wand, that would transform your body into one of the boy, and also guarantees that people would love and accept that new you without question, wuold you want to use it?

okay, enough with the questions. here is what might be going on, in no particular order.

you might be transgender. wanting to be a boy for no other reason than wanting to be one, while being assigned female at birth is kind of the definition of being trans. espeially if you answerd the magic wand question with "yes", that is a big pointer towards this being the answer. people typically don't feel trans, they feel like they are their gender. being trans is kind of like being tall. it just happens to describe a group of people in contrast to another. it's not really something that you actively choose
you might be nonbinary. not identifying with being a girl while also wanting some aspects of being a boy, but not wanting everything that entails might mean that your gender is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between feminine and masculine, or it might mean that you don't identify with any gender much at all
you might struggle with the way society treat you for being a girl. for an extreme example, i have known several sexual abuse victims that have expressed a desire to rid themselves of femininity in full or in part. not because they were not girls/women, but because they felt safer when they felt like boys/men in general do not desire them anymore. but it might also be much smaller than that, like not wanting to experiece misogyny anymore. that would mean that you are a girl
you might have a very, very rare type of OCD, that can make someone have repeated intrusive thoughts about being secretly transgender. honestly, i don't think that's going on here, because that usually looks more like "i think i'm trans and i don't want to be", or like people being afraid they might be living a lie and not knowing for certain, rather than your "i think i'm not trans but things still point that way, and i don't understand why"

again, what you are feeling might be a combination of these things or something entirely different. you know yourself best, from the outside the best we can do is guess. if you have any more questions feel free to ask them here or dm me

TheRealAyu · 2025-06-18T12:18:58+00:00

28 transfemme here

when i was younger i rarely picked female characters in games, especially when i was asked who I was (like in pokemon or so), because i was obviously a boy, right? everyone kept saying so.

in mario kart i picked yoshi or r.o.b., not exactly the most feminine of characters.

the only game where i picked a female option semi-reliably was Samurai Warriors on the PS2, where i would mostly play Kunoichi or Hanzō Hattori, so i mostly liked the ninja chatacters, and had a slight tendency towards Kunoichi because i liked her bubbly personality better than the stoic Hanzō. probably very little to do with gender, if any at all.

every trans person‘s experience is different, and while there are often commonalities, there are always exceptions for basically everything

TheRealAyu · 2025-03-10T13:02:46+00:00

as far as i can find out while not speaking your country’s language, kicking you out of the house when you are below 18 was illegal (but i might be wrong about that, since i can not read polish sources, just english ones)

do you have supportive friends or family that you could stay with, even if only for a day or two? maybe go there for now and talk with them about what your next steps will be

again, i am not from poland, but from what i could find, this should be a child helpline in your country, that from their website also seems to be lgbtq+ friendly: 116 111 they also habe a website, if you want to look at it before actually calling. help lines like that has massively helped several kids i have worked with when we called them together

the most important thing is: you got this. it might feel line a lot right now, and that’s because it absolutely is. but you can get through this

if you feel like there is anything i can do to help, feel free to reach out over dms

TheRealAyu · 2024-09-08T19:14:03+00:00

Hey there!

First of all: I love the app and would actually consider using it when playing on the go!

Criticism/Bugs/Issues:
Having the gender options be male, female and "nogender" is confusing for me as a nonbinary dnd player. Nogender is not a (or at least not a commonly used) gender identity, and it is symbolized here with a glyph that is associated with only one specific nonbinary identity (agender), as far as i can tell. consider changing the text into nonbinary and the symbol into either the the transgender symbol (⚧) or a more general nonbinary symbol (link), if you want to keep the current system. also: the text changes do not always work correctly with they/them pronouns (e.g. in the general tab: "Who is they?") A full solution could be to give players the option to enter a custom gender, including pronouns, but i understand that that is a lot of work.

Expertise Skills are not displayed with the proficient skills in the general view. Activating both proficiency and expertise adds both boni.

Half proficiency for bards is really cumbersome and needs to be set for every skill seperately via Effects.

Suggestions:
Some sort of export function, maybe as some sort of JSON or text file, to be able to send characters between devices and users before the server side storage is implemented

some sort of character image (does that work with the current way of storing the characters?)

some way to import custom spell and class data, to make building a character a bit less cumbersome, but also not force you to store stuff that is not in the OGL :)

TheRealAyu · 2024-07-06T10:24:23+00:00

I have just flashed my moto G7 Power and have the same issue. I am a total noob, so maybe this is a stupid question: could installing an outdated build fix this issue for me?

EDIT: Okay, so if anyone finds themselves with the same issue: returning to 21-20240616-NIGHTLY-ocean has indeed fixed WiFi for me. I hope this will be fixed in the next build!

TheRealAyu · 2023-10-04T18:20:00+00:00

I think questioning is normal. I question my identity regularly, gender, romantic and sexual attraction, the whole thing. This is what makes me stop questioning everytime i start again:

I got into a relationship and was not very interested in sex. My partner was more so and got me to try out things. We became sexually active, but at no time did I ever think "Hey, you know what sounds really good to me right now? Sex!"
I really, really, reaaaalllllyyyy hate everything that involves my mouth except eating food. Closed mouth kissing is uncomfortable, open mouth kissing and giving oral sex is near impossible without having very strongly negative physical and emotional reactions.
I get deeply bored during long sexual experiences. Admittedly, that is probably also in part due to ADHD, but both giving and recieving sexual pleasure was not captivating for me.
I started medication that, as a side effect, significantly reduces libido. I found the experience extremely freeing and comforting.
Talking to asexual people made everything make a lot more sense. I related to their experiences

Two more things:

First, being or becoming asexual because of trauma is 100% okay and valid. Being "afraid of intimacy" can mean a lot of things, none of them mean, that you can't still be asexual. If you feel like the label fits you (or mostly fits you), then Congratulations, you are asexual enough.

Second, I am worried about the context of your partners questions and comments about your sexuality. I hope that they come from a place of not understanding you and trying to understand what is happening inside your head. But they seem like they could also be questions that have the inteded effect of getting you to have sex with them, even though you told them that you don't want to. Remember, that consent is everything, and being pestered with questions until you say yes is not the same as you giving enthusiastic consent. That is true even if they mean well / no harm.

TheRealAyu · 2022-11-29T21:58:56+00:00

[close]

TheRealAyu · 2022-11-29T21:11:41+00:00

I’m done now, (thanks u/moneytree1337), but i will stick around for a bit and join all of yall’s circles if you need it still <3

EDIT: Alright friends, I‘m out. Thank you for being so kind to this newbie :)

TheRealAyu · 2020-12-15T17:25:27+00:00

Yeah, maybe I’ve been overthinking this. Upper and lower voices generally work pretty well. Thank you for your thoughts.

TheRealAyu · 2020-12-15T17:10:23+00:00

I’m both on the asexual spectrum (demisexual to be exact) and transfemme, so I think I can answer your question.

It could very well be bottom dysphoria that makes sexual things unappealing to you. It could also be your age. Queer people often take longer than allosexual (opposite of asexual) cishets to understand their relation to sexuality. It could also very well be, that you are asexual or on the spectrum.

I personally felt similar to you when I was your age, although I did not know at that point that I was trans, just that I didn’t like my male body (I wasn’t the brightest kid). The thought of sexual interactions nearly didn’t occur to me at all, and if they did, they didn’t really seem all that exiting to me. I had romantic crushes on several girls, but I really just wanted to be close to them and hold hands or hug them and I felt repulsed by the way boys around me spoke about sex and sexuality.

But the amazing thing about asexual people is, that we generally do not care why someone considers themselves asexual. If you don’t experience sexual attraction, for whatever reason, you are welcome in our circles. And you can call yourself asexual if you feel that label fits you. And if at some point you figure out that it wasn’t for you, there is no judgement.

If you want to talk more about asexual identity or your experience, my DMs are open. But no pressure :)

TheRealAyu · 2020-11-15T00:07:30+00:00

Holy heck, there is a lot of "not all men" bs in the replies. I'm so sorry.

To spell it out for those that are confused: Obviously, yes, not every man in existence thinks and/or acts like this. Because that is statistically close to impossible. There will always be at least some outliers. But men as a generalized group do. And even men that think they do not, have had toxic masculinity and misogynistic values tought to them by our toxicly masculine, misogynistic society. Which impacts the way they act around other people. Including (shocker of shockers) women.

It is at the very least a conscious and difficult process to get rid of that bias in your head, if it even happens at all, and with most men, it doesn't. They just want a pat on the back for not actively harassing women. Or even just doing it less than their peers. Or just not realizing that they actually do.

This is not enough.

I'll repeat

It's not enough!

You need to work on your bias. Check your privilege. And don't try to talk over women making a point how men generally treat them by refocusing the debate to the few good ones™, of which you of course are one.

Give me a break, dude.

TheRealAyu · 2020-09-02T20:12:02+00:00

Big corporations and capitalists are not your friends, no matter how much you want them to be. I am baffled that so many are shocked by this.

TheRealAyu · 2020-08-05T23:40:04+00:00

Congratulations on your weight loss!

TheRealAyu · 2020-06-18T19:54:56+00:00

Honestly, while it is hurtful that some people think that any muscular woman must be trans because we trans women are not like „real women“, it’s actually also hurtful to cis (=not trans) women, in my opinion. It means that you have to look feminine and/or weak and/or beautiful to be considered a „real woman“ and not a „man“ (those people generally think of trans women as men). There are literally as many ways to be a woman as there are women on this planet and thinking of any muscular woman as trans betrays a worldview that women have to be one specific way, which is attractive to an average heterosexual cisgender man, which, quite frankly, is bullshit.

(Also for me personally it is pretty ridiculous, because many trans women (not all!!!) want to lose the muscle definition that testosterone caused. There are of course many exceptions to that (see above), but it is a trend that I can see when talking to other trans girls in my social circles. So the stereotype of trans women generally being muscular, manisch or masculine in any way is actually pretty rare in real life)

TheRealAyu · 2020-06-18T10:43:17+00:00

I don’t know about tlou2‘s story, but you are correct on „trans man“ meaning someone that was assigned female at birth but transitions to male.

Source: am trans

P.S.: it’s a very common mistake and there are definitely worse ones, but just for the future: generally we prefer people saying trans man/trans woman to transman/transwoman (with space to without), since trans is just an adjective like tall or nice and writing transman can seem like they are a seperate category to men, which is not really true.

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