r/FTMOver30 • u/asantaatnasa_ • 3h ago
A PSA for people who sometimes get misgendered after years on T
Tldr: 10 years on T, pass seamlessly in real life, but recently misgendered on the phone for the first time ever but I wasn't really offended by it and I don't think you should be either because so many factors go in to have someone perceives your voice over the phone and it may not necessarily be a YOU thing.
Occasionally I see posts where people vent about being misgendered on the phone despite being on T for years and years and passing seamlessly in real life.
Well, today it happened to me for the first time ever. I'm 13 years on T and pass 10000% in real life (and to toot my own horn, am usually considered very attractive 😉).
Anyway, so I was calling a hospital today and after speaking to someone briefly, was placed on hold for a minute. Then when the person came back to the line, she goes "hello" and I respond "hello" and then she goes "were you waiting for [insert department name]" and I say yes. Then she says "oh I could have sworn you had a female voice initially".... implying that, apparently, before she put me on hold she thought I was a woman, then once she came back I now sounded like a man.
So, I know for a fact that my intonation is higher when asking questions and my voice sounds lower when I am responding without a question mark at the end. However, I didn't think that my question asking sounded so high that it would come off as a woman's voice.
But tbh, I wasn't personally offended by her thinking I was a woman because I think people's perceptions of gender only through voice can be extremely subjective. There are so many factors in how someone interprets your gender through your voice. Some factors include the language you speak (certain languages naturally form lower voices), the intonation as I mentioned earlier, or even simply the people who you surround yourself with, and many more factors that I'm too lazy to research right now. For example I've met plenty of cis men with higher voices than mine (or at least I assume they were cis anyway).
So the point of this post is that, for anyone who suddenly got misgendered on the phone after years and years on T and have been passing for a long time as well, my advice is not to waste too much time or energy being worried about getting misgendered especially if it only happens occasionally, because there are so many factors that go into how someone perceives your voice and it's not necessarily a YOU thing.