Why you don't voice-verify trans-women

I'm sad that I have a use for this icon again.

In the 90's, it was a common practice in "Lesbian" or "Women's" chatrooms, to subject new users to a process called "Voice Verification". The idea was simple enough on it's surface.. how can you tell the 'real women' from the 'men pretending to be women' in a text-based chatroom? Call them up on the phone and listen to their voice.

The idea seems simple on it's surface, but it fails to consider the existence of transgendered people.

There is no voice marker for what a transgendered woman sounds like. In fact, a transwoman can sound like a man, or a woman, or like a man trying to sound like a woman. The same is true for transmen (Transgendered Men). A transman can sound like a woman, or a man, or a teenage boy trying to sound older. A few of the luckier ones can sound so ambiguous that the listener simply can't know which is which.

Voice can betray secondary sex characteristics.. but not gender.

My voice betrays years of discomfort, with a lifelong lisp, with my teeth, with my voice and an indicator of which hormones were most active during puberty, a body gone the wrong way at the fork in the road, a lifetime of shyness and a decade of withdrawal and isolation. A friend of mine from Second Life, on hearing my voice for the first time, said it was weird.

I have a weird voice.

What I don't have, is a passable voice.

Sure, with some surgery, and years of voice therapy, I might be able to pass as genetically female to the occasional telemarketer.

In the 90's, in the chatrooms, those voice verifying gatekeepers to #Lesbian, were trying to keep the horny guys of the net out of their boys-free-zone. But in the process, they also created a barrier for transwomen who were also lesbians. In the process, they created hurt, when they established a barrier that said "you're not woman enough, if you can't pass 100% on the phone."

That was the 90's.. and a lot of shitty things happened to transgendered people back then. Many times at the hands of the LGB people we called allies. 20 years later, things have changed somewhat. The Transgender umbrella has gotten bigger, and more people have started being more 'out' about their varying perceptions of Gender. There are terms now for people who switch back and forth on a whim, for people who see themselves as both genders at once, for people who see themselves entirely outside of gender as well.

And yet, even today, when I was invited by a friend to visit a "Lesbian Club" in Second Life, I was subjected to the same decades old hurts, when a gatekeeper at the door insisted that to gain entry, I must be voice verified.

I asked why, and got no direct answer. "It's a rule" I was told time and again.

I was ready to give up, retract back into my shell and go hide in my skybox alone while my friends had their good time at the club. Fuck this stupid club. Instead, I got angry.

There is nothing you can tell, via voice, that differentiates a 'real trans-woman' from a 'guy just saying he's a trans-woman'... Unless we were very lucky and transitioned before puberty, blessed with supportive parents we could come out to at an early age, we're both going to have voices deepened by puberty's waves of testosterone.. only in the case of a transwoman, that happened against our hopes and dreams.

Transwomen face a life near constant microagressions, tiny little digs and insults, little hurts and injuries to the will and soul. Death of a thousand papercuts. Every hour of every day. We're excluded from women's groups, women's sports, women's shelters and support groups, women's clothing stores don't cater to our size, and god.. finding shoes in our sizes can be impossible. We settle, we compromise, and we learn to shrink away from confrontation, and sulk alone in the face of exclusion.

When you place a gender screening barrier in front of a transwoman, asking them to prove they're 'really a woman', you resurrect every barrier they've ever faced over their sex or gender. Every betrayal of trust, every dream destroyed by puberty, every indignity caused by a dirty look at the fitting rooms, or terror at having to use the boy's locker room. You're reaching into their psyche, and finding that moment when for the first time, someone said "no boys allowed" and made the little trans girl cry inconsolably.. and you're poking that memory of hurt with a sharp stick.

Estimates place the suicide rate of transgendered people at between 30% and 50%.