Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.
Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: And I’m Carrie Gillon.
Megan: Happy anniversary.
Carrie: Happy anniversary!
Megan: Is that what we want to go with? Not birthday? We’re not talking to the podcast.
Carrie: It seems weird to have a non-corporeal entity an actual birthday.
Megan: I feel like it has a mind of its own.
Carrie: Sure.
Megan: I guess if I’m saying it to you, it’s happy anniversary. Dos años. How exciting.
Carrie: So exciting.
Megan: And it’s right on the dot, right? Because July 15th is kind of the day we restarted after we accidentally put “asshole” in our description and had to restart everything.
Carrie: Yeah, completely coincidentally, this is actually going to come out on our anniversary for the reboot.
Megan: Yeah, because the first time we tried it was my birthday, which is the 11th, but “asshole” was just an asshole, and we had to…
Carrie: We had to change it to “jerk.”
Megan: Yeah. So for anyone who wants to start their podcast, iTunes will not allow you to have a curse word in your description.
Carrie: Yeah, definitely keep that in mind.
Megan: Every time I hear that, I just don’t think “jerk” has the same effect.
Carrie: No, it really doesn’t. It just seems so mild.
Megan: It is so mild, and “asshole” is pretty mild too, except, I don’t know. I feel like we’ve all just come to the same conclusion that you don’t want to be an asshole.
Carrie: Yeah. “Asshole” is milder than some other words we could have chosen, but it still gets to the heart of the thing that it’s not. You’re being a jerk really, really a lot, not just a little bit.
Megan: There’s a pattern of jerkiness here. It’s more widespread than we can say coincidental.
Carrie: Yeah. Alright. I never knew that we were going to do the lexical semantics of the word “asshole,” but there it is.
Megan: You never know what’s going to happen on an anniversary, and we got a good episode for our anniversary episode, but we have a few little things to talk about before.
Carrie: Yes. So first we have an email from Belen Martinez.
“Hello. I’m a Mexican green card holder living in Laredo, Texas. I currently work as an LPAC facilitator in an alternative high school where I was also a TA.”
I don’t know what an LPAC facilitator is. Do you?
Megan: Language proficiency.
Carrie: Nope. Probably something to do with language.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: “I’m originally from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, just across the border. Back there I worked as a therapist in special ed and as a teacher in kindergarten, elementary, and even master’s program, always with a focus on ESL. So I’m slowly working my way back to the classroom, which is actually the point of this message. I spent the week before last reviewing for the ESL Supplemental TExES. T-E-x-E-S. I guess. As I read the cards before the actual test, which was last Monday, I kept saying, ‘Got it, don’t be an asshole. Yeah, just don’t be an asshole. So, don’t be an asshole? You get it.’ I’m positive I said that to myself during the test. On Friday, I found out I passed the test. Thanks for your help, Belen.”
Thank you so much. Oh, I love it.
Megan: It really is like, do I know the answer to this? It’s ultimately going to be something like, don’t be an asshole in this situation. I looked it up. LPAC is Language Proficiency Assessment Committee.
Carrie: Oh, okay. Cool.
Megan: Yeah. So I knew something like that, but that’s very cool. So it fits perfectly with our little life school semantics of “asshole.” Nice transition. I really appreciate when people write us emails like that. Thank you.
Carrie: Yeah, thank you so much.
Megan: If anyone’s ever inclined…
Carrie: Yes. Anytime you want to give us a shout-out, tell us that you passed a test, or you have something that you want to share with us, we’d love it.
Megan: Yeah, and then Patreon? Is it Patreon time?
Carrie: It is Patreon time. So, we have a bunch of people to thank this month. First, I’m going to mention Justin Gerald, who also wanted to give a shout-out to his professor, Dr. Maria Teresa Sanchez. Apparently, she suggested the podcast to him. So, thank you so much.
Megan: Maria. Gracias.
Carrie: So, double shout-out. We also want to thank Carla Jennifer Borgioli. I hope that’s right. Adriana Diaz and Ana Maria Truster.
Megan: Thank you so much, everyone. Every time you say names, I’m like, I’m so glad I’m not doing it, because I don’t want to say anyone’s name wrong.
Carrie: I know, and I’m going to get at least one of them wrong.
Megan: That was the hardest part about being a teacher because I really took it seriously. I started passing around the sheets to sign in, and then having them say, which name should I call you? Is there a pronunciation that is not obvious to me from asking these things? Or how you would like it pronounced? Because guessing can be a really fraught game.
Carrie: Yes, it is. Although, because it’s linguistics, you can at least be like, ‘Let’s learn a tiny bit of IPA. So, you can at least give me your name.’ So that I can read it.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Everything is a teaching moment [inaudible].
Carrie: That’s true. So, just a reminder for people who don’t know what Patreon is, it’s a site that you can support all kinds of creators, like podcasters, but all kinds of artists.
Megan: Poets.
Carrie: Yeah, basically anything you can think of, you can support someone, and for us, if you support us at either the $3 or the $5 level, you get a shout-out on the show. At the $5 level, you get an extra bonus episode every month.
Megan: Yes. Saltier episodes.
Carrie: Definitely saltier. With even more swearing.
Megan: Yes, if possible. I was telling someone, I didn’t know if I was proud or embarrassed, when we did that favorite turn of phrase thing, that because of our clip, the person had to put an explicit rating for the first time on their podcast.
Carrie: Yeah, Chris was listening to it, and he heard it before I did. He was like, “Yeah, they said that they had to put an explicit rating, and I knew it was because of you guys,” and I was like, “Oh.” Definitely was, but I’m like, it was really hard.
Megan: They could have beeped it.
Carrie: They could have beeped it, but also it’s really hard to talk about Gong Show without also talking about ShitShow.
Megan: Oh, yeah. Did we say Clusterfuck a lot?
Carrie: We might have said Clusterfuck.
Megan: Yeah, because that’s what I think of when I think of ShitShow, is Clusterfuck.
Carrie: That’s right, you did say it. So, yeah, we have some swearing.
Megan: Was I going to say ClusterF? No.
Carrie: No.
Megan: Or Poop Show?
Carrie: No, no Poop Show.
Megan: It’s ShitShow.
C; Get your poop in a group. So apologies. It was a good episode still, regardless of our faux pas. If you ask us to do this, just beware, we’re probably going to end up swearing.
Megan: Yeah, but I would love for you to beep me. It’s fine.
Carrie: You’re allowed to beep, yeah. Feel free. You can do what the Good Place podcast does. They replace it with forking, or bench, or shirt. Which is so funny that it’s one of the few times I really appreciate censoring like that. It’s not true censorship, but you know what I mean.
Megan: Oh, yeah, no.
Carrie: Because it’s so cute.
Megan: It is. I love the Good Place, and that is one of the things I really love about the Good Place.
Carrie: Oh my God, I love the Good Place. The podcast that goes with it is so good, too.
Megan: It would take me a while to be able to act, be on screen and be in like forking shirt or whatever. Like be able to not be cringing in my eyes a little bit. Knowing that this is not the right way to staccato or something. I don’t know.
Carrie: It’s just you take some acting lessons and maybe you get there. Which is also a hint for one of our future episodes.
Megan: It’s true. Oh, speaking of, well, I don’t know. I feel like it’s related because this is related to a lot of actors. There is this terrible article in the HuffPost. Here’s what makes a voice sexy or deeply unsexy. There are scientific reasons you assume a sexy voice stranger on the phone is physically attractive. It’s like immediately you should be like, your hackles should be raised. What am I about to read?
Carrie: Right. So what are the metrics for scientific sexiness? How do we measure sexiness?
Megan: Well, yeah. That’s a good point. There’s some list of, let’s take this further in a subjective, but ultimately correct examination of sexy voices.
Carrie: Subjective, but ultimately correct. Amazing.
Megan: I know. It’s trying to be cute, this article, but it’s ultimately reifying some terrible things, about how we view how people speak. So, Jeff Goldblum’s voice, definitely screwable, they say.
Carrie: Subjectively true.
Megan: Idris Elba, reading anything. Liz Hurley’s deep British accent, and then they say Jon Hamm earlier. So these are sexy accents, sexy voices.
Carrie: It’s [inaudible] there’s only one woman and a bunch of men.
Megan: Yep.
Carrie: And someone that people don’t think about anymore like Liz Hurley. She [crosstalk] is a very attractive woman.
Megan: I know. I had to Google that.
Carrie: I haven’t seen her in forever.
Megan: Yeah. Although it is a picture that they use in the main pic. So they have Tom Hardy.
Carrie: Oh no, that’s Lauren Bacall.
Megan: Lauren Bacall and then Barack Obama are all prime examples of sexy voices.
Carrie: Okay. So there’s two women.
Megan: Yeah, and then an unsexy voice they give is Jared Kushner. See, here’s the problem I have immediately. He is a horrible human person. When we talk about language, everything is a proxy for something else. I am never going to think his voice is sexy, even if he sounded like Jon Hamm, because of how horrible I think he is.
Carrie: It’s true. He also does not sound anything like Jon Hamm.
Megan: That’s true. That’s also true.
Carrie: It’s really hard to actually tease it apart. So I agree with you that because he is, I don’t know, a very bad person, we can’t even conceive of his voice being good. However, I don’t think it would be good even if he were a good person.
Megan: Yeah. It’s extremely subjective.
Carrie: Yeah, it’s a poor choice because how would you possibly say, you don’t want to say anything good about him.
Megan: Right. Yeah, it’s true. Even if I did find his voice sexy, I would be like, “I’m sorry, I have no comment,” or “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Carrie: Yeah, I would just keep my mouth shut. I wouldn’t say anything at all.
Megan: So when they get to the science part, it’s what exactly makes a sexy voice sexy. Studies show that women tend to prefer men with deep voices. So it’s very like cis-hetero, like normative shit.
Carrie: Well, what I found interesting is that it also said across the board, deep voices were bad or deemed more attractive. I was surprised at that claim, because I was like, “Well, really even for like hetero women?”
Megan: Right, exactly.
Carrie: Later they say for men only.
Megan: Right. Yeah. Okay, so they bring up a couple of more women. So rather than a high-pitched girly voice, women drop their tones to a lower sexier register when they’re around the person they’re attracted to. Think Lauren Bacall, Scarlett Johansson. This is from a 2010 study. I don’t even want to click to the 2010 study because I can already tell them it’s not good science.
Carrie: It’s probably not, but to be fair, often studies get mangled in the translation.
Megan: It’s true.
Carrie: So it could be the case that the study itself is normal and fine, and the journalists have twisted it. Not saying that’s the case in this case.
Megan: Yeah. So Jean Berko Gleason, who is a psycholinguist who I’ve read a ton from.
Carrie: And invented The Wug test, which we’ve talked about before. Just in case you don’t know what The Wug test is.
Megan: The fucking Wug test.
Carrie: It’s a test where you show kids of a particular age a picture of a thing that’s not real. So she called it a Wug. It looks kind of like a bird. This is a Wug. Now there are two.
Megan: And then a child finishes it and you see if they have a certain linguistic form if they have the plural ‘s’. So they say two Wugs, right? Anyway, it’s really important for psycholinguistics.
Carrie: It’s important for linguistics, period.
Megan: God, it’s so important. She says a sexy voice is warm and inviting. It feels as if it is spoken from the chest rather than the head. Its tones are pleasing and not at all nasal.
Carrie: I was so shocked that she said this.
Megan: Why did you say that?
Carrie: Like, what are you talking about? This is something that you find sexy, which is totally fine, but weird. It’s weird that you’re admitting this.
Megan: You got to plead the fifth.
Carrie: And not even saying this is subjective.
Megan: This is subjective. Yeah.
Carrie: She could have said something like, “Many people find these things sexy,” and maybe that’s true. I don’t know. I’ve never done the studies, but to just say it as a blanket statement.
Megan: I know.
Carrie: I hope she was misquoted.
Megan: No. Well, she says essentially, it’s partly determined by biology, whatever, and partly determined by society’s exaggerated ideas around voices. Overall, though, a sexy voice is warm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, I don’t know.
Carrie: She’s probably right that there’s some biological component because all animals have [crosstalk] ways of attracting mates…
Megan: Mating calls.
Carrie: …but we don’t know what the biological part is, I don’t think, for voices.
Megan: Especially since we’ve been so concentrated on doing studies on cis-hetero people.
Carrie: Right. We could even say this is only for cis-hetero people.
Megan: Sure. Yeah.
Carrie: I don’t even think they do that. Anyway, it’s never really been done properly. We still don’t really know. So, to make that claim, the first half of the claim seems fine to me, but the second half, which is the more detailed part, is just, wow, I’m so shocked.
Megan: My kind of science communication advice to myself is, if anyone ever asks me a question like that, you’ve got to be very clear that you’d have to be like, “Subjectively, this is what I think makes a voice sexy,” but this is me speaking.
Carrie: I don’t even know if I would answer. I don’t think I would answer.
Megan: [inaudible]
Carrie: I don’t think I would say what I find sexy, because it’s nobody’s goddamn business.
Megan: Yeah. They could twist it.
Carrie: They could easily twist it. I would say something like, “We don’t really know yet. It’s probably a mix of biology and social conditioning because almost literally everything is.” End of story.
Megan: Yeah, but then you wouldn’t be quoted. They’d find some other linguist [inaudible].
Carrie: That’s fine. Go find someone else. That’s fine with me.
Megan: Like Jean Berko Gleason. Come on, goddamn.
Carrie: I was so shocked, because she’s very famous, and she’s done this hugely impactful study that if you’re in linguistics, you have to learn it at some point, usually in your first class. I’m sure she’s a really nice person too.
Megan: Yes, absolutely. I’m not saying anything about her character. Just as a scientist, why’d you say that?
Carrie: Yeah, only her character as a scientist, because this is problematic.
Megan: Yeah. Well, we happen to talk about what voices sound like today, don’t we?
Carrie: Yes! Weirdly! It’s so perfectly aligned.
Megan: It’s almost as if we planned it, but we fucking didn’t.
Carrie: And we totally did not. No, we did not.
Megan: No, not at all.
Carrie: So we’re talking with Dr. Lal Zimman about trans voices and also vocal fry.
Megan: Yes. It’s everywhere. It’s important. It’s beautiful.
Carrie: It is beautiful.
Megan: Yes. So it’s a great episode, and we hope you enjoy.
[music]
Megan: I’m so excited to have Dr. Lal Zimman. He’s an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and affiliated faculty in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include sociocultural linguistics, which we’ll get to in a second, and are focused around two areas: language, gender, and sexuality, and sociophonetics and its interface with discourse. Thank you so much, Lal, for being here.
Dr. Lal Zimman: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Megan: Yeah, you’ve been someone that I’ve wanted to have on the show for a while, so this is very exciting. Please tell us, before we get into it, what is sociocultural linguistics?
Dr. Lal: Yeah, sociocultural linguistics is usually defined as an interdisciplinary area of study. The term came about in part because of the connections and also differences between sociolinguistics on the one hand and linguistic anthropology on the other. So the idea is that sociocultural linguists draw on both of those areas, as well as others, like certain kinds of discourse analysis, for instance.
Megan: I like that because it’s always good to remember that linguistics language is bigger than the actual language. Like, there’s languages, political languages, good, can be bad, our whole show is about how it affects people very deeply.
Dr. Lal: Absolutely.
Carrie: So you say that it intersects with discourse. Can you explain what that is?
Dr. Lal: Yeah, I’m really interested in how fine-grained differences in people’s voices are used to construct certain kinds of identities. A lot of people who do research in that area focus primarily on phonetic analysis. So, they might bring some social factors into it, but frequently there’s a reliance on either interview types of speech or even having people read passages, sentences, or words. For me, this is not a fully satisfying way to approach the voice because so much of what we do with our voices is to do things like taking a stance on something, expressing how we feel about it, or what we think about it. So if we want to understand what people are doing with their voices, we also have to think about what people are doing with their words and thinking about different levels of language.
Carrie: So what are they doing with their words?
Dr. Lal: Well, one of the things that I’m really interested in is Creeky voice quality or vocal fry.
Carrie: Awesome!
Dr. Lal: As I’m sure you know very well, there’s been a lot of research connecting that to gender and suggesting especially that young American women are using a lot of Creek. That seems to be true at least kind of in a broad way. At the same time, when you think about what kinds of things people are doing when they’re using a lot of Creeky voice, often they’re doing something that sort of expresses how strongly they feel about the subject they’re talking about, or how emotional they are about that subject. So one thing I’m really interested in is how people in really intense emotional interactions use Creek as a way of kind of managing their emotions. I think there are certain things about Creeky voice that really lend it to that sort of function.
Carrie: Like what?
Dr. Lal: Well, this is something that I first noticed because I watch a lot of true crime TV.
C; Oh, we do too!
Megan: Right there with you.
Dr. Lal: Yeah. So when folks are being interviewed and they’re talking about really traumatic things that have happened to them or people they know, I started noticing that there is Creeky voice everywhere. It really struck me as being related to maybe holding back on emotional expression a bit and even potentially holding back on crying or other kinds of sort of socially stigmatized or socially uncomfortable kinds of emotional expressions.
Megan: That’s really interesting. You noticed that across gender?
Dr. Lal: Yeah. Something really interesting. A lot of the folks that I’ve worked with use a lot of Creeky voice. One person that I’m thinking of in particular used it like two-thirds of the time. So almost all of his speech sounds Creeky, but even looking at that very Creeky speech, there are patterns that come up in terms of when Creek is used. There’s actually kind of an interesting paradox involved in this. On the one hand, it tended to come up when the speaker was sort of taking stances that suggested he didn’t really care too much about what he was talking about. This kind of makes sense because Creek is different from the ways that we usually express excitement or emotional engagement. Usually, we’re using our pitch a lot to go up and down. We might be speaking louder or more quietly, and just the way that Creek is produced physiologically, it’s really difficult to do those things while speaking with Creeky voice. So it makes a lot of sense that it’s kind of a way of showing I’m not really emotionally engaged with the subject. I’m kind of laid back about it. I’m relaxed. I’m not experiencing strong feelings; but then it also showed up in these contexts with really strong emotional expression, particularly when the emotion was kind of an undesirable or negative one. So there’s something kind of going on there where you can take this resource for conveying yourself as not having strong emotions to sort of cover up a little bit the stronger emotions that a person might be experiencing.
Carrie: That makes total sense to me. When I’m trying not to show emotions, I tend to go kind of flat, and so if Creek is easier to do when you’re being flat, 100% makes sense [crosstalk].
Megan: That is really exciting. Is this new research for you?
Dr. Lal: Yeah, it’s pretty new. It’s stuff that I’m still working on. I think it gives a much better account of why people use Creek because people don’t usually do things just to say, “Well, I’m a woman, so I’m going to use this linguistic feature.” They do really different things [crosstalk] in the moment of actually using language.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely.
Carrie: Also, there are just so many men who use it that I just don’t even get the gender. I recognize that women use it slightly more than men, but this idea that only women use it, I don’t get it.
Megan: Have you looked into whether non-binary folks use Creek in a certain way that is different or the same?
Dr. Lal: Yeah, I’ve been working on a project with some colleagues at Reed College thinking about this question. We had a diverse gender sample to work with. So we had cisgender women and men. We had trans women and trans men. We had non-binary people who were both assigned female at birth and assigned male at birth. There wasn’t really an easy-to-summarize pattern there. So in general, the folks who had higher-pitched voices tended to use a lot of Creek. Actually, I think this goes to the question of, are men really using Creek that much less than women? And I think it’s important that Creek is sort of salient or stands out when it’s produced by somebody with a higher pitched voice because you’re kind of going along at a high pitch and then suddenly you drop away low to Creek. If you already have a really low-pitched voice, it’s a lot more subtle and can be more difficult. Even just as researchers, when we’re coding for Creek, it can be difficult to decide for low-pitched speakers. So I wonder if maybe people are just noticing women’s use of Creek in a way that isn’t necessarily noticeable.
Carrie: That’s what I’ve been thinking for the past couple of years, that it’s just that people are noticing it more for social and actual pitch reasons.
Megan: Yeah, I was going to say, I blame the patriarchy.
Dr. Lal: Oh, absolutely.
Megan: You told me to notice it in women. You all did. Of course, there’s also something going on with production too. You said how language becomes action or action affects language. I don’t know where it starts anymore with vocal fry and noticing it and actually producing it too, because I think that I produce it too, because I’m a millennial woman. I don’t know if I’m doing that consciously or subconsciously, but I think that there is some of that happening because of what people are telling me about Creek.
Dr. Lal: Some people have suggested that Creek could be kind of a reaction against uptalk, which is sort of the previous generation of maligned things that women supposedly do with language more than men. Uptalk became something that non-linguists talk about and know about. It’s something that people talk about really disparagingly. So kind of instead of going upward with pitch, going really down [crosstalk] might be a way of sort of addressing that and pushing back against that stigma.
Megan: Interesting. Yeah, I definitely feel like sometimes I’m trying to reclaim it because people have stigmatized it so much, definitely.
Carrie: I do wonder if that’s true, though, because if you listen to people, my generation, many of them still do Creek, maybe not as much, and we were uptalkers slash maybe still are talkers.
I don’t know.
Megan: Well, it’s everywhere. That’s a good point. Creek is everywhere.
Carrie: Right. Even if you’re using both, I think they’d have to be sort of in alternation with each other, right? Because you can’t really do them at the same time, but I think that’s a good point. The study that I’m thinking of was looking at mothers and daughters, and found that the mother’s generation of speakers who were kind of youngish parents of teenagers used more uptalk and then the teen daughters used more Creek. So there’s kind of that perspective. I think everybody uses uptalk, and everybody uses Creek to some degree or another. It’s just a matter of when we notice it and when we care.
Megan: Right. So I brought up a little bit about how I feel like I am using Creek for my identity. What are trans and queer communities doing with Creek?
Dr. Lal: Good question. One thing about the study I just mentioned, the collaboration looking at trans and cis speakers, was that some of the trans speakers were using a lot of Creek and some of them were using not so much Creek. So one way that Creek might be useful to trans speakers is because it does provide access to a different pitch range that people are typically not producing in their non-Creeky speech. One of the groups that had the highest levels of Creek in the study I mentioned were trans men who were not on testosterone. So trans men with higher pitched voices, and so we were thinking that for them, Creek could function to provide access to a lower pitch range. I don’t think that it’s intentional or conscious in any way, but it’s sort of an effect that’s maybe useful to speakers.
This also came up with the really Creeky speaker I mentioned who Creeks like two-thirds of the time. He was non-binary and in addition to having this really laid-back sort of quality to his voice, he’s also mostly sort of opting out of this binary pitch range thing. Regardless of what your pitch is in your sort of unmarked speech, your Creeky speech is always going to be kind of in a particular range. That range doesn’t seem to be determined by things like how big your larynx are. So it’s possible. Again, I don’t know that this is like a primary motivator, but it’s certainly an effect of using a lot of Creek that people can sort of get out of this really strong binary difference in pitch range that we typically hear.
Carrie: So this is sort of slightly off-topic, but related. Elizabeth Holmes, who we’ve talked about once or twice, has really lowered her voice. At least that’s what people are saying that it’s not her natural voice.It doesn’t seem like she’s using a lot of Creek. Do you have any explanation for what she’s doing to lower her voice if she is indeed lowering her voice?
Dr. Lal: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think kind of the first thing to point out is that all of us use only part of the pitch range that we have access to. We might want to say that Elizabeth Holmes is lowering her voice, but then we should also say that other people are raising their voices, or that men are lowering their voices. So she happens to be making use of a pitch range that’s not typical for women, but a lot of women could produce that pitch range if they had perhaps the social motivations to do so. I do think there’s also something particular going on with Elizabeth Holmes’s voice where it’s not just low frequency in terms of pitch, but also something with her resonance. To me, actually, her voice just sounds like a female nerd. I feel like I’ve known a ton of women who have this kind of low voice quality and they tend to be people who spend a lot of time with men who maybe operate within male-dominated social or professional circles, and who also might, to a certain extent, reject some of the expectations for how women are supposed to express themselves. So I think that she has this low resonance in her voice that could really just be kind of a stylistic thing rather than being about trying to sound masculine, which I think is sort of the implicit message that goes along with this idea that she’s lowering her voice below some sort of supposedly natural, or default, or unmodified range.
Megan: It’s really important to think about how we talk about it and how we’re saying she’s lowering her voice, but I never thought about it in that way that. It is kind of reinforcing this patriarchal idea that women should speak higher than she is, but really, she is utilizing something that she has within her. So, yes, thank you.
Carrie: Because I was primed to think about it in a particular way, I really can’t disentangle that from my feeling about it, but it sounds somewhat painful, like as if she’s hurting herself, and that’s probably not the case at all. My sister also pointed out that she sounds kind of like someone’s masking the voice. So it sounds really artificial. What’s all like impacting her impression of it? But anyway, it’s interesting.
Megan: Yeah. A quick point when I was teaching and lecturing and had like 3 different classes, someone told me, “You must hurt because you are projecting vocal fry when you’re lecturing.” So I was like, no, it doesn’t hurt at all. People have this perception of things. Whatever that person’s perception, how that person’s perception was, how they got to that point. I don’t know, but they definitely thought I was hurting myself and I’m not. It doesn’t hurt at all. Back to identity and how trans and queer folks are using Creek.
Dr. Lal: There’s actually a connection there that’s kind of interesting, which is the way that people talk about trans voices in the literature by speech pathologists and therapists. There’s often a lot of concern that trans people will hurt themselves by using a particular part of their pitch range, by having their larynxes enlarged by testosterone or just learning to produce language in a different way. There’s this kind of sense that if you’re going to change your voice, you need to have a speech pathologist to help you not hurt yourself. This really ignores the fact that it’s very clear that people learn to speak in gendered ways with their pitch and their vocal resonance before puberty, before there are any physiological differences in the vocal anatomy. So we are all engaged in this process of not necessarily as consciously, or with the kind of awareness that a trans person might have, but we’re all doing things with our voices, learning to occupy particular ranges of our voices. I think the idea that it must be harmful for trans people to do that, but not for cis people to do that is just a manifestation of the general idea that there’s something unnatural about being trans, essentially.
Carey: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So a couple of years before that, the big study on how women were using vocal fry, which was like 2011, even just 2 years before that, I read something about vocal fry and trans women and how at the time, speech pathologists were trying to train trans women not to use vocal fry because men were using it. So you didn’t want to sound like a man, and only 2 years later, it was like, no, women are doing it. It’s a woman’s thing.
Dr. Lal: I think that might be because one of the early papers looking at gender and Creek in American English was suggesting that women are using Creek in order to sound like men because Creek is sort of inherently masculine, which just seems like really tortured logic to me, like, oh, women are doing this. It must be because it’s masculine and women want to be masculine. What? Or it’s not masculine, right? That seems like a simpler explanation.
Megan: Oh, my gosh, it goes exactly to Elizabeth Holmes, the same point. Is she really torturing herself because of how much she wants to be a man? I’m definitely buying into this. I’m part of the society, the society built me, but it is tortured logic. I think that when we talk about vocal fry, we joke about it a lot because it’s in our name, and I love it. I never thought about something you could love, but I’m like, “No, I’m trying to reclaim it. I don’t want people to think it’s just for women,” and even if it was something that was just women, but it’s not. That’s okay, because what’s wrong with women?
Carey: Nothing?
Megan: Yeah, exactly. I love the word tortured, I’m so tortured by vocal fry and am a cis woman. There must be so much more going on when it comes to the trans-non-binary folks and how they are using it, and I wonder if that shows up in discourse, if you’ve noticed anything interesting there.
Dr. Lal: People talking about the presence of Creek or vocal fry?
Megan: Yeah, like how Carrie said that speech pathologists are…
Carey: Were.
Megan: …or back then were saying like, “Let’s not use it.” Is there still talk around that when people are talking about how they want to identify or how they use language?
Dr. Lal: It’s interesting. There’s a real split in my experience between trans men and other trans masculine people who are on testosterone and experience that change in vocal pitch as a result, and kind of everyone else, but maybe especially trans women and trans feminine people who are probably more attuned to the ways that their gender is being policed and surveilled by people. So there might be a need for a little bit more awareness there, but a lot of the folks that I work with who are on testosterone really don’t talk much about other aspects of their voices. It’s just sort of you get a male pitch range from testosterone, and then people are a lot less concerned about the details, for instance, whether they might be perceived as gay men as a result of having some not-so-typically masculine characteristics of their speech along with a low pitched voice. On the other hand, trans women that I talk to tend to have a huge amount of awareness of all of these things. I have heard a couple of people kind of talk about that conflict of Creek is associated with femininity, but it might also sort of depend on an ability to contrast your Creek with a high pitch when you’re not using Creek.
So I can see how this is sort of another kind of paradox, where the thing that could potentially lead people to perceive a voice as female could under slightly different circumstances undermine that perception. So there’s sort of a choice to make about whether you’re going to aim for, you know, high pitch and going as high as is comfortable, or whether focusing on other things and creeking as well. Of course, there is sort of a generational difference. I think there might be a difference between trans folks who have maybe always had a similar gender presentation to the one that they have after transitioning. A lot of folks who are maybe assigned male, but have always been quite feminine, tend to acquire a lot of the vocal characteristics that are normatively associated with women early in life, and so pitch might actually not be that important, because we know that people can have pitch that’s not super typical for their gender. If other characteristics are typical for their gender, that can potentially be more important in terms of how people are going to perceive that voice.
Carey: It makes sense.
Megan: Yeah. Do you think it’s meaningful that the trans men and trans masculine folks that are on testosterone are the ones that don’t really think much about their voices?
Dr. Lal: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is the very real nature of pitch and the fact that a dramatic change in pitch does often change the gender that a voice will be perceived as. So I think there’s something very real and legitimate there. A lot of the trans folks that I’ve talked to about this point out that early in their transitions, they might have put more thought and effort into masculinizing their voices, but as their pitch gets lower, they don’t feel like that’s really necessary. Often specifically mentioning that transitioning is about authenticity. It’s about comfort in who you are and not having to hide or cover up things about yourself, so constantly paying attention to your voice for some folks feels like not fully realizing that potential of being one’s true self. On the other hand, I think there’s also this idea that masculinity is sort of the absence of femininity, that it’s very natural, that masculine people are totally unartificial, don’t have to do anything to be masculine. In fact, if you’re doing things to seem masculine, that’s kind of a problem, right? That raises questions about the legitimacy of your claim on masculinity. So I think there’s also kind of the social stigma factor of feeling like masculinity should come about naturally versus the idea that femininity is a product of effort and the use of certain kinds of technologies and cultivating one’s body in particular ways. That’s not really seen as a problem. In fact, I think women are kind of expected to put effort into their femininity, and if they’re not, then that’s a problem.
Carey: Yeah, absolutely.
Megan: Yeah. These gender normative expectations are hurting everyone. That is so obvious. It cannot be said enough though, until everyone realizes how obvious it is, I think.
Carey: It’s interesting that in this case, that as long as you seem masculine enough, you’re good. Whereas when I think about it, normally, I think about how men do have to perform masculinity quite a bit at least in certain arenas.
Dr. Lal: I think that varies across communities, too. The folks that I’ve worked with have been mostly in the Bay Area and other kind of metropolitan areas in the western US, on the West Coast. There’s a little bit of research on trans folks from more rural areas and kind of non-queer centers. It seems like their folks might have more gender normative voices, whether that’s a matter of intention or effort or cultivation, or if it’s maybe just a reflection of the communities that those folks are growing up in. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the people that I’ve worked with are totally unaware of these issues either.
Carey: Oh, no. I didn’t mean to suggest that either.
Dr. Lal: Yeah, for sure. I think, for instance, a lot of people have talked to me about being perceived as gay cis men after transitioning, even if they don’t identify as gay or queer, and how even for straight-identified trans men, the priority is so much on being categorized as male that whether people are getting your sexual orientation right seems less significant overall.
Carey: Yeah, that makes sense. So this reminds me, there’s the new voice assistant Q, which is non-binary. I hear it as female and many other people hear it as a gay man. So I’m wondering if it’s just like I don’t have enough non-binary people in my life and that’s why I’m categorizing it the way that I am, and that’s true for other people. Or if there’s something else going on. So what do you think about Q? How do you interpret it, et cetera?
Dr. Lal: I haven’t really done a whole lot of exploration of that in particular. I think it’s an interesting question. The way gender categorization works, it does seem for a lot of people, it’s not a scale. It’s like you’re either in one category or another, and you might be perceived as not very typical for that category. I think for most listeners, there isn’t an ambiguous voice category because we’ve been socialized into a system that only recognizes two, and so I think particularly with no social context whatsoever, this is just this disembodied voice that is not saying things that a person would say. It’s really hard to find that category unless maybe you have a really robust category in your mind. I’ve found that getting to know voices has a big impact on how I perceive them. So I can kind of have this initial categorization that I make, maybe I call somebody on the phone and they say, “Hello,” and I have an immediate sense of what gender I think they might be. Once I get to know somebody, even just a little bit, it becomes really hard to access those perceptions. Sometimes folks who I interview will say at the end of an interview, “So what do you think about my voice? How does it sound to you? Does it sound male, female?” And I’ll say, “Oh, I don’t know, you identify as X and I know that. So now that’s how you sound to me.”
There is something to the idea of exposure, both in general to non-binary people and to individual voices, but it’s not clear to me. Non-binary is a really big category, right? It’s everyone who isn’t strictly female, strictly male, and so I think that there’s a lot of variability within that category, probably more than the other gender categories that we’re talking about. I think it’s really hard to say what does a non-binary voice sound like? Because it can sound like anything from a really typically masculine male voice to a really typically feminine female voice. That might connect with gender in any number of ways or the gender assignment of the individual in any number of ways, but it’s really hard to say. There are some voices that I perceive as non-binary sounding, but I know that itself is also somewhat limited since the non-binary community and identity tend to be sort of weighted toward people who are assigned female at birth. So I sort of have a category of a voice that to me sounds like a female assigned non-binary person as nebulous, whatever that means. That’s something that happens in my brain. I would imagine that perhaps folks who are in non-binary communities that are more fully populated by people who are assigned male at birth, that could be a category that people have access to as well. Although that said, my last several partners were all male-assigned non-binary people. So I do have a lot of exposure and for some reason don’t have quite the same kind of category, which is something someone should look into. That’s interesting.
Megan: Yeah. Wow. I feel like I’m learning a lot about myself here and how I perceive voices. I hope that our listeners will think about this as well. It’s so important to stop and investigate why. For a lot of people, it’s the most you can do, and it’s a good thing to do. It’s to stop and think about why you’re doing these things, why you’re thinking about these things, why you have these perceptions. My mind is blown right now. I’m sorry. Do you have anything? I’m just like, so in my feelings right now.
Carey: No, yeah. It’s really great. This is something that I know I have to think about more. So I’m really glad that we’re talking about this. I guess maybe now we can switch to trans-inclusive language if that’s okay.
Dr. Lal: Sounds good.
Megan: Yeah, because I think it’s important. We talked with Kirby Conrod, and the episode that they are on is very important. Everyone was talking about how they learned so much. There was a little bit of talk about singular “they” and how to get the fuck over it. It’s singular. So, I think it was really important that we talk to you about this because so many people were like, “Oh my God, yes, singular ‘they.’ I learned so much. Thank you to Kirby.” So, I really wanted to make sure to talk about this. This is very important.
Carey: So what are some ways that language is transphobic?
Dr. Lal: Oh, gosh, there are so many ways that language can be transphobic. Sometimes I like to distinguish different kinds of transphobia. I think that’s useful. I think when people think transphobia, they tend to think of more overt forms of hatred or negativity, judgment, othering that’s directed at trans people. Certainly, there are a lot of ways that language can do that simply by misgendering someone, using a word that is generally reserved for one gender when they don’t identify with that gender. There are also subtler things that happen. I think that one concept that’s really interesting and useful for thinking about that is cissexism. So cissexism is kind of a type of transphobia, you could say, that treats cis people’s identities and bodies and experiences as normal, default, natural, and trans people’s as abnormal, unnatural, and needing an explanation in some sort of way. So for instance, just something as simple as using the word ‘women’ can have a really big impact on trans people because it often involves defining women implicitly around something like what kind of body parts a person has.
So for instance, talking about something like ‘women’s health,’ which is itself, basically a euphemism in order to avoid talking about certain body parts, that implies that anyone who has those body parts is a woman and anyone who doesn’t have those body parts is not a woman. Obviously, this is not what the folks at women’s health centers are thinking about, but there is this really important message kind of underlying this language use that trans people certainly notice immediately.
Megan: It might be hard for cis people to start thinking about this, but it’s important.
Dr. Lal: Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that just sort of takes practice. Once you acquire a different vocabulary for talking about these things, like talking about people being assigned female or male at birth instead of being born female or male, once you kind of get that into your vocabulary, I think it becomes a lot easier to conceptually distinguish who exactly am I talking about? And it has the added benefit of just being a more accurate statement, right? If we care about making accurate statements, then not making sweeping generalizations about what all women supposedly have in common or all men supposedly have in common seems like a good thing.
Megan: Yes, although you’re also assuming a lot of sums of people.
Dr. Lal: It’s okay. It’s an important if.
Carey: But our listeners.
Megan: Yes, absolutely.
Carrie: I’m sure they do want to be more accurate.
Megan: Oh, definitely, and that flies in the face of any argument where someone will say, “Trans-inclusive language is making language more muddy and difficult. It’s the opposite.”
Carrie: No, you’re being clear.
Dr. Lal: Yeah, exactly.
Carrie: I’m a fan of precision in language whenever possible.
Megan: Yeah. I wonder if this trans-inclusive language, that’ll also be something I think as simple as instead of saying fireman, you say…
Carrie: Firefighter.
Dr. Lal: Yeah, that would definitely be a kind of trans-inclusive language. It’s interesting. Sometimes we sort of have our history of feminist language inclusion efforts and then we have trans language inclusion. Sometimes they really coalesce well. Other times they kind of take us in different directions. For instance, if the alternative was to say firemen and firewomen, that would be good as far as feminist language reform, but not so helpful for non-binary people. So there are sort of different strategies of dealing with the same problem.
Megan: Yeah. We have to make sure to update our feminism too, because it’s the question of do we want to keep pointing out that? Yes, you’re a firefighter, but you’re a woman. So that’s unnatural. I just think saying firefighters like, okay, it’s getting the job done. It’s like we all deserve to be here kind of thing.
Dr. Lal: Yeah. One kind of tricky thing about that is that sometimes there will be a shift so that, for instance, a word like chairperson that was originally introduced to be a non-gendered option comes to be the one used for women. So men are chairmen and women are chairpeople. That’s the really hard thing, right? We can introduce language, but then people are free to use it however they want to use it. As long as there are still problematic ideas in peoples’ heads, there’s always a possibility that they’ll use language to express or reinforce those ideas.
Carrie: Yeah, I’ve definitely noticed [inaudible] like that. Just not that particular example. Sounds ridiculous.
Megan: It’s like we have to keep up with all these sexism and transphobia and all this stuff. We got to be on top of it and keep thinking about it, because language changes, which is fantastic and fine and natural. As people, we have to keep up with it if we want to be thoughtful and kind to each other.
Carrie: Do you have a final thing for our listeners?
Dr. Lal: Yeah. So I think there are probably 3 key principles for trans-inclusive language. One is to talk to people about how they want to be referred to. That includes pronouns, but it can also include other kinds of language, particularly if somebody uses non-binary pronouns. You might then want to ask questions like, what would you like me to do if somebody refers to you with a different pronoun? Would you like me to correct them? Would you like me to ignore it, correct them in private later, et cetera? What kind of terminology do you like to have used in reference to yourself? Are you say a sibling versus a brother or sister? And just having those conversations is so important. It also takes a lot of the anxiety out of these things. I think that you don’t have to know everything yourself. It’s really just about finding out what feels good to people and how you can support them.
The other 2 principles I would say are closely related. One is to use gender-neutral language when gender doesn’t actually matter for what you’re talking about. It’s very common for people to say, “Oh, yeah, you know, the woman at the bank told me blah, blah, blah,” and the fact that the person who told you at the bank was somebody you perceived as a woman is really not relevant at all to what you’re talking about. So using gender-neutral language like the person, the clerk, or a bank teller is a way to avoid misgendering people. Finally, the last strategy is kind of related to this issue of being more precise in our language. So when gender is relevant, making sure that we’re using language that reflects what our meaning actually is rather than having kind of implicit suggested meanings that we might not actually even agree with.
Megan: Yes, that’s great. Thank you. I’m just so happy to virtually meet you.
Dr. Lal: Yeah, likewise
Megan: I think this is a really important thing to talk about. You should come back and tell us more about that research that’s ongoing, because I’m happy to hear about Creek.
Dr. Lal: Absolutely and all the time. Sounds great.
Carrie: All day, every day. I’ll talk about it. Let’s do it.
Megan: Someone pay us just to be commentators on Creek. Creek commentators. Anyway, well, we’d like to leave our listeners with one final message. Do not be an asshole.
Carrie: Don’t be an asshole.
Megan: Thank you.
Dr. Lal: That’s great advice.
Carrie: Thank you.
Dr. Lal: Thank you so much. Great talking to you.
Carrie: The Vocal Fry’s podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Half Tone Audio. The music is by Nick Ranham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Vocal Fries Pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com, and our website is vocalfriespod.com.
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Lal-apalooza Transcript
The Vocal Fries Pod 