Renée's Blog

Vocal fry is one of the most talked-about vocal qualities of the last decade and a half. Some people want it. Some people hate it. Some people have been told it's ruining their careers. As a gender-affirming voice teacher, I've watched this conversation swirl around my students f...

I met Floralis after she sent me a completely unsolicited email, and I am so glad she did. I've been following her on Instagram ever since, loving every bit of what she's building. Floralis is a transfeminist, anti-imperialist musician and community organizer based in Brighton, U...

It seems like every video on YouTube right now is about looksmaxxing, AI, or GLP-1s. And then I learned about voicemaxxing and so now I'm making it your problem too. I'm Renée, a gender-affirming voice teacher, and I invited my friend and colleague Rory Jack (he/they), a speech-l...

Have you ever heard someone speak and immediately thought, they sound gay... without being able to explain exactly why? You're not imagining it. And you're not being reductive. You're picking up on something that linguists have been quietly investigating for decades. It's somethi...

You're working on raising your pitch as part of your voice feminization journey. Things are going well... until you get to the end of a sentence, and something just drops! If you've experienced that sinking feeling, you're in very good company. The end-of-sentence pitch drop is o...

Every June, I get asked some version of the same question: How do I actually build a voice practice habit? And for a long time, my answer was just: practice a little every day. Which is true! But it's not very helpful on its own. So this year, I made something to help with that....

If you've been studying trans voice training for a while, you've probably heard the word resonance more times than you can count. You've read about it, watched videos about it, maybe even tried exercises for it, and still felt like something wasn't quite clicking. That's exactly ...

What if the story of trans existence stretched back not decades, not centuries, but millennia? That's the territory Sophie Edwards explores in her YouTube series We Have Always Existed, and it was the starting point for one of my favourite Speaking Freely conversations yet. Sophi...

Whether you want to shrink your Adam's apple, grow it, or just finally understand what it actually is, this is the guide for you. As a gender-affirming voice teacher, I find the Adam's apple comes up a lot. It's visible, it's culturally loaded, and for many trans and nonbinary pe...

As you may know, I'm usually here talking about gender-affirming voice work. But today I'm putting on a different shirt entirely (or taking one off??). Today, I'm talking about my own gender-affirming care: my top surgery. Three years ago, I had a bilateral mastectomy. Two years ...