Meet the singers helping trans people find their voice

Authentic. Confident. Unique. A voice can say many things about a person, but how often do you think about the way you sound?

When Stephen Davidson moved from Canada to London in his mid-twenties in 2010, two years after he transitioned to living as a man, he was on a journey to rediscover his voice after taking the male hormone testosterone, known as T.

“My voice was really hard to use after I transitioned and because it was 2008 at the time, there wasn't very much good information out there around what T does to the voice and how to navigate that,” he said. “So I just couldn't sing for a few years until I found a specialist teacher.”

While transgender rights have populated recent headlines, little is known about the growing number of coaches helping individuals self-actualise by working on their voices.

With a background in music, theatre and improv, Davidson was keen to find a group in which to unleash his skills. “Once I could sing again, I really wanted to join a choir,” he said. “But I tried a few out and none of them felt like they fit, both in terms of the cultural vibe and in terms of how vocally demanding a lot of choirs were.

“Even with amateur choirs, you’d get a two-minute warm up and then it's three hours of singing, which my voice just couldn't handle at the time.”

An experienced orchestra conductor, Davidson decided to start a chorus of his own in 2017 and created the London Trans Choir.

“There was a little bit of a learning curve but it's really grown over the years,” he said. “I now have a lovely co-conductor who does come from the choir world and I think, between the two of us, we've grown the choir to something kind of great.”

The choir, which accepts newcomers when it refreshes the pieces of music it practices in January and September, produces two talent show productions a year at the Vagina Museum in Bethnal Green, east London, and appears at other events.

“At the Trans Talent Show, the choir sings a few songs and then there are a bunch of five-minute slots that we book various trans performers into,” Davidson, now 40, said. “We've had literally everything in there. Last concert, somebody did a burlesque math lecture. There was an oud performance.

“The thing that I really love is when people come to perform at the talent show and they're either someone who wouldn't have been brave enough to perform somewhere else or they're someone who gets to perform material that wouldn't really work anywhere else because it's a trans-heavy audience. It's us, it's our partners, it's our community.

“Something like a comedy routine, it hits really differently depending on the general knowledge in the room ... we've created that space for people to try something they couldn't do somewhere else.”

From student to teacher

With the choir growing from a handful of people to a group of 50 to 60 at any one time, Davidson began receiving requests to teach.

“People started asking me for voice lessons,” he said. “And that went from being a side hustle to a full-time job. I was so busy!”

Demand for coaching was so high last year that Davidson “cannot take any new students at this point. I'm full!” So he raised £685 to train six apprentice teachers.

“I picked people who are fantastic but also who are a little more diverse than who is currently doing that work — different accents, different languages, different cultural backgrounds — because how we speak is so ingrained in all of that stuff,” he said.

“I really wanted everyone to have the opportunity of a teacher who they identified with in some way.”

Speech and language therapists have also received growing requests from those wanting to train their voice to align with their gender identity.

In Wales, NHS referrals have risen sevenfold from 68 in 2020 to 475 last year, with “no indication that this trend is set to change”, according to a report by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. NHS England said it did not record equivalent data.

Though the therapists’ approach was “not mechanically different”, Davidson said it often lacked a personal connection.

Finding their voice

Zichao Zang, 27, a software developer and an apprentice of Davidson, said his interest in voice as a child eventually led him to question his gender identity.

“When I was growing up, I’d be watching cartoons and hearing all the different voices and I was like, ‘it’d be so cool to do something like that,’” he said. “I think I was always quite attuned to voices and personality and presentation.

“When I first started getting inklings about ‘am I trans’ or ‘should I do some gender experimentation’, one thing that stood out to me was thinking I don't think I sound like what I’m meant to sound like, rather than it being a visual cue that initially made me think about gender.”

For transmasculine people, those whose gender aligned closer to masculinity, the change in voice caused by androgens such as testosterone was often equated to “having a male voice”, Zang said. But after he started taking T, he undertook voice training through the NHS, which prompted him to experiment with how he sounded.

“That broadened my understanding of what kind of stuff you can do with voice,” he said. “I think so many trans people go through an experimental phase of trying on different clothes and it’s like if I’m transitioning to a male gender identity, not only am I a man, but what genre of man am I? You try a lot of different things to figure that out.

“I find it interesting that people don't necessarily go through that same process with voice since it can be a really large part of how you're perceived.”

Beck Lombardi, a care co-ordinator in Southampton, had also experimented with their voice since they were a child. “From a very young age I have always been a really good mimic,” they said. "So like impressions, beatboxing and making sound effects.

The non-binary singer recalled performing The Sound of Music at six or seven years old. “It's the song where they're all singing goodbye,” Lombardi said. “They were trying out different kids on the little solo operatic part and all I'd ever heard of opera was whatever had perhaps been on a TV show or something like that.

“But there's this thing that happens for me where I will hear something and I'll just know what my mouth and my throat need to do to achieve that sound. I realise sometimes when someone's singing I become conscious that my throat is mimicking the muscular contractions of what it would be like to sing that thing, even though I'm not consciously trying to sing that thing.”

Lombardi got into rock, heavy metal and punk music at 13 years old when they were outed as being queer. “You're looking for more marginalised or external, fringe communities to feel part of something,” Lombardi, now 30, said.

Rediscovering a childhood love of singing ignited an aspiration to become a musician.

As the lead singer of the self-styled “genre-queer” trans punk band, Hunting Hearts, it was while recording the debut album, Anybody Else, that Lombardi realised they gravitated toward songs with masculine vocals.

“I realised that I would get an album, probably the most important album is The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, and I would perform it in my room,” they said.

“I was never more comfortable than when I was singing along to a male singer like Chester Bennington or Gerard Way. I'm able to sing along to [female leads in] Paramore and Evanescence, but it just doesn't feel as close to expressing myself as it does when I'm singing Linkin Park or My Chem.

“I think my range and the texture that I go for are still very much based on that. So it's like my gender identity and being so much more comfortable and consistent for me in my head to emulate a masculine vocal range and masculine timbre and texture.

These qualities were part of Lombardi’s decision not to take testosterone. “I've been slightly worried about what would happen to my voice because I feel I've got a really good range and sweet spot,” they said. “I don't know what would happen if that changed.

“Would I lose everything entirely? Or would it be different in a way that I don't like and doesn't feel comfortable?”

Though “reticent to give advice” over a lack of formal training, Lombardi sometimes coached fellow music lovers who heard them perform. “You just need to be in touch with your body and how things feel for you. The basics of singing is warm up, stay hydrated and breathe properly,” they said. “But most of it has been about gaining confidence.

“Having a voice as a marginalised person is really important and also really difficult. And when you're talking about singing, literally having a voice, it's hard to have confidence in it when you're not always hearing people that sound like you or seeing people that look like you doing this thing.”

Lombardi said quality teaching was about the individual. “I don't think you can teach someone to sing,” they said. “I think you can help someone find new skills and help someone find a truer version of their voice for sure, by asking the right questions: how does that note feel in your body? Do you feel like that note isn't super strong?”

Coaching versus therapy

Zang said that, though well-meaning, speech and language therapists often did not understand the nuances of exploring gender identity through voice.

“The person who was training me was a really lovely cis woman [whose gender identity aligns with the sex at birth], but it was hard for her to understand what I meant when I said I wanted to explore figuring what my voice should sound like to me,” he said.

“My voice had dropped at that point to something that was being read as male or passing as a cis man in the majority of social contexts, but I didn't feel like it really reflected who I was ... I felt she didn't know how to provide a lot of guidance on that and while she did help with certain things, in general I felt like I wish she kind of understood me more as a person in terms of what my voice needs were.”

Davidson agreed, saying: “I feel like broadly, it's a very medicalised, therapised approach to something that could just be fun.

“Because of the training needed and the culture around it, it's a very, very ‘well-intentioned white lady’-heavy profession. That works great for some people, but not for everyone … It’s very much set up as a therapeutic space where it's got that same doctor–patient vibe where the doctor definitely knows what's best and is very separate and aloof from the situation.”

The choir leader highlighted difficulties trans people sometimes faced with the practice of speech and language therapy, describing his method of voice coaching as “more holistic” and “more connected”.

“I see speech and language therapists talk a lot about ‘practice compliance’, whereby either the patient has complied and practised enough or they haven't complied,” Davidson said. “That's scary language for trans people, because if you're deemed a non-compliant patient, it’s harder to get medical care, which is terrifying.”

The choir leader compared voice coaching with using a personal trainer at the gym. “Seeing a personal trainer once is not necessarily going to do the whole job," he said. “And I think what people get [with voice coaching] is that ongoing support and checking in and fine-tuning.”

NHS England said that practitioners must provide “an appropriate level of provision ... on the basis of clinical need and individual choice” and advised following a competency framework for trans and gender-diverse clients set by the Royal College.