Renée's Blog

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...

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...

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...

What happens when you start testosterone, expecting your voice to drop, and it mostly doesn't? That's just one of the threads in this rich, wide-ranging conversation with Rey Katz, a transmasculine nonbinary writer, advocate, and voice training student who has been part of this co...

What a way to mark International Transgender Day of Visibility. This past week, I had the honour of sitting down with Sean Henry on CBC Montreal's Daybreak to talk about gender-affirming voice work, the trans community, and what it means to help people find voices that feel like h...

If you've ever taken the New York City subway, ridden the AirTrain at Newark Liberty, or commuted between Philadelphia and South Jersey on PATCO, you've heard Bernie Wagenblast's voice—likely multiple times a day, without ever knowing her name. Bernie is a voice actor, journalist...

What if accessing gender-affirming care, whether that's top surgery, voice feminization training, or a chest binder, didn't require years of saving money? For over 30,000 trans and gender-diverse people, Point of Pride has made this a reality. In the first episode of Speaking Fre...

When I look back at 2025, I see a year that exceeded every expectation I had for my gender-affirming voice teaching practice. This was the year I finally made the leap to YouTube long-form content, expanded my public speaking work, increased my community giving, and experienced pr...

When Shaynah joined last year's cohort of my teacher training course, Learn to Teach Trans Voice Alteration in Five Weeks, they brought something special to our community. As an autistic Black musician working across Dutch and English contexts, Shaynah opened up conversations abou...

When nonbinary folks ask me how to make their voice sound neutral without being categorized as female or male, I know exactly what they're searching for, but I also know the answer is more complicated than they might expect. As a gender-affirming voice teacher who specializes in ...