Renée's Blog

Let me guess a few things about you. You may be trans, or nonbinary, or questioning your gender, and somewhere near the top of your list of transition goals is changing how your speaking voice sounds. You are not afraid of a little research. That is probably how you ended up here...

Last Friday, I had the honour and the privilege of attending the 14th annual INSPIRE Awards in Toronto, Ontario. It was a magical night of celebration and inspiration, where I got to be surrounded by amazing queer and trans people working extremely hard to make the world a bette...

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...

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...

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....

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 ...

You've been working on your voice. You can hit it when you're focused. But the moment you're ordering coffee, answering a question mid-thought, or telling a story to a friend, it's gone. If that sounds familiar, you're not doing anything wrong. Real life is full of distractions, ...

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...