Editor’s Note: Eva, Kathe’s first client, self-described as a transsexual woman.
The telephone on the roll top desk in my office rang. My perfunctory greeting was followed by the usual, “How may I help you?”
A brawny, emery voice responded, “Hello, this is Eva.” She didn’t sound like an Eva. I paid closer attention. “I’m having a problem with my voice.”
Most people who call are having some kind of trouble with their voices. “Tell me more,” I encouraged.
Eva confided that she was a transsexual and had surgery for her voice, which failed. Instead, she was left with only a slightly higher-pitched voice that was raspy and still considerably masculine.
“Do you have experience working with transsexuals?”
“Uh, no. No, I don’t. But as a speech pathologist, I have many years of experience working with injured and damaged voices,” I said.
“Well,” she went on, “I’ll teach you about us transsexuals and you teach me how to get a better voice.” She was very transparent about who she is and over the course of that year, she shared intimate and painful stories about her transgender heart and soul and life.
A week later, Eva walked into my Boulder, Colorado office—all six feet-two inches of her—in sensible pumps, despite her height. Long silky legs sashayed through the waiting room. Heads turned. They always would. Transgender women have that effect on the uninitiated. And I must confess that I too, on that day in 2000, was trying my professional best to not gawk. Her hands, her shoulders, her blond wig all shouted “man trying to look like a woman.” But in her heart, Eva was and is all woman.
In that bungalow tucked away on a tiny street beneath the so-aptly-named Flat Irons, Eva shared with me her life’s story. She spoke of the travails of trying to fit herself into the man she thought she was supposed to be rather than become the women she honestly felt herself to be. She had done the manly things expected of her, like military service, where she excelled. Then there were her radio days when her booming baritone voice carried no reflection of her feminine soul across the airwaves. Since about the age of five, she said, she began sensing something wasn’t quite right. One day her mother was dressing the kids for a special occasion and Eva asked why she couldn’t wear a dress and Mary Jane shoes like her sister. Her mother laughed. “Little boys don’t wear dresses.”
At age ten, Eva was caught in her bedroom in her mother’s bra and slip. Mother wasn’t so kind that day. Eva was slapped. In high school, she was caught again, this time in sister’s closet while shimmying a skirt over her narrow hips. Then Eva went into the closet herself and would not emerge until she was in her late fifties–divorced, kids grown, and so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed.
Finally, after the required psychotherapy, Eva had her GRS (gender reassignment surgery) in Trinidad, Colorado, the “Sex Change Capitol of the World,” by the famous and now deceased Dr. Stanley Biber. She was now anatomically a woman! But each time she spoke her voice revealed the true nature of her birth. And depression knocked her down hard again. Having once been a radio personality, she knew a thing or two about the voice. She worked on her own trying to create soft feminine vocal tones, but only managed to achieve a “man trying to sound like a woman” kind of a voice. So off for another surgery she went. This time the effect she sought was not achieved.
We worked together for about a year and I can’t honestly report that she completed her voice therapy with the mellifluous feminine voice she so desired. Nevertheless she had progressed and was happy that her voice sounded closer to the image she had for herself.
A voice is not just a voice. There’s a heart connected to it quite literally. Anatomically, the left recurrent laryngeal nerve dips into the chest, loops around the aorta and courses back up and innervates the larynx. It’s one of those questions on my list, you know, when you die and you get to ask God the burning questions of your life?
“So, God, what good reason is there for the left vocal cord nerve to wrap around this blood vessel of the heart? As you know God, this causes a lot of problems for people’s voices.”
I have pondered this for years. And it was just this last year that I got my answer from Theresa, a singer I’d been working with who had vocal cord nodules. I posed my decades-old conundrum to her casually one day as we chatted before her session began.
“That’s easy,” she said. “Don’t you see?”
“No, see what?”
“The voice and the heart are connected. They’re interrelated. The voice has heart, and the heart must have a voice to express itself!”
Whoa! How come I hadn’t seen this before? It’s so true!
Eva’s exterior bundle of large hands and feet, of lipstick smeared outside the lines, told one story. Her voice told another. Yet her heart told the story of her soul, of the person, of the woman she truly is.
Now, ten years later, I look back. That one phone call changed the path of my career, my entire life perhaps. And I love them–my misfit (by some people’s estimation) transgender patients and acquaintances, many of who have become good friends. I have never, ever been a witness to such courage, such fierce determination, and such dramatic transformation. We should all be so lucky to be challenged in this way, to have to work so tirelessly to become who we truly are.
As Roxie Hart sings in the musical Chicago, “They love me for loving them. And I love them for loving me. And we love each other.”
Kathe Perez is a certified speech-language pathologist and an internationally recognized transgender voice trainer. She is also the co-founder and co-creator of Eva, the world’s first transgender voice training mobile app.
