UC Santa Barbara

Trans people often undergo a process of voice training for many reasons, including alleviating gender dysphoria and improving their mental health. While professional options are available, many trans people utilize online resources either as a supplement to or replacement for professional training. One such place where trans people gather to discuss voice training is r/TransVoice, a community on the social media website Reddit. r/TransVoice is dedicated to gathering and disseminating resources for voice training as well as sharing voice recordings for feedback from the community. This thesis examines popular posts, comments, and media from r/TransVoice to analyze an aspect of voice training that is often overlooked in voice training research: emotions.

Using the 25 most popular posts of all time and of the past month, as well as the comments on those posts, this project analyzes the emotions that are expressed and negotiated in the process of voice training and how they are talked about by members of the community in interactions, videos, and memes. Many of the top 25 posts of all time are memes that encapsulate some aspect of the voice training experience, whether it is a common exercise that people use or making a reference to a popular voice coach in the community. These memes are analyzed in a sense of communicating and perpetuating norms, as their popularity relies on their relatability and further reinforces that these experiences are common. In addition to the analysis of memes and videos, comments and comment threads are analyzed to show how community members respond to the discussions of emotion in interactional contexts.

Expressions of affect are present throughout posts and comments on r/TransVoice. Users attend to more formal voice coaches, even as these coaches gloss over or dismiss “bad feelings” as individual problems that can be resolved with individual actions. The bad feelings come not only from dysphoria, but from feelings of discomfort that stem from comparing one’s progress against popular success stories. Through processes of authorization, these success stories in turn get to define what successful voice training is. Members of r/TransVoice address these emotions by building an “affective trans commons” (Malatino 2022) in comment sections as users connect with each other and recognize each other's emotions. However, when that recognition is not present, connection fails and the bad feelings persist in ways that can undermine voice training practices. Through this analysis, I make a case for the importance of emotions and community-based collaboration in the research and execution of voice training.