Sociophonetic inquiry into sexuality and the voice has often focused on the perception of men’s sexuality on the basis of disembodied voices. However, inconsistencies across these studies limit our ability to unite their findings into a cohesive model of gay-sounding speech. This paper focuses on variability among gay-sounding speakers by analyzing the voices of female-to-male transgender individuals, or trans men. Trans men who make use of testosterone typically experience a significant drop in vocal pitch, yet may maintain stylistic traits acquired while living in a female social role. An acoustic and perceptual analysis of trans and non-trans men’s voices reveals that even as trans men may be perceived as gay-sounding, their sociolinguistic styles also differ from those of gay-sounding non-trans men. These findings support the notion that gay-sounding speech does not constitute a single phonetic style, but rather numerous deviations from the hegemonic norm.

This article demonstrates the importance of considering transgender speakers apart from gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, even where there is significant overlap in the linguistic practices of these groups. Through an analysis of transgender coming out narratives, it is shown that previous accounts of this genre, which have focused on gays and lesbians, do not extend to the entire LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. Coming out as transgender differs from coming out as gay or lesbian primarily in that there are two distinct ways a person can come out as transgender: before and after a change in gender role. The dissimilarity of coming out before such a transition and afterwards presents a challenge to previous characterizations both of coming out and the narratives that result from this practice. Ultimately, the coming out narrative genre reveals itself as a venue for making sense of stigmatized identities in community-specific ways.

Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice—including those influenced by physiology—are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speakers in the early stages of masculinizing hormone therapy, the analysis demonstrates the complex interrelationship of the gendered meanings attributable to characteristics like fundamental frequency and /s/. Trans speakers challenge systems for categorizing voices as female or male, which assume that different aspects of the gendered voice will pattern together in normative ways. Yet a voice's gender is not a unidimensional feature, but a cluster of features that take on meaning only in context with one another, leaving them open for recombination and change through stylistic bricolage. (Transgender, style, gender, voice, pitch, sibilants)

Sociocultural linguists share with transgender communities a strong interest in the power of individuals to assert agency over linguistic patterns. For trans people, a key principle of activism is gender self-determination, which treats each individual as the ultimate authority on their own gender identity. This article explores some of the ways gender self-determination and self-identification surface in transgender people’s linguistic practices. Three particular manifestations are highlighted: gendered identity labels, third person pronouns, and body part terminology. The observations offered on these subjects are based on a series of ethnographic projects carried out from 2006–2016 in transgender communities across several metropolitan areas in the United States and in online spaces frequented by trans people. However, the analysis goes beyond mere description by treating this kind of individualized linguistic agency as the product of cultural practice rather than an asocial given. Such a perspective introduces questions concerning why this form of agency arose in the time and place that it has. This article frames gender self-identification as an enactment of neoliberal personhood, in which individuals are framed as the driver of their destiny. What the ideology of neoliberal agency obscures, however, is that agency is not an equally distributed resource.

Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of nonnormatively gendered bodies. This article deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating Internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how trans men navigate homonormative sexual economies by linguistically recuperating their bodies' sexually productivity. Instead of undermining claims of embodied masculinity and homoerotic value, potential sites of exclusion-i.e., trans genitals-become sites of flexible accumulation that enhance rather than detract from their bearers' desirability.