How To Talk Like A Woman · by Niko Popowich

She’s a vocal coach and she goes by one name—Cilica.

She sits across from her client Suzanna. No desks in this New Westminster
office, they sit on exercise balls. The focus today is on controlling
question intonation, but it’s not your usual lesson in English
pronunciation. Suzanna is already a native speaker, perfectly fluent.

She’s here because she wants to talk like a woman.

Six months ago Suzanna was a man.

Since 1988 Cilica has been helping clients like Suzanna reshape their
voices. A professional singer with a three and a half octave range, Cilica
began coaching by working with up-and-coming vocalists.

Soon her client list included non-singers, like women wanting to make a more powerful vocal impact in the board room. And transgendered men seeking a more womanly voice.

“I’ve had singing students quit when they find out I work with the transgendered,” says Cilica. “It’s a group that’s often marginalized.”

Cilica works with those who’ve recently gone through sex-change surgery, as well as those considering it or just wanting to try on the voice.

“Some of my students are transvestites who want a female voice for a
specific event,” Cilica says. “But for most of them it goes deeper. It’s
about recreating their vocal identity.”

Her process isn’t simply about embedding gender cues in her clients’
speech. Cilica claims that such cues don’t exist.

“In our culture women tend to apologize more than men, but that isn’t
necessarily what you want to get in. It’s not a quality shared by all
women, and it’s not exactly gender specific.”

Instead, her process focuses on developing the type of female voice her
client wants, and then learning to place that voice correctly.

Cilica claims confidence is one of the keys to mastering the female voice.
“The register of the first word becomes a cue, like the first note in a
song.”

She encourages her clients to move forward smoothly from that first note,
to not make any sudden corrections in pitch, which can indicate a lack of
confidence and control and undermine the authenticity of their speech.

Double voice, the unconscious switching between male and female voices, is
another problem common to her clients.

“One of my students just had the surgery, but hadn’t told her mother yet.
It was when she was talking on the phone to her, switching accidentally to
a female voice, that her mother caught on, and that’s how it came out,”
says Cilica.

There’s also a darker motive her clients have for mastering a woman’s
voice. Fear. Many of them live in a world where vocal slips can have
consequences.

“Concealment is important to them,” says Cilica. “There are situations,
like being out alone late at night, where it could be dangerous to reveal
that they’re transgendered. It goes into other areas too like body
language.”

One recent session had her doing field practice at a bus stop with a
student who wanted to know the proper way to hold a purse.

“I don’t even carry one myself, and what I was trying to get across was
that there is no single way to hold a purse,” says Cilica. “It comes back
to confidence and the ability to act naturally. Sometimes not having that
makes them prone to exaggerate their gestures and voice because they’re
not familiar with the parameters. It really becomes about learning
nuances.”

Sitting across from Cilica, Suzanna is working on nuances, controlling the
rising intonation in the question “Where do you want to go for dinner?”
Positioning the words differently in her voice. Taking everything she
knows as a native speaker and recasting it in a different way. Learning to
talk like a woman. One phrase at a time.