Abstract
Many transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) people want their voices to change, but how pronoun use, a public expression of gender that only partly overlaps with identity labels, relates to the voice people want is unknown. In an online survey (N = 2,536), participants placed their current and ideal singing voices on a 5-point masculine–feminine scale. In exploratory analyses, participants who used they/them pronouns, alone or with she or he (n = 130), wanted larger changes than binary-pronoun users (n = 2,272; d = 0.84, 95% CI [0.66, 1.02]). The difference was robust to age and sex assigned at birth and was attenuated but still present after adjustment for gender identity and recruitment cohort. Among TGD participants, however, the two pronoun groups wanted changes of similar size (d = 0.11 [−0.16, 0.37]), so the full-sample contrast largely reflected comparison with cisgender binary-pronoun users. Pronoun use instead distinguished the destination of change: among TGD participants, 48.1% of gender-diverse pronoun users placed their ideal at the gender-neutral midpoint, compared with 18.3% of binary-pronoun users, whose ideals more often lay at a masculine or feminine pole. A moderation pattern in which singing-related gender incongruence strengthened the link between desired change and the acoustics of a chosen model singer did not replicate in a held-out test set and is not supported. Pronoun use appears to index where, more than how far, people want their singing voices to go; vocal goals and the scales that measure them should accommodate gender-neutral targets.