ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen unprecedented visibility for transgender people and issues, and sociolinguists are increasingly interested in exploring the ways gender diversity is manifested on a linguistic level. An interest in gender diversity not only demands the inclusion of transgender and gender non-conforming speakers in sociolinguistic research, but also a shift in how the field thinks about gender and sex. Most significantly, trans-inclusive research disrupts the assumption that sex and gender will align in normative ways, that speakers’ gender identities can be ascertained based on appearance, that sex and gender are binaries, and that members of the same gender category will embody norms for that category to the same extent.
One of the most challenging aspects of dealing with the complexities of sex and gender diversity is in acoustic phonetic analysis of variables like fundamental frequency in which both physiology and social practice exert an influence. Drawing from two sociophonetics studies on transgender speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon, the chapter presents several potential approaches to coding gender and sex and their varying implications. While complex models of gender present certain unique challenges, I argue that they also offer deeper insight into the ways sex and gender shape the voice.
