Hacker News Reader

Gender, ie cultural context, does in fact play a role on how we speak and both the pitch and intonation of how we speak.

You ever hear of upspeak/uptalking? Vocal fry? It's not so simple as just sex driven characteristics. (Although testosterone does impact the development of vocal chords.)

View on HN

Slightly, but what we consider male and female voices are correlated with sex and not gender. This is apparent in almost any transexual person, unless they happen to have an androgynous voice or physical alterations to their vocal cords.

Seems like it is affected by both, no? Transgender women tend to speak differently after they begin to transition.

And yet it's more often than not recognisable as a male voice. But anyway, they're not changing their gender, they're changing their sex. They will tell you that there were of the female gender before transitioning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com