Acceptance without Understanding & Deer Lodge Centre

Well, in 2016, I realized there was an unexplored journey in my life, that being my gender, and I began that process. And through that process, that led me here to Deer Lodge to provide support for the vocal services.

So we started seeing, I guess about 10 years ago is how the story starts, there was one clinician here practicing voice rehabilitation, and there was a need seen for individuals, mostly transgender females, so transitioning from male to female, wanting to pursue treatments to help feminize the voice so that it helps combat gender dysphoria and just the feeling that your voice is a— is part of you and it needs to be congruent with your gender.

When I began the program, I was a working executive that was also doing public speaking on behalf of the organization. So certainly the use of my voice was very important professionally as well as personally. And so to have an authentic voice that presented the same as the rest of my physical being was very important. And now that I've become an international public speaker It is even more important that I am fully represented to who I am, in that everything kind of aligns and matches, and that's what Deer Lodge has been able to work with me to create that authentic presence.

Her outcomes are fabulous, and you know, I think she's just very dedicated. From the beginning, she does daily work, it's part of her life. She never misses a day. She always makes time for it and knows the importance of it. And then I think it's just developed as she gets the feedback from society that make it that benefit. So there's a lot of benefits to coming to speech therapy to help feminize your voice.

A lot of it has to do with the muscles within your throat and in terms of using it, but it's even more finesse to The words that are used, the flow, what they call the lyrical flow, right, of a sentence, of the way women speak, the language as women that we use in a conversation. And also, you think about the breathiness, such as, do you end with a hard sound to the end of your sentence, or does it actually become softer and just kind of float out? And so Where are you at on that? So, you know, the frequency or pitch is just one piece. The breathiness is just another piece. There's many, many other layers that 2 years ago I had no clue, and I just thought it was get a really good falsetto. It is nothing like a good falsetto. It is finding a much more authentic voice that matches everything else that all the, the surgical and medical practitioners have been able to take me through how I need to then massage and work with my voice to get to the same place.

Easy. So really, really, really nice, and you're happy with that too, right? It sounds really, really good. Cynthia's case is, is a very great case because we've got good outcomes. She had always good support to help her with her outcomes as well, but now I'm actually seeing a lot younger generations, and not only transgender, but individuals that identify as non-binary, so they're seeking services to help reflect their true self in their voice as well. So we're not seeing maybe even, not even masculinization or feminization, but even a neutral setting. So it's very different how we even do treatment. I think, you know, for Deer Lodge, I think I'm very proud to be an SLP here at Deer Lodge. I think I'm very proud to say that I am and part of the transgender program because people are so motivated and they do the work and then you get the outcomes. And I think that's very unique in a program to get such great outcomes consistently.

Deer Lodge is a fabulous center to start with. They have always been very accepting, and that's certainly— as a transgender individual, it certainly is a very important thing to find accepting safe places. With that, the staff have also followed through, of course, with that and provided excellent care in terms of it's not just about, you know, work hard, get to that. It's like, okay, how is your voice feeling? How are you feeling? Where are you at in your journey? And I've met many folks who practice but never actually put into practice what they're working on. For me, I lived it every single day. So people heard me from the really rough, very low, gruff sounding that I used to have to the voice that I have today. And I continue to work and refine that every single day. I am the woman that I've always been, and I believe that every part of me is now reflecting who that is and sounds like who I am. And really is just me. I think the biggest message is we need to learn acceptance without understanding. As a society, we need to understand, and if we don't understand, we can't accept. We need to flip that. We need to learn to accept. And everybody's on a journey in their life. Nobody's ever at the end of their journey. That everybody's complete and they're going, "Oh, I'm sitting back." No, everybody's always growing, changing, evolving. And just because somebody's journey's different than yours, doesn't matter. And people like Deer Lodge make a difference in helping people travel their very own unique journey.