What is speech therapy?

Professional training in changing the quality of your voice.

What does speech therapy do?

• Voice

  Raises or lowers pitch and changes sound

How long does speech therapy last?

Working on your voice normally takes a significant amount of practice, and may take practice over many months to achieve a dramatic change. The lessons learned in speech therapy may allow you to make a life-long change to your voice.

Why might I want speech therapy?

Speech and language therapy can be used by people wanting to change the quality of their voice, raise the pitch of their voice, or lower their average pitch. A trained speech therapist helps you discover what you would like your voice to sound like and helps you achieve those goals.

Are there other options?

Many people make changes to their voice on their own without help from a speech therapist. You can find more information about doing this on your own on our page about working on your voice.

To lower your voice, you can practice using the bottom part of your existing vocal range more frequently (to lower your average pitch), and speech therapy can help with this. However, it is not normally possible to increase your vocal range to be able to reach lower pitches than you can already. To do this, people normally use testosterone instead. The effects of testosterone on voice are permanent, and will only affect certain aspects of your voice. To change other aspects of voice that are normally associated with gender, like inflection or speech rhythm, you might still wish to work with a speech therapist.

To raise your voice, it is possible to learn to reach higher pitches with practice, possibly with the help of speech therapy. Oestrogen has no effect on the voice.

A minority of people are unable to reach their goals through speech and language therapy or testosterone treatment and undergo surgical interventions to change their voice.

How do I get speech therapy?

You can find more information about accessing speech therapy, both via the NHS and via private speech and language therapists, on the TransActual website.

Errors and omissions

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