Empowering Voices: Creating Safe and Joyful Spaces for Gender-Expansive Clients and Patients

OBJECTIVE: This workshop is intended to provide voice teachers, voice coaches, speech pathologists, and pedagogues with the opportunity to reflect on and grow in their ability to create and maintain a safe, joyful environment for transgender and nonbinary clients. So often, well-meaning providers of care and services begin doing the work of gender-affirming voice care without a full understanding of the trans and nonbinary community, which is imperative to reduce the risk of doing harm to these clients.

METHODS: This workshop begins with an examination of self. How can providers of voice services get ready to open their practice or studio to gender-expansive clients? What are they actively doing inside and outside of work to engage with the community and create a space of safety and joy? Have they examined their own gender and how they enact this through their own voice?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Using interactive, hands-on activities in small and large group settings, participants of this workshop will:
Investigate how their own gender affects the way they interact with others in social and voice-related settings
Identify means of becoming more involved in their local gender-expansive community as an active ally
Develop a plan to foster a safe, inclusion, joy-filled voice studio or voice care practice
Explore voice techniques aimed at optimizing change in vocal production through a gender-affirming lens with opportunities to practice with their own voice

As voice care providers, we know the joy that comes from singing and speaking from the heart. Let’s prepare ourselves and our spaces to prosper joyful voice production for all.