What does gender sound like?

What do others assume about us from our voices? Jess speaks with Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, an associate professor of linguistics at Ohio State University, who specializes in sociolinguistics — The study of how society and culture affect language. They discuss how gender norms change how we speak, and how our speech changes the way others perceive us.

Creators and Guests

Host

Jess Lupini

Host of the Show, and Creative Director of Avo Media

Guest

Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler

Associate professor of linguistics at Ohio State University

What is The Words Don't Fit the Picture: Gender vs. Voice?

What happens when your voice no longer matches your gender identity? Join host Jess Lupini as she explores the strange and tangled relationship between gender and voice. Through interviews with linguists, trans people, voice training experts, doctors, surgeons, storytellers, and much more, The Words Don't Fit The Picture will take you on a journey through what we know — and what we've still yet to fully understand — about how our voices and gender identities affect one another.

[00:00:00] Jess: Hey everybody. Jess here. I'm the host of the show, and you're gonna be hearing my voice a lot over the next few episodes. So I wanted to introduce myself properly. I'm a science communicator, musician, comedian, and filmmaker living in Vancouver on the unseated territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Sleight Tooth Nations.

[00:00:18] Jess: I decided to make this show because I'm also a trans woman. When I came out, I knew transitioning would be hard, but I, I don't think I quite realized just how complicated the relationship between voice and gender really is. Part of how I process my own thoughts and feelings is by learning as much as I possibly can.

[00:00:37] Jess: So I decided to bring you along on the journey with me as I searched for answers to some big questions about how we speak and the way it's tangled up in our identities. If you like moving pictures along with your words, you can find the video version of this episode on YouTube. Let's jump in.

[00:01:08] Jess: Hey, I'm Jess Lupini, and this is the Words Don't Fit the picture, the show where we untangle the strange and fascinating relationship between gender, voice, and identity. When I first started making this show, I knew I was gonna talk about how we can change our voices through things like voice therapy, surgery, and hormones, and why we might wanna change our voices.

[00:01:27] Jess: Reasons like dysphoria or safety. But there was something else I wanted to explore, something that's a little harder to quantify and something that I wasn't totally sure where to start looking for, and that was what's going on in our minds and in the world that causes us to perceive different voices differently.

[00:01:44] Jess: When you hear a voice on a podcast or on the phone, what causes you to form the mental picture of the person speaking that you see in your head? Why that particular person with those features and that gender turns out there's a field of study that looks at exactly this. Sociolinguistics. So I'm here today with Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, an associate professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University. Thanks so much for joining us, Kathryn.

[00:02:13] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Thanks. I'm delighted to be joining you.

[00:02:15] Jess: I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. First question, um, is either very easy question or very hard question depending on your perspective.

[00:02:23] Jess: I guess, what is sociolinguistics?

[00:02:25] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So sociolinguistics is actually a very broad term that refers to lots of different fields. Um, so at the broadest level, it just means the study of the relationship between language and all the other social stuff. So obviously language is social stuff, um, but we're interested in how it connects to all the rest of it.

[00:02:45] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, in my particular corner of sociolinguistics, what we're interested in is what you were just describing. So how do we make meaning out of language variation? So variation in how we say things, whether that's pronunciations or word choice or sentence structure. How do we make social meaning, make differences between people, make connections, uh, do all of our, our day-to-day social work with that stuff.

[00:03:07] Jess: When I was developing the idea for this podcast, I had, I had this list of eight big questions I wanted to answer, and one of the toughest ones is, of course, the one I want to talk to you about today, which is what do people assume about a person from the sound of their voice alone? What, what does that make you think about?

[00:03:24] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, so we have a lot of stuff that we learn about each other from voices. Um, some of it is about who we think someone is, so that might be some of what we think of as like the big demographic categories like race or gender or age. Um, some of that is situational, right? So we're trying to understand each other's.

[00:03:44] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Uh, hidden meanings or, or the emotions that somebody's feeling, right? We track a lot of different stuff through language use. Um, we don't really know what the full range is, but most of the stuff that somebody set out to find out, like, is this something that people can learn from, from language? Usually the answer seems to be, yeah, people are really tuned into that.

[00:04:08] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: We're very hungry. Our minds are very hungry for information about other people. And so we tend to grab onto everything that we can during an interaction to try to like track what's happening and, you know, what should I be doing in this situation,

[00:04:22] Jess: right? And I imagine some of that information is probably really accurate or useful, and some of it is.

[00:04:27] Jess: Maybe not so accurate.

[00:04:29] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah. So early on in the study of, of this kind of perception, there was a, a real focus on accuracy, right? Like what can you tell? In fact, the first

[00:04:38] Jess: mm-hmm.

[00:04:38] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Speaker evaluation study is from the 1930s in the uk and they actually played people's voices over the BBC radio and then invited the listeners to write in letters with their guesses about anything they could tell about the people.

[00:04:53] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And they compiled the research that way. Um, oh, wow. And so they were really focused on like, what, what did people get right? And they were really good at it, right? So they didn't necessarily know exactly what someone's job is. But, you know, they heard somebody who was held a high position in the military and they said he is used to telling people what to do.

[00:05:11] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right? Like, so they can get a lot of, of these kinds of details. But then as it went on, we realized the accuracy I. Especially for personality stuff is really hard to judge, right? Like what's the gold standard for whether somebody is authoritative or friendly or intelligent, like what, what counts, right?

[00:05:30] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Mm-hmm. Um, and so we've shifted gears from a sense of like, what are people doing it right? And more looking at what is it in the language cues that trigger particular perceptions, right? So one of the, um, the early sort of developments in what we call the gay speech literature, so this sort of obsession with, um, you know, what is it that makes some men sound gay, right?

[00:05:57] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Mm-hmm. A big development of that was realizing that people were very bad at actually. Telling somebody's sexual orientation, but they were pretty good at agreeing with each other, right? So somebody's response is likely to look like somebody else's response. The listeners tend to agree on which talkers sound gay and which ones don't, even if they're not very good at actually saying anything about the actual reality of those people.

[00:06:23] Jess: Right. So you mean that, like people were, who were participating in these studies were all in agreement about which voices they thought sounded gay, but the voices they thought sounded gay didn't necessarily correlate with the people who actually were

[00:06:37] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Exactly, exactly. So it, it's, there's this other thing that's called sounding gay, and that's its own entity, which is, you know, not completely unrelated to people's lived experiences, but doesn't match up with it.

[00:06:52] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Doesn't match up with sexual orientation. Right.

[00:06:54] Jess: It's fascinating to me that sounding gay, which you would assume is very strongly correlated to being gay, is actually its own totally different thing. What other aspects of how people talk? Are kind of their own category where sounding the, like the thing is not actually related to the thing.

[00:07:14] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: This happens actually kind of a lot, right? So I'm actually, I'm, I'm working on, uh, writing up a paper right now where, um, I look at how people are picking up on race cues in speech. So there's a tremendous amount of variation in, in how people are heard. That doesn't match in for stuff like race, for stuff like gender, for stuff like sexual orientation, people are actually quite good at age.

[00:07:39] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, there seem to be interesting theological changes in the vocal tract that, that people are pretty good at picking up on. So, you know, they're not like down to the year, but sort of in broad swaths, people are pretty good at age. Um, but a lot of stuff, again, it, it often correlates, but it's not, it's not tapped in, in some kind of automatic way to people's lived reality.

[00:08:03] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: The main relationship, well, there's a few, right? So one is. You learn to talk from the people that you're around. So for the, that aspect of things, particularly in terms of stuff that runs in families, right, or communities you pick up, uh, from, from sort of who you grew up with. And then the other thing is, is if you don't sound like people think you should sound based on who you are, that can create problems for your life.

[00:08:29] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And so then you're likely. To want to do things about that and, and you know, so that's, that in itself be creates a pressure that ups that correlation, right, between those features because we're, we have an incentive to want that to be, to make sense to other people.

[00:08:46] Jess: Okay. So c could you talk a bit more about that study that's looking at race and voice?

[00:08:51] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, so there's you referring to, there's a, a, a bunch of existing work on the topic. John B is like the big name in this area of linguistic profiling. Um, and he has a very well-known study from about 20 years ago where he showed that people could judge racial guises. So it was all him. Um, the stimuli were all him.

[00:09:13] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: It wasn't different people, but he was, he was able to produce, uh, some, uh, version of his own voice that sounded African American, that sounded white, and that sounded Chicano. Um, and from those guises, it took less than a second of speech for people to make those judgements, right? So he would play people the word hello, and they would be able to be like, oh, that that person's black, that's person's white.

[00:09:40] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: That person's Chicano.

[00:09:42] Jess: Did you say less than a second?

[00:09:44] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Less than a second of speech? Yeah.

[00:09:46] Jess: So that's so fast for somebody to make a judgment of race from the voice alone.

[00:09:52] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, it goes very, and it's, it's not, it's very fast in terms of how fast they're processing and it's also just not very much material, right?

[00:09:59] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: There's just not a lot of speech that's happened. Um, and we're, I was seeing the same thing. So I'm, I'm essentially replicating that work, but just trying to see if we can use an eye tracking methods. So an, uh, a computer that is looking at where somebody's eyes are looking. So we give them a bunch of faces, and then again, they're just listening to the beginning of a recording.

[00:10:20] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and a little for us, we're seeing a little bit more than a second, their eyes shift and start looking at the start sorting by race in terms of which, which potential speakers they think they're, they're seeing. So the task is, ah,

[00:10:34] Jess: okay, look

[00:10:35] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: at these faces, listen to the person and click on who you think is talking.

[00:10:39] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and their eyes start showing that pattern of distinguishing by race, um, a little bit more than a second in. And it takes about 200 milliseconds to. Go from, I'm gonna move my eyes in a place to I love you, majesty.

[00:10:57] Jess: We've both got our cats running around in the background. I saw mine was jumping and running out there.

[00:11:04] Jess: It happens. Let's talk about gender then. How does, how does the process of, um, guessing at somebody's gender based on the sound of their voice, or maybe guessing is the wrong word, word that implies kind of an, an intentionality or a, a conscious process. But what is that process of recognizing, um, gender when someone is speaking?

[00:11:24] Jess: What does that look like?

[00:11:25] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah. I actually, I like guessing. Um, I think it's a great description because I think it underlines the fact that you can't tell someone's. Gender from their voice, unless their voice is saying what their gender is at you. Right? Yeah. That then it'll work. Um, but, but people do guess, right?

[00:11:44] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: They do make judgements about what they think is happening. Um, and there's a few different ways that they, things that they might be going on. Right? Um, so probably one of the fastest has to do with what we call formance. Um, so that mm-hmm. It's an acoustic measure that we can make of somebody's voice that relates to the length and shape of their vocal tract.

[00:12:08] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so the vocal tract is the space basically between your lips and your larynx. Um, and that's where a lot of the action happens in terms of making speech sounds right. Um, and. So if somebody's larynx has been exposed to testosterone, either going through a sort of naturally occurring puberty as a young person, or later on, if they, if they take exogenous testosterone, then their larynx is gonna get bigger and it's gonna drop lower in the throat, right?

[00:12:41] Jess: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:41] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And that has an effect so that getting bigger will change the fundamental frequency of their speech. Um, and dropping lower in the throat will make the vocal tract bigger,

[00:12:51] Jess: right? Mm-hmm.

[00:12:52] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and so that is one of the big cues that people often go by, um, because it does make a pretty big difference in terms of the, the acoustic quality of the speech.

[00:13:03] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And it's something that's gonna happen, just like I was saying about age and voice quality. It's something that kind of happens throughout. Almost everything, all the sounds that somebody's producing. So you're gonna be able to pick up on it very quickly. Um, so that I think is one of the big things that people use, but it's not the only thing.

[00:13:22] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: There's a lot of other stuff that, that people have more control over that can influence perceptions of gender. Um, and people tend to produce them in order to sort of exaggerate, uh, gender differences. So there's really old work from the seventies showing that, um, you get fundamental frequency differences in the speech of children.

[00:13:49] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: At like five to seven years of age. Right? So this is way before any physiological differences are happening. Um, there's no larynx effect in this situation. Yeah. Five year olds don't have a difference in their larynxes, but they have learned already that. That fundamental frequency, the pitch of your voice, uh, informally is something that carries gendered meaning.

[00:14:14] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And so they're already starting to pull their, their performances apart. They're, they're starting to make those differences just in the manipulation of how they use their larynxes, just like the rest of us can. Uh, we have a physical possible range of our fundamental frequency, but we can decide where in that to live.

[00:14:32] Jess: So we were seeing kids way before there's an age where we're starting to see a physical difference still exhibiting those like, learned differences between how different genders speak.

[00:14:43] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, exactly. Is that right?

[00:14:44] Jess: Yeah. Okay. That's, that is so interesting. How does that process of learning how people around you speak and like adopting that, how does that actually work?

[00:14:55] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: We kinda dunno. Okay. It's really interesting. Um, well, if you're a linguist, it's really interesting. So we know that. Uh, perceiving other people's language use is obviously crucial to doing your own language use, right? Particularly for babies. Like they have to, they have to perceive other people's language use, right?

[00:15:19] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And that's how they learn language, right? Um, so obviously there's what we call the, the perception production loop, right? There's some kind of, you learn to perceive other people's language and then that informs what you do. But it's not a perfect loop because otherwise, every time we talked to anybody with a different accent than ours, we would immediately switch over completely to their accent.

[00:15:42] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And there is a pull in that direction. There's something we call accommodation or convergence where we tend to pick up some things about other people, but we don't go all the way. Right? And sometimes we don't even go there at all. And there's sort of complicated social stuff about when and how we do that.

[00:15:58] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so we don't really know very much about where the sort of blocks and and openings are in that loop, um, for how we learn those things. Um, we certainly, there's gotta be a lot of action happening in terms of how people respond to us. Particularly, you can see this with little kids, right? Where they're really licensed and teenagers, right?

[00:16:22] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: They're really licensed to try out new selves, new versions of themself and, and sort of socially that's considered normal. It's developmentally appropriate behavior for them to, to try sounding different ways. Um, and that's, we can sort of pick up on how that goes.

[00:16:39] Jess: What is semiotics?

[00:16:40] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So semiotics is, is about meaning and how people develop systems of meaning, right?

[00:16:47] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and so. We might take a particular linguistic feature, um, and say, okay, well what does this mean? So in gender, when we talk about gender and perceptions of gender, everybody's favorite one is S right? We love to talk about s and we talk about fronting S and backing s And when people, when you're not a linguist, people still talk about it.

[00:17:10] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: They talk about the gay lisp, right? And they wanna, they wanna understand the gay lisp. So this is one of those features that people really associate with gender and linguists have done a ton of work on it, right? So there's a lot of different interpretations about what an A fronted s for example, so as fronted instead of a is the middle, or shh.

[00:17:33] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: As a backed s right. These, depending on where you put your tongue, when you, when you make the s sound, uh, it's gonna make it sort of a different quality. It's gonna change, uh, the acoustic signature of the sound. So

[00:17:47] Jess: a fronted S is where your tongue is at more near the front of your mouth. And a backed S is where it's for the bag.

[00:17:53] Jess: Yeah. Okay, great. Got it.

[00:17:54] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Exactly. So if you say s and kind of hold it, you can kind of feel where the, the closest part of your tongue to the roof of your mouth is like where that, that smallest point is, and exactly where that is, uh, on the roof of your mouth is going to shape. What the, what the S sounds like, and the further front it is.

[00:18:14] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So the closer to your teeth, the higher frequency it's gonna be, and the further back it is, the lower frequency it's gonna be.

[00:18:21] Jess: Ah, okay. And

[00:18:21] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: across, um, a bunch of languages. Not all of them, but, but most of the languages that anybody has checked, there's an association with a front or higher frequency, s as being associated with femininity and the backer s is being associated with masculinity, with a lot of complexity, uh, hidden in that, in that statement.

[00:18:43] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: That is not always true. Um, but broadly speaking, it's sort of the most common pattern. Um, but it, because it's not always true, that's where you see these semiotic disconnects kind of emerging sometimes, where some people are gonna interpret that as, as meaning a particular thing, uh, and other contexts in another community.

[00:19:03] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Maybe it's going to be interpreted differently.

[00:19:05] Jess: Okay. So that, that gives me another question about this sort of gay voice thing in the first place, which is, if the, if sounding gay is not strongly correlated to being gay, why do we think it is as a society? Um,

[00:19:20] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: I think it's because as a society we're not great at thinking about the differences between, and the relationships between gender and sexual orientation and also just kind of different aspects of gender, right?

[00:19:38] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So when people talk about sounding gay or the gay lisp, part of what they're doing is saying, this is somebody who sounds feminine. If he's a man and he sounds feminine, all I've got is that he's gay. Like that's, that's the only version I've got. Right. And not every, again, with the semiotic systems, not everybody has a model that sort of connects those two things, uh, in that way.

[00:20:06] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right. But, but I think the concept of the gay lisp or gay speech comes from that assumption.

[00:20:12] Jess: Right.

[00:20:13] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and I mean, a lot of that is sort of a bit older, right. Um, the gay speech literature was kind of labeled that in the late nineties when it was still really new and exciting to have. Work on gay stuff that was being carried out by gay linguists, right?

[00:20:34] Jess: Mm. Yeah.

[00:20:34] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Absolute earliest stuff on that we would now put in the gay speech literature was speech language pathologists in, you know, the 1960s saying. Some men sound feminine, we should figure out how to fix them, right? So I'm gonna do an acoustic study of like what makes them sound feminine so that we can, so then like the speech language pathologist can like train them out of it, right?

[00:21:00] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Oh my gosh. That's where that original literature started, right? So by the nineties, you know, having white cis gay men saying, I'm gonna study what makes other white cis men sound gay or not. Like that was a big step forward. That was really exciting. Right. But it was also, you know, 25 years ago,

[00:21:22] Jess: oh my gosh, like it's better than that.

[00:21:25] Jess: We're gonna try and fix this. Yeah. Right.

[00:21:27] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Like, it was, it was exciting, right. But of course since then, like we have continued to, to move forward a bit and say, ah, okay. So like one, it turns out that there are other queer people other than white cis men, like we can ask about their experiences and, and their relationships to different language cues and, you know, also kind of disrupting this, this set of assumptions saying like, okay, well they're straight guys and they sound masculine, and then there's gay guys and they don't sound as masculine.

[00:22:00] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right? Like, we can really complexify this picture quite a bit.

[00:22:03] Jess: But how quickly does that process of gender identification happen?

[00:22:08] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: I don't think that we. No, although the, the eye tracking study I was telling you about, um, the second half of that paper is looking at the effect of s again, fronted s on perceptions of masculinity.

[00:22:26] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and just like with the race identification, it happens quite quickly. So within a second or less people shape, which faces they're looking at after they hear the more fronted version of s versus the less fronted version of s, um, they're picking up on that. Now, that's, that's not looking at that sort of generic identification the way we did with race, but it's still, it's still happening quite quickly.

[00:22:52] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, I don't, off the top of my head, I don't know of any work that looks at how fast people are picking up, uh, gender from speech. I know that when they're looking at faces, they're very, very fast. So, um. Less than half a second. Uh, the people are judging, uh, gender and, and race from faces, if I remember that literature.

[00:23:18] Jess: Yeah. Gosh. So if you Yeah. If you're trying to convince somebody you're a specific gender that you might not sound typically, like that's not a lot of time to work with.

[00:23:27] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah. Yeah. People are, are pretty fast at making, um, the, it's hard to know what the actual set of dimensions are for, for like what people do this with, but I think the things that, that our culture acts like are that they're really important, right?

[00:23:45] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Those are the ones that we learned to do very quickly because we sort of, growing up in the culture, we learned like, oh, these are really, really big pieces of information about somebody. And so, you know, it's sort of

[00:23:56] Jess: worth

[00:23:56] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: working hard. Um, and one of the consequences of that, of course, that we see with both gender and race is for people that are.

[00:24:05] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Perceived as difficult to classify in those dimensions that sometimes perceivers can respond to that as if they've sort of been done wrong in some way. Right. Like your existence is is disturbing to me because my process, I'm used to being able to classify people within a half a second and like, if I can't do that, then my perceptual system sort of flags it as like, oh, we're having trouble here.

[00:24:29] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right. And that can then, uh, you know, people can respond quite badly. Right. So Judith Butler has the whole conversation about intelligibility and, and sort of the ways that we pressure people into sort of requiring intelligibility. You must make sense to me, you know, or you've sort of done something wrong.

[00:24:46] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right.

[00:24:47] Jess: That's so fascinating. 'cause you, you do see people react, um, in a, in a very like. I, the, the people have a lot of different reactions to misgendering somebody or having that sort of words, what I'm calling the words don't fit the picture problem where there's, they're seeing something that doesn't necessarily align with what they're hearing.

[00:25:08] Jess: Um, and yeah, what I mean, what you're saying makes sense. 'cause I, I do see sometimes reactions that kind of have that like, oh shit, so something's wrong with my brain, sort of feeling to them. Um, how important is voice compared to visual cues?

[00:25:24] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: It depends. Uh, it depends I think, on what people are doing. Um, I do have a study, not looking at gender, but looking at perceptions of foreign accent that suggests that if you tell people to ignore one or the other dimensions

[00:25:41] Jess: mm-hmm.

[00:25:43] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Part of what makes a difference is what they're supposed to be evaluating on. So we had them rating, uh, faces and voices for how good looking or how accented they thought the person was. Right. So obviously there's a bias there where if I'm supposed to be rating how accented somebody is, then there's a better fit with voice than face.

[00:26:02] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Mm-hmm. 'cause with face, because with face I'm having to rely essentially on racial stereotypes in order to make that judgment. Um, and then similarly with good looking right, it sort of belongs to faces. So people are willing to do that. That rating on voice, um, but it sort of, it doesn't, isn't quite as sensible.

[00:26:22] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and what we find is that there, in terms of what people are able to ignore when they're told that it's irrelevant information mm-hmm. Uh, that the fit between the medium and the task matters, but also voices have an inherent advantage. So people were unable to completely ignore voices when they were, uh, when they were told to, but they were able to completely ignore faces, um, in the task.

[00:26:52] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So maybe that's a bias in, in favor, at least in that very sort of structured environment, this suggesting that that voices are. Are more powerful. On the other hand, also voices are harder to ignore, right? Like if somebody is talking to me, it's hard to, for me to choose not to hear them. Right? Um, whereas if somebody is in front of me, it's easier to choose not to look at them or just sort of not focus on their face.

[00:27:20] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So it could just be a really basic perceptual pattern. I'm not really sure.

[00:27:25] Jess: Oh, that's really interesting. So that, does that study does, I guess then suggest that it's harder to ignore the recognition or guesswork signals that you're getting from a voice than it is to ignore those that you're getting from a, a visual?

[00:27:41] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, I think so because we have more, I think we have more control over our visual attention, but we are, we are wandering into fields that are not mine. So I am speculating rather than, rather than speaking from knowledge.

[00:27:54] Jess: Let's come back to talking a little bit about these different features that can make voices sound different ways.

[00:28:00] Jess: Um. Uh, obviously we've, we've talked about some of those physical differences, um, like structural differences, things that can be affected by testosterone. Um, you mentioned S'S and the pronunciation of those. What other levers can we pull to change how our voice comes across from a gender perspective?

[00:28:21] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: It really, at that point, it really starts coming down to more culturally specific patterns, right?

[00:28:30] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So, um, one of the big turns in language and gender research, maybe I wanna say like 15, 20 years ago, was. Was multiplying our concept of gender and not in the way that has happened more recently. Um, where, where more and more people have said, you know, there's more than just men and women. Right? But even, even before we sort of got there, just recognizing that, that within any given gender category, there's lots of different ways, ways to be that gender, right?

[00:29:05] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and so I think that's where if somebody's being a particular gender, they're never just being that gender, right? They're being a lot of other things. At the same time, they're, they're racialized and they have life experiences and they have particular social goals and they have communities that they belong to, right?

[00:29:28] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And so the cues that we use to say, Hey, I belong, uh, to this gender, they're always gonna be. Mixed up with all this other stuff. So really early on in the language and gender literature, many people would kind of locate that with, um, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place, which was this very sort of second wave of feminism.

[00:29:50] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Look at, uh, gender language and gender, gender sociolinguistics. Um, and, you know, she was really coming from a sort of academic white, middle class perspective of what it meant to sound like a woman. And she put together this kind of list of features that she thought of as, um, not only features that women used, but that features were, that women were policed into using, right?

[00:30:17] Jess: Mm-hmm. Um, and

[00:30:18] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: so her big thing was, um, in the sort of mid seventies, right? This sense that women were expected to, to speak in particular ways, to use language in particular ways, but then they were also penalized for sounding that way because many of the rules made. Sort of pushed in the direction of making your speech less effective or less assertive.

[00:30:41] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so we were talking about swearing, right? Um, earlier and swearing or not swearing right, is one of those kinds of examples of like, women were not supposed to swear or sort of penalized more for swearing. Um, but Lakoff pointed out that there are some situations that really call for swearing. So she had this classic example of, oh, fudge my hair is on fire, right?

[00:31:04] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Like, doesn't really capture the moment, right? Like, I'm sort of not expressing myself as effectively if I'm not allowed to swear. Because some moments, like having your hair be on fire is sort of a high emotion moment and being sort of banned in some meaningful way from swearing kind of limits that. Um, so she had a whole bunch of, of things that she thought of as, um, classically women's language, um, but that were sort of self-limiting in some way.

[00:31:30] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So. Hedging. So saying something like, um, you know, that's, it's kind of nice out, right? Uh, these kinds of, uh, limiting things or tag questions, right? It's a nice day, isn't it? Right? So she's sort of named these as, as features that women are expected to do, but then when, when women use them, it, they're sort of produced as evidence of like why women are unserious or sort of not really capable of engaging intellectually because they say these, these silly things.

[00:32:04] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, now of course there's a been many, many critiques of like discussion, right? Not least that she didn't actually work with data, right? She kind of was drawing on her own intuitions and those of her communities of how, what they think of as women's language, not necessarily how actual women were actually talking.

[00:32:22] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, but also probably more crucially that she didn't really. Dissect the, the other dimensions of identity that she was kind of assuming, right? Um, so that's, I think where things get very complicated is that in different communities. What it means to be a man or a woman or any gender ends up looking different, right?

[00:32:50] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Even stuff like who's supposed to be angry and who's supposed to be calm. Mm-hmm. Not necessarily supposed to in a prescriptive way, but in a, in a assumption of like what, what people's natures are, right? Um, so there're absolutely communities where the assumption is that men are sort of inherently angry and women are a calming influence.

[00:33:09] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And then there are other human cultures where the opposite is assumed, right? Where everybody kind of knows that women tend to be kind of angry and not in control of themselves, and men are the ones that are, are sort of calm and, and levelheaded and you know, the ones that, that you need to bring the temperature of a situation down, right?

[00:33:26] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So then the language features that you expect to see being gendered in those communities are gonna be different, right? Because it, part of what is gonna matter then is, well, what language features make you sound angry and what ones make you sound. Calm and like you're in control of things, right? So one of the, the things that I think we ultimately, you know, a few decades on from Lake Hop started to realize was, um, or started to be able to spell out in research, is that you can't really talk about what language features have, what relationship to gender without talking about what meanings have what relationship to gender, right?

[00:34:06] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Because that's really where the action is. So you can do a study and you can say, oh, in this study women say please and thank you more often than men, right? But that's not because please is like a female thing to say, right? It's because politeness means something and it's gendered in a particular way in this community, right?

[00:34:28] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And please, and thank you are ways of being polite. So you always have to look at those sort of intervening. Meanings. So one example is a, a colleague of mine, Sarah Benor, um, we were in grad school together many years ago, and she was looking at, uh, a, a bunch of different language features in an Orthodox Jewish community and she found that tea release.

[00:34:52] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so this question of what do you do with a t, particularly at the end of a word, so if we think of the word like hat, I can not release that T at all. So I can say hat, or I can release a little bit like hat, or I can have a really big burst like hat, right? So it's that sound that you can kind of do different things with.

[00:35:16] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and it turns out in the community she was looking at having that T burst instead of just kind of ending. Without, it was gendered because it was associated in that community and in a lot of other communities in the English speaking world with sounding educated or precise, something along those lines.

[00:35:39] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: But in that particular community, sounding educated or being educated wasn't just a general quality. It was associated specifically with studying Toro, which was a gendered activity. Only the men were doing that in that community.

[00:35:52] Jess: Oh, okay.

[00:35:53] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And so saying, having a release tea, which made you sound more educated, was kind of a way of saying like, I really study Toro, like I'm a studier kind of person.

[00:36:03] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right. And that was a way of being masculine, of sounding man like a man in that community. But that's a very specific set of meanings, right? You couldn't even go, you know, two blocks over. In the same physical location, but in a different community, and expect those meanings to apply because as soon as you're not, as soon as you're outside that Orthodox community, then you lose that, that chain of connection from sounding educated, to sounding studious, to studying Torah, to being a man, right?

[00:36:34] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Once you lose those intervening connections, it's no longer a gendered. Feature.

[00:36:41] Jess: Right. Okay. Yeah, no, I, I completely see that. I mean, when I started initially looking into this topic, I was like, gosh, it seems like there's no research on these specific questions I'm trying to answer. And now here I am, however long into it and I'm going, oh, it's 'cause they're impossible to answer.

[00:36:55] Jess: It's because there's no possible way we can ever untangle this stuff.

[00:36:59] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: It is, it's very, very complicated. Um, because, because humans are complicated, right? And the meanings that we want to make about our world are, are complicated. So yeah, there's no easy way to get through it, unfortunately. Or fortunately, complication is fun.

[00:37:15] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Sometimes.

[00:37:16] Jess: In general though, it seems like there's, there are some things that are more broader across more cultures, and those, I guess the mo, the broadest ones tend to be the ones that are, that are physical, like changes that tend to be very different depending on what, whether you went through puberty on estrogen or testosterone, and then.

[00:37:35] Jess: As you get further and further away from that, from the things that are physical differences, it sounds like they're just more and more and more cultural. Is that right? Yeah,

[00:37:43] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: yeah, exactly. So, so I think what happens is that people pick up on the meanings that are around them and then they wanna do stuff with them.

[00:37:53] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And often what they wanna do is exaggerate them. So there's something, um, in sociolinguistics we talk about, called fractal. Recursive, where, um, we take divisions between. Anything but groups of people is a sort of a prominent one, and we kind of apply that division within the groups, right? So, um, this is where you see stuff like, oh, well, if on average men are taller than women, then that must mean that if you're taller, then you're like being more of a man because you're sort of taking this thing that kind of belongs to the group.

[00:38:26] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And then you, if you have more of it, you're doing more of that thing. And if you have less of it, then you're doing less of that thing, right? So then that's where you get these kinds of. Cultural assumptions or norms that get put on people that, you know in that then taller men are treated as sort of being more successfully masculine in some way.

[00:38:45] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right? So it's taking these differences and then applying them at different levels. Right? And so that's where I think we get stuff like little kids differentiating their, their pitch, their fundamental frequency at a very young age, right? Because they're picking up on the culture around them that says, it's not just that there's physical differences in people's larynxes, it's that these.

[00:39:09] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Sounds mean something important, right? And so we're gonna do something with them. Often that's exaggerating those differences, but not always. Sometimes you get these, these places, these cultures, these moments where people say, actually we're gonna try to squish these together. We're gonna do less of that difference.

[00:39:25] Jess: So, uh, I wanna talk about exaggeration for a second. 'cause you brought it up and it's making me think of a few things. Something that is often said about trans women that some people consider transphobic and other people consider a true observation, um, is that a lot of trans women exhibit like a hyper femininity that some people, um, can accuse them of seeming like it's mocking femininity or womanhood in some way.

[00:39:51] Jess: Um, and I don't wanna necessarily unpack everything that goes into that specific comment 'cause it's a complicated one. Um, and I think a lot of the time it comes from a place of bad faith. But I, I do think there's a piece of it that I want to. Poke at, which is this idea of, I, I have certainly observed that it's true and it's something I've experienced myself, that I often feel like I'm fighting against the current when it comes to being gendered correctly.

[00:40:18] Jess: And so when it comes to physical appearance or speech, there's an element of feeling like, okay, if I have the right combination of levers pulled and variables in a certain way, people are gonna recognize me as a woman and not a man. But I don't know what those are. I don't exactly know where the threshold is, where I cross over from.

[00:40:37] Jess: Most people around me in my culture are gonna assume I'm a man to, most people are gonna assume I'm a woman. And so I think I have felt certainly the pull to be like, well, I'm gonna pull every single lever and get myself so far over that line that I'm not gonna have to deal with this thing that makes me uncomfortable, which is getting misgendered.

[00:40:54] Jess: Yeah. Um, can you speak to that at all? Or that, that tendency or like maybe the effectiveness of that strategy?

[00:41:01] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, so I think there's sort of two big answers. The, the sort of more, um. General linguistic one is, yeah, peop redundancy is so common in language and in social signaling in general.

[00:41:17] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um. Even for folks who aren't routinely getting misperceived. But in general, we just have this tendency to like pile on. If I, if I want people to perceive me a particular way, I can't trust that they're just gonna pick up one instance of my s fronting or whatever and be like, oh, I gotcha. Like, it's fine.

[00:41:36] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna like do all the s's and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that. Right. So there's, there's a ton of that in language in general. It's not, it's not something that's unusual by any means. But then, yeah, I think in cases where people are being policed, um, and particularly where that policing is particularly harsh and judgmental as, as it is for trans women, then I think it makes a ton of sense to have that reaction to say, I really, I don't like this experience.

[00:42:11] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: I don't like it when people are responding to me that way. And like, how can I navigate? In a way that minimizes that, that pushback. Right. It makes me think of the, um. The Whistling Vivaldi example that Claude Steele talked about years ago, um, in his discussion of stereotype threat, right? Of, um, using literally whistling Vivaldi as a way of diffusing people's reactions to him walking down the street as a black man in the Stanford neighborhood, um, in the area in Palo Alto near Stanford, where he, he would whistle Vivaldi and, and sort of use that as a way for people to be like, oh, like, he's not one of those, right?

[00:42:56] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Like he's, you know, he's okay, right? He's say, I'm not in any danger as a way of diffusing the danger. Against himself. Right. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know whether it is true that trans women are sort of producing more femininity per minute than than other women are. Right. Like, I, you know, nobody's done that study and I, I don't think they should, frankly.

[00:43:21] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: But, um, but I mean, I think even if it were true, it would be a completely understandable reaction. Right. And I think for individual people

[00:43:32] Jess: mm-hmm. To

[00:43:32] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: make that choice. I think that's where, you know, there also personality comes into play. Right. When you, when you feel yourself being policed, you know, some people in some situations with particular experiences are inclined to say, okay, I'm gonna do everything I can to successfully be read in this way.

[00:43:50] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right. You know, and other people are gonna be like, I. We're not supposed to swear, so I dunno how to in that sentence, but Right. So other people get a, uh, potentially push back and say like, okay, well maybe I don't want that. Right. Um, and not to mention that it also, there's just that factor of like, independent of the policing, you know, who do you wanna be?

[00:44:13] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right? For all of us, we're always figuring that out. What kind of person, what kind of woman, what kind of professor, what kind of whatever, you know, do I wanna be, what's my version of this, of inhabiting this category? Um, and that's, you know, a lifelong question for all of us

[00:44:32] Jess: talking about sort of being policed or feeling threatened in some way.

[00:44:35] Jess: Um, would you be able to talk a little bit about code switching in the context of, of like linguistics.

[00:44:41] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah. Yeah. So code switching, um, kind of broadly speaking is the practice of using multiple varieties across different contexts. Um, so it's very commonly associated, or I think probably for a lot of folks when they first hear the term code switching, they, they think about, um, African Americans in particular.

[00:45:04] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: That I think that's where it gets used in, in sort of public spaces a lot. Um, so referring to folks who have command over. Varieties that read as African American and maybe they experience as, as being particularly at home or a way of, of sounding or feeling authentically black. And then other varieties that are sort of fine tuned to pass muster or to be sort of perceived as non-threatening or appropriate or professional or what all of these, these particular judgements might be, particularly in professional contexts, right?

[00:45:37] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So at work, uh, uh, but any place where it's sort of a, potentially like a white dominated situation. Um, so more generally, code switching can be, can apply to any, um, anybody who's has sort of enough linguistic difference that we might wanna call them different varieties, although that's not a particularly technical distinction.

[00:45:57] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, but, but where people sort of perceive themselves or are perceived by others as having really distinct styles or distinct language varieties across different contexts.

[00:46:09] Jess: So I mean, I definitely notice myself, um. Taking on what I think of as like a more feminine sounding voice when I'm in situations with people who I don't necessarily know or who don't know me well, and I'm like looking to increase the chances that I'm gonna get gendered correctly off the bat.

[00:46:26] Jess: Whereas when I'm, yeah, when I'm with people who I'm comfortable with, my friends, my family, people who've known me for a long time, I, I tend to not feel any of that pressure and I talk the way that I more or less have my entire life that I'm aware of.

[00:46:39] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah. Yeah. So this notion of sort of, I think one of the ingredients and code switching a lot that, that gets talked about and deserves to be talked about is, is sort of effort and intimacy in the relationship between, between those, because you could imagine a world where.

[00:46:57] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Everybody just said, oh, like strangers perceive me in a way that I want them to if I talk like this. So I will just always talk like that and like problem solved. Right. And you know, I think there are in fact people that have adjusted their whole repertoire to be more formal or more feminine or more whatever in order to sort of grab at these meanings that matter to them.

[00:47:21] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: But a lot of people don't do that. And the, the sort of ingredient there, one of the ingredients there is, is a sense of your own identity and who you are and a sense of comfort of sort of sounding like you yourself to yourself, right? Um, sounding like you belong to your community if, if the, the language variety and question is about community, but even just sounding like ourselves.

[00:47:47] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and part of that I think is what we're used to and that it's effortful to change, but part of it is also. The emotional connection of being able to, to feel like we're being our, our own authentic selves.

[00:48:02] Jess: Right?

[00:48:02] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And that then translates into being a way of offering intimacy to people, right? To say, if I, if I know you well or I trust you, then one of the ways I can show that is by using the variety that I think of as my true self and not using the variety that I use to protect myself among strangers, right?

[00:48:25] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So then you can get these kinds of layers of meanings of your own experience, of your variety, but then also it becomes a way of interacting with people and sharing, right? By sort of allowing them that intimacy of something that you think of as a more protected version of yourself.

[00:48:39] Jess: Can that process by which people categorize the gender of a person they're speaking with, um, can that change?

[00:48:48] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: I think so I don't know of any work on it. Um, but sort of based on everything I know about language in general, we know that people change both how they use language and how they perceive language over the course of their lives. Um, and we know that one of the big ways they do that is by being exposed to different people and different types of people, right?

[00:49:12] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So some of the really classic examples are stuff like, if you have never heard somebody, uh, speaking English with a Mandarin accent, then you have more trouble understanding the first time you do. Then if you've spent your whole life, or even a few hours or a few weeks, hearing somebody with that kind of accent, once you get that experience under your belt, you're better at it.

[00:49:35] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right, because your linguistic brain is actually pretty good at saying like, oh, I, I'm a little lost, but, but hold on. I'll just, you know, twiddle some things and we'll get, we'll get it used to this, right? And then after a while it's like, okay, I've got it. I've got a model for this kind of way of sounding.

[00:49:54] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So the next time somebody comes at me that sounds like that, now I know what to do. Right? And so all of that would make me expect that you would see similar kinds of development in people's experiences in general. So if somebody spends a lot of time with people whose linguistic gender presentation is different than they had heard before, they're gonna update their models of what.

[00:50:22] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Of what those categories sound like or what people sound like. Uh, and they're, yeah, they're gonna shift both how they hear linguistically in the sense of how they actually process and understand the language, but also they'll shift their social perceptions.

[00:50:37] Jess: So that, that's kind of tying into something I, I was thinking a bit about like my own personal experience, which is when I was early in my transition, I, I found that some people in my life really struggled to consistently gender me with she her.

[00:50:48] Jess: But then as time went by, for some people that's just not a problem anymore. Um, whereas for others it's still a very clear, conscious, deliberate process to get it right. And I can tell that their first instinct is still to go back to he, him and it's, I I can almost see them overriding it. So what do you think is going on there between the, the difference between those two groups?

[00:51:11] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Uh, that's really interesting. Um, you know, it's, it's hard to tell 'cause there's probably a lot of different things that might go on for different people. Um, but I think. One possibility. And again, I'm actually speaking a little bit less as a linguist and more just as a, as a person who uses language on this one, um, I think one of the things that can happen is that for some folks, their pronoun use and sort of other linguistic markers may be really heavily tied to what we might wanna call a perception of gender.

[00:51:42] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: But for other folks it may be, uh, habit or tied to directly to the person or their sort of representation of someone. Mm-hmm. Um, so one thing that I would, would wonder about is sort of depth, uh, like how much time that person has spent with you over your, both of your lifetimes, and sort of how much exposure they had or how much practice they had using the older forms.

[00:52:06] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, because I, I suspect that there's a few different paths that somebody's brain might take there, where for some folks it's coming from. Something that is about gendered perception and for other folks it's coming from, but this is, this, these are the words that I've always used for this person. Um, and not necessarily running through what, what I might think of as like an intervening gendered perception, but again, that this is, this is me speculating wildly.

[00:52:36] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, I, I don't think that we really have good, we don't have good research on this. Um, I think it's something that's, that's likely to happen soon. Right. So we're in a really exciting time, um, in linguistics right now for this stuff because there's, there's sort of a younger generation of trans linguists that are just, there's so many of them coming up and they're in this sort of, you know, the early grad school or just finishing up their PhDs and getting out there into as professors and like, I think there's just so much.

[00:53:11] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Work on trans linguistics that, you know, has been blossoming, but also I can kind of see looming as folks get graduated and get settled and really start, um, being able to, to kind of do this work from a, from a more secure place. So I think hopefully soon we'll know a lot more about some of these questions.

[00:53:29] Jess: That's really exciting. It's cool to hear that. I mean, it, it lines up with what, like, I would, I would just love to see some research into this. 'cause I, I do, I do notice so much that like queer people, trans, non-binary people especially, are so much better at switching how they gender people. Um, I. Whereas some, some cis people have no problem with it, but a lot of them do.

[00:53:50] Jess: Like, even if they're really good at getting my pronouns right, having now known me out for a long time, they still completely flounder when it comes to another trans person. So like, they've made the one, the switch for one person, but they haven't redirected the path, the bigger pathway in some way. And I, I would love to see more work into why that is.

[00:54:09] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: It is, yeah, it is very interesting. I, I have a lot of psycholinguistics questions about this stuff because I had always heard, and I kind of expected, you know, that sort of people would say like, oh, time and practice. Like, if you don't get somebody's pronouns right, like keep practicing at it and over time you'll get better.

[00:54:27] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And, and my experience has been that I, I shift, you know, if somebody tells me that they have different pronouns than they had last time I saw them, that I, I, my experience is that I'm pretty good at shifting. I. Almost entirely, you know, upon command. Um, but that, that lingering like few percent and a little bit more inside my head.

[00:54:48] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: That doesn't always make it out as in like, nope. Right. That it doesn't necessarily trail off. It just kind of hovers.

[00:54:56] Jess: Coming back to the, some of the linguistic variables that people can exhibit or exhibit differently, um, you mentioned that those variables can be interpreted differently by different listeners depending on the context.

[00:55:11] Jess: Um, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that study that you sent me a while ago, the perceived sexuality of men.

[00:55:18] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: The same feature can really show up differently. Um, for different people and sort of, uh, in different ways depending on what they're trying to do. Um, so yeah, LA Ziman has this really great study looking at, um, uh, a series of trans, well, a set of transmasculine speakers looking at them sort of over time.

[00:55:38] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and one of the things that he examined, or that he measured in their speech was, um, how they ended up using s as over the course of the voice changes that they were experiencing on testosterone. Um, and where I think a kind of simplistic set of assumptions might predict that you'd expect everybody to either keep their s the same or sort of make their s for their back, right?

[00:56:05] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Because we just said, well, front desk means feminine and backes means masculine, right? So we, we could tell a story or we could imagine someone trying to tell a story that says like, oh, well here are these transmasculine folk. So, you know, and they're on t so their voices are, are changing, um, to sort of be more masculine.

[00:56:25] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And they, that's a choice they've made. They're being more masculine, so maybe like their s's should become more masculine. Right? Like we could imagine every simplistic story that would predict that lull is not a simplistic person. So he did not predict that, but he was just asking what was happening.

[00:56:41] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right. Um, and, and what he found was that different of the speakers, they did different things, right? And part of what that depended on was the relationship to the, the sort of notions or the categories of men are masculine because different people have different relationships to them. And so one of the things that he found was that for a, a few of the speakers, they actually started fronting their s's.

[00:57:06] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so doing the more feminine thing, right? In this simplistic view. And laws zimmerman's, uh, interpretation of this, right? Was that what was happening was that for some of them they had pretty complex relationship with, with masculinity that they identified with masculinity, and in some sense, sure, they were kind of moving towards that in some meaningful way.

[00:57:28] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, but they also didn't want to kind of fully or sort of unproblematically inhabit the category of man or the category of masculine and just have people be like, oh, look. There's that dude going by, right? They wanted some complexity there, or they wanted some distance from that. And so as the fundamental frequency and the, the forin changes that they experienced from the effect of the testosterone on their larynx, as that progressed, they were strategically, not strategically in the sense of consciously deciding necessarily.

[00:58:02] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: They may have been, but they, they didn't need to be conscious of it in order to do it. They were manipulating their use of s to kind of offset that effect, right? So that they weren't, they weren't sounding kind of all the way masculine or as, as it more extremely masculine, right? So people can, can get very kind of strategic about putting these meanings together.

[00:58:23] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: We talked about redundancy. A little bit ago and, and so often people will be redundant with their meanings, but that redundancy in the system also means that we can use the multiple channels to get a little more complex and say, actually, I don't want every single one of the 20 different ways I can signal my gender.

[00:58:44] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: I don't want them saying the same thing. I want some of them saying something different, because that's actually what I'm trying to say. Right. That we have that ability to kind of put these pieces together in complex ways.

[00:58:57] Jess: So sort of being able to tell a more complicated story, like a more nuanced story about who you are as a person with a combination of those levers that isn't just like, you know, full blast on everything.

[00:59:08] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:59:10] Jess: It feels really obvious to me why trans people have an interest in changing their voices. Um, and I think a lot of cis people also get it, like when it comes to. When trans people are saying, Hey, I wanna change how I sound. I think a lot of the time there's an understanding of like, yeah, I get it.

[00:59:28] Jess: Why, you know, why you might wanna sound more like the gender that you identify with. Um, but it seems like you've given a few examples of how cis people also change their voices all the time. Um, is that something that's extremely common as well?

[00:59:43] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, I mean, people changing their voices, uh, either easily just because they're moving through the world and they find that particular versions of their self fit in particular context or through a lot of effort, you know, accent training and these kinds of things.

[00:59:59] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: It's really, really common for people to, um, to shift how they use language in order to do stuff in their social world. Actually, one really small but highly gendered version of this is, um, I have a corpus of. Uh, college student speech. Um, and some of that includes, uh, them performing, uh, versions of themselves where they try to sound as masculine as possible or as feminine as possible, whatever it means to them.

[01:00:32] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, and when you look at the pitch variation, the college women move in both directions so they get higher when they're trying to sound as feminine as possible, relative to their baseline, and they get lower when they're trying to sound masculine. And the men get higher when they try to sound feminine, but they don't get any lower when they're trying to sound masculine.

[01:00:51] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And then if you look at the distribution of their baseline, their baselines are skewed. The distribution of their pitch is skewed, which I think is because they're all inhabiting kind of the lowest range of their physically possible pitch all the time. Like these college men, you just say, Hey, read this word list just in your normal voice.

[01:01:15] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And they're like working down here. All the time, like they can't get any lower 'cause they're already talking like this. And you know, I've got, uh, I talked to somebody about this who had, uh, recordings from like 40-year-old men and they're not doing it. Like, it's really just these, like 18 to 25-year-old men that are just living, like, they're just using their, their sort of voice control to just kinda hang out as physically low in their fundamental frequency range as they can.

[01:01:44] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: You know, and it's just a little thing, you know, it always makes me feel so bad for them. Like, it just sounds like so much work. You know, like, like that's just like putting this effort in all the time when they're talking. Right. But that's, you know, that's a gendered performance, right? They're, they're, not only are they doing gender, like everybody is sort of always doing some kind of gender, but they're like doing gender in a particularly effortful way.

[01:02:07] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Right? Something that just kind of takes a little bit more work. All the time than just, just regular talking. Um, so yeah, it is absolutely not specific to trans people of like doing, putting effort into your voice to, to make it sound the way you want, um, particularly in a gendered way.

[01:02:27] Jess: I would like to ask you what area of research or like what studies would you like to see more of in this field?

[01:02:34] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: That is a good question. I actually, I have a grant proposal that, uh, that I'm not writing yet because I have a lot of research that's been done that hasn't been written up and published yet. So I'm not allowed to write a grant proposal until I've done that. Um, but what I would like to see is, so for, in terms of just what I'm interested in for myself, not like what the field needs is, um, I think looking at people's experiences, I.

[01:03:04] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Over the course of working to change their voice, I think is a really neat opportunity to look at notions of effort and control. This is something that I'm interested in just in general in my work, is sort of what, what people are aware of, um, in different ways of being aware, uh, of their voices and what they have control over, what they feel like they have control over.

[01:03:24] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: And so I think people that are, that are going on kind of a bit of a journey of like, I need things from my voice. Like I have stronger thoughts and feelings than, than just the everyday and I'm gonna spend some time really thinking about my voice and focusing on it. I think that represents a really interesting moment, um, to ask questions about awareness and control.

[01:03:49] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so, so that's, that's a little, um, that's an interest that I have that, and I've got a, a, a graduate student that is also interested in these questions. Um. So my hope is that we'll be able to explore some of that. Um, but I think at the broader sense, just of like what the field, where the field is going.

[01:04:08] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, you know, I'm, I, I think I'm not as much, I'm more of a spectator, right? And in trans linguistics, I'm, I'm watching some of these younger folks come up and do their thing and I'm really excited about it. I'm not really in charge of what they're doing, but, um, but I think these, some of these psycholinguistics questions about how are we processing, um.

[01:04:30] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: New forms of language. These are also control questions, right? So the stuff like pronouns, what's going on with people's when they don't get it right or when they can't get it right over an extended period of time. Like those are some control, interesting control questions. Um, as well, there's a lot of stuff about, um, meaning making and perception, right?

[01:04:49] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So, um, a student of mine who's now an assistant professor at Penn State, um, they just finished their PhD this past summer, um, has been looking at, okay, well what if you look at different listeners, so doing this kind of speaker evaluation work, but saying, okay, so how do, if you've got black non-binary speakers doing their own gender and doing their own thing.

[01:05:20] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: How do white cis listeners hear them? How do white trans listeners hear them? How do black cis listeners hear them? And there weren't a lot of black trans listeners in their study to, to study how they think. Right. But there's like, what is the difference between listening within the community, perceiving within your own community versus perceiving outside the community?

[01:05:43] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Um, so I think there's a lot of really interesting questions about that. And as I think as more and more, especially as more non-binary linguists are asking questions about what does it mean to live outside the binary? There are a lot of really interesting questions about how those experiences sort of pile up and then shape our ability to perceive other people.

[01:06:06] Jess: Yeah. I, I would love to see more research into how people think about non-binary voices too, because that's, and, and categorize them in general. Like I find that so interesting that so often I will hear a voice that, that. My brain doesn't even, doesn't even try to categorize. And it's like, oh, it's like that, that, that's such an androgynous or non-binary sounding voice to me.

[01:06:27] Jess: Um, which I know even it's still an assumption I'm making about that person's voice, but I, I'm aware that I have a bucket in my brain that I'm sorting some voices into. And I definitely know some people don't seem to have that bucket yet. They haven't developed a bucket where they, where they even quickly or slowly sort people into a non-binary category before learning what they actually are.

[01:06:51] Jess: And I'm curious about that process and whether it can change or improve with time.

[01:06:56] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that would be some really interesting research to look at, sort of how. How our buckets change because we know they must because people learn and grow. Right. But, but there's hasn't been any work on like, what does that look like, right.

[01:07:13] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: From not having, like only having two buckets to having three or more buckets, like what, step by step, what is that process like? We don't know anything about that.

[01:07:22] Jess: Yeah. Oh, I'd love to know more about that. I mean, I know something at some point in my life has, has changed how I. Hear and categorize voices, but I just, I can't put my finger on what, what exactly it is.

[01:07:34] Jess: I just know that I don't associate voice with gender the way I know I did 20 years ago.

[01:07:39] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah, it's really interesting stuff. So hopefully, hopefully folks will be figuring out some of that stuff in the coming years.

[01:07:47] Jess: Cool. Yeah, I hope so too. Thank you so much for talking with me about all of this stuff today.

[01:07:52] Jess: This is, it's genuinely so interesting.

[01:07:55] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: This was really fun. Thank you for having me on.

[01:07:57] Jess: Yeah, I really appreciate it. Um, hopefully I'll get to talk to you soon and we'll see some more of this research that we're both hoping is gonna show up.

[01:08:06] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: That sounds great.

[01:08:08] Jess: Okay. Thanks a lot Kathryn. All right.

[01:08:10] Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Bye-bye.

[01:08:14] Jess: The words don't fit. The picture is created by Jess Lupini. Special thanks to this week's amazing guest, Dr. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. This episode is edited by Koby Michaels and produced by Jess Lupini and Lucas Kavanagh. Production funding was provided through Telus Storyhive. Special thanks to Nicole Doucette and Alexa Landon.

[01:08:34] Jess: See you next time.