Honors Theses and Capstones

Date Completed

Fall 2025

Abstract

Linguistic research on how transgender speakers use speech traits commonly associated with gender, such as f0 and /s/, is still limited in scope. Past research has focused primarily on singular gender groups within the transgender community, particularly transmasculine speakers, leaving gaps in how speech differs among transgender speakers. Additionally, there has been little research on how transgender identity influences perception of gender in speech. Here, I use data from reading passages by fifteen university-age transgender speakers in New England to analyze variation in /s/ and f0 among transmasculine, transfeminine, nonbinary, and multigender speakers. I then performed a perception study using resynthesized clips from these reading passages to analyze how identity as cisgender, binary transgender, or nonbinary influences listeners’ assignment of gender through speech and their confidence in these assignments. Production data corroborates existing findings on transmasculine speakers’ use of /s/ and f0, while also offering new insight into nonbinary and transfeminine speakers’ use of the same traits. Perception data finds that nonbinary listeners are overall less confident in assigning gender than others and that binary transgender listeners assign more binary identities than others, suggesting that personal experience with misgendering and degendering influences one’s perception of others’ genders.

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

First Advisor

Rachel Steindel Burdin

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

College or School

COLA

Department or Program

Linguistics Program (English Department)

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

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