[Transsexuality: speech therapy supporting the "voice" of transformation]

These past years, the Unité de Phoniatrie & Logopédie du CHUV, in Lausanne, has been increasingly requested to provide care to transsexual patients. If the sex change from female to male does not generally entail vocal problems as a result of hormonotherapy, such is not the case the other way around. Thus, our patients are mostly men converting into women. Since the male larynx cannot be modified on an organic level, speech therapy is of the utmost importance in ensuring vocal adaptation. In this article, we briefly describe the complete gender transformation program, and detail the therapeutic approach supported by our unit. In addition to raising the fundamental frequency, we also focus on various factors such as articulation, intonation, vocabulary, and phrase structure, keeping in mind that the female voice is not only high pitched....