Agreement in Voice Gender Perception Between Cisgender and Transgender/Gender-Diverse Listeners: An Observational...

Voice is a central marker of gender identity and strongly shapes social perception. For transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals, feedback from peers and clinicians can support gender affirmation. Little is known about how much TGD and cisgender listeners agree in their perceptions of vocal gender, or how consistent judgments are within each group. We therefore examined agreement in vocal gender perception between TGD and cisgender listeners, and evaluated the reliability of judgments within each listener group.

Forty voice recordings with user comments were extracted from r/transvoice, a discussion forum ('subreddit') on the social media site Reddit used by TGD people to discuss voice. Comments from TGD Reddit users were coded into four gender-perception categories (masculine, feminine, gender-neutral, undecided). Twenty-six cisgender listeners rated the same recordings using the same four categories. Weighted percentage scores for each category were calculated for each recording, which provided continuous variables suitable for Spearman's correlation analysis. Within-group reliability was assessed using Krippendorff's alpha (nominal) with bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals (CI). The average percent agreement was calculated.

Strong, statistically significant correlations were found between TGD and cisgender ratings for weighted masculine (r_s = 0.72, P < 0.001) and feminine (r_s = 0.75, P < 0.001) voices. Agreement was weaker and non-significant for weighted gender-neutral ratings (r_s = 0.28, P = 0.77). No correlation analysis was performed for undecided, since no TGD listeners selected this option. Within-group reliability was fair for cisgender listeners (α = 0.40, 95% CI [0.13, 0.73]; 78% consensus) and moderate for TGD listeners (α = 0.54, 95% CI [0.17, 0.79]; 84% consensus).

TGD and cisgender listeners showed high agreement when judging masculine or feminine voices, while both groups varied in judgments of gender-neutral voices. Stronger internal consistency within TGD listeners suggests shared experiences may shape more convergent perceptions of vocal gender.