The Cisgender Listening Subject in Sociolinguistic Perception: Transgender Identity Affects Sibilant Categorization in American English

Abstract

Research in speech perception has shown that a speaker's gender identity affects how sibilants are categorized by perceivers. Here, we explore how transgender identity affects sibilant perception in North American English. In a replication of the Strand experiment, 90 listeners heard a male and a female voice, but half of the listeners were told that the speakers were transgender. Listeners’ categorizations suggest that they expected transwomen to produce higher frequency /s/ than ciswomen. Additionally, when listeners did not personally know a trans person, this difference was magnified, and transmen were also expected to produce lower-frequency /s/ than cismen. We argue that the cisgender listening subject expects trans voices to diverge from cis voices, and this ideological expectation can be so pervasive that a perceiver's representations of sounds for trans speakers may differ from the sounds those trans speakers produce.