 Próswpeth... mae byw'r papurau iawn, yn y rhan o g regimes rydyn ni'n erm... mae'n amlwg allaniaeth gennym yn y nifer yn hirio arfer. Felly, mae'n rhan o'r pryn yw, at wedi yn ei gwaith ym mwy o bobl, yn y rhan o'r ymnwys i'u hwnnw, yn y pwbl pan pobthalau. yn y pwbl sy'n gwybod yn y pwbl maen nhw'n llawer yn y rhan o'r prydol. felly mae hynny yn y pwbl sy'n gwybodaeth oherwydd bod yn fy nghynghwyl gwahan o'ch cyllid iawn yn y rhan o'r company I teach voice in university and moved into specialising in trans voice in communication in 2006. I'm doing some consultancy work with the Tower Stock Trust in London which runs the largest gender clinic in the UK. Traditional voice therapy has always approached voice, learning voice skills and then working through a hierarchy of learning to transfer that voice into lived situations, so single words, phrases, sentences, conversations, then moving to role play. I began thinking about using improv and so the colleague that I worked with and I have been doing some initial studies and we've had some fantastic results using improv in the group work that we did. I think I just want to talk about why for me it's so exciting and it works really well for people who are trying to modify their voices as part of their transition. For those of you who don't know, not all people who are transitioning will come and see us. Some people transition very happily and never see them. So the people we work with have gender dysphoria which is the distress around their identity, around the fact that there's a lack of congruence between the gender they identify with and the sex that they were assigned natively. So that distress is what really people come and we work with and around voice and communication is where I'm going next. There are lots of things that actually create a lack of congruence and therefore anxiety particular to the voice. Just before I move on to voice, we live generally in a binary world. I think what's really interesting and not too long ago people used to talk about speaking with a male voice, speaking with a female voice. I've been having conversations these last few days with people about both the safety and the danger of the dichotomous world that we live in and the absolute division between male voice and female voice is certainly not useful at all for the people that I work with and it creates a very black and white view about what women should sound like, what men should sound like and that poses problems not only for people who are transitioning as trans women, trans men but also people living on binary who are gender diverse. So we tend, we're trying to move towards thinking about voice as a continuum from the most masculine to the most feminine. Before I talk about improv, let's just have a look, there we are. One of those, your vocal folds, you might call them vocal folds, they're vocal folds. So a nice healthy pair of vocal folds there. And of course part of the work is physical, it's muscular. We have to train, help people train their voices. There's no two ways around it, there's no shortcut. People have to learn about their instruments and they have to work with producing a different target pitch, different resonance. So we're talking about pitch, resonance, voice quality and then what happens when you take that voice into speech. So here's a set of vocal folds working very helpily. But that was a set, of course, for opera singers who were using voice in a very healthy and sustainable way. But one of the phenomena that you might not know about voice is that it's not the voice at all, vocal folds aren't the voice at all. Anyone know what the vocal folds are called? Elimination of, they're a safety valve. So they protect the airway. So their primary function is to protect the airway. And so what happens is that they will want to close. So basically these healthy vocal folds here, but also these what we call false vocal folds either side, will want to actually close, tight lock, protect the airway anytime there's a perceived threat. Now what that means is it could be a perceived threat as in standing during the presentation where voice becomes dry, breathing becomes more rapid and so the voice tries to lock that down. It might be a psychological threat, so going into a situation, a psychosocial, back to where the situation is complex and messy and unpredictable like all of human communication and somebody is trying to practice a modified voice and it locks together three minutes ago. So just close your eyes and just try your own voice as a completely effortless voice. So your most effortless voice just by counting very easily 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Some people went on to 10, can you just count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? No effort, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now those of you who have a more masculine voice you might want to put that effort into raising voice to sound more feminine, not too high, just push it a little bit in terms of effort. Those of you with a more feminine voice might want to try and use that effort to push your voice down. So this time really feel the different effort it takes just to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 if you're going into a more feminine voice or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 if you're pushing it down into a masculine voice. And then just back to your effortless voice, just effortless voice, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. OK, so the voice likes to, it likes to be effortless. And then during education particularly it likes to be effortless. And of course you're used to your voices going all over the place. When you did that lovely siren at the beginning of my talk you were effortlessly gliding through your range up and down using a lot of flexibility. For people who hate their voices and feel that their voice does not match who they are there's a huge amount of fear associated with moving anywhere. So they may not like the voice they've got but actually moving to anything else is also extremely frightening because it brings with it that whole connection between voice and emotion. And so moving towards putting voice, we can train voice, we can use exercises and pitch resonance but actually when we come to put voice into lived experience for me improvise has been absolutely fantastic even the little work that we've done so far in really helping to free up and allow people to play with their voices and to be who they are. So for me above all it's about people come with a lot of history of thinking they should sound a certain way. They might come wanting the perfect voice and the perfect set of communication skills to match the gender that they prefer and identify with. And basically that's not going to happen. It's certainly not going to happen straight away, it takes a lot of hard work. And also when people meet social situations then if you put too much into a different voice then authenticity tends to be sacrificed. So the kind of improv games that we're playing in groups are about using the whole continuum of not only voice but also other communication skills. So people can actually use a lot of facial expression with that fear, they're smiling, they may have quite rigid physical non-verbal behaviour so we can play with a lot of different exercises. For me I think I have really enjoyed using Paul's... I've really enjoyed using Paul's life path and that's what I'm going to take back because I think the structure, freedom within that structure for me makes a lot of sense. But if people are interested in voice I can talk to you more about that. There's a great book if you work with trans people. I'm not a gender police person but I am actually interested when people can be mindful of the language that they use and when we did a lovely exercise yesterday to record to the hype and the rant and so on, instantly there was kind of, you can be a hype man or a hype woman obviously. Little things like that, it's not about huge transphobia but it's about little tiny bits of language that instantly can make people feel shame and then self-silence and avoid talking. So to transform your language for me is lovely, thanks. And as we are moving slowly into the break we have Pascal having some short announcement for you. All right, thank you very much.