that one study that was talking about how the “gay voice” can be viewed as just what post-testosterone based puberty voices sound like when not trained into culturally masculine modes of inflection and intonation. I think that’s a great masculinity based example of the same phenomenon as discussed in my previous post. Like the reason speaking in that way is gender nonconforming is likely because it reveals the effort and practice that goes into “natural” adult masculinity. it draws attention to the fact that the narrow allowable masculinity is constructed and necessarily learned in order to be perfected.
interesting flipside, feminine inflections are probably learned and constructed too. i have some feminine cis female coworkers who have very "boyish" voices who would probably read very masculine if their voices are deeper. i distinctly recall, as a teenager, realizing that the way i talked was different than my female classmates and starting to inflect more to "fit in". so the real default is probably a wide variation that gets shoved into these different boxes by a lot of pressure
Bringing the citation onto the main post: Gaudio, Rudolf P. "Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men" American Speech, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 30-57
