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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know why you'd want to disguise yourself as the opposite gender unless you could pull off the voice, your cover would be blown almost immediately.

Only if you speak. The solution then, if this were for some reason necessary, is "don't speak."

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You can train your voice to speak convincingly like a female. Transgender women do this all the time. The training does not take that long (a few months) and would be good for disguising your voice in a number of ways, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they did this.

In my limited experience they aren't that convincing.

I'm probably missing something here but how are you confident that you're not failing to identify the ones who are convincing?

a semi-related question, can people with training in music recognize the difference between a sopranist and a soprano?

because as a layperson i really can't.

It doesn't matter if a few are good at convincing, as long as most are unconvincing. Unless the people who are good at voice conversion are the same people who have done body shape modification aand wardrobe modification and are opposite the people who openly admit about their transness, it's easy to estimate what fraction of trans people are good at changing their voice.

Well this conversation was about spies and I doubt it is very important what percentage of trainee spies eventually pass.

I used to work at a place where there were a lot of transgender prostitutes outside in the evenings. They would proposition me as I walked by (as well as flash their parts at me sometimes). Some were pretty convincing regarding looks but when they spoke you could tell.

(I said "limited experience", but I suppose I probably have a fair bit more experience than most people).

Prostitutes likely wouldn’t have access to the tools and care needed to make their voice sound good.

But ultimately, most trans women are not prostitutes. I know a trans woman who is an executive at a major tech company and you would not even suspect her unless you dove into her LinkedIn profile and googled some of the trans charities she’s involved with.

Could be the toupee problem. You only notice the bad ones, and assume that all toupees are unconvincing? Meanwhile, the effective hairpieces slip by you undetected.

Relying on not having to speak is extremely sub-optimal. I'm not sure how many situations you can get in that you have both the time required as well as the need to disguise yourself as someone of the opposite gender.

You could pretend to be mute, of course, but this can attract more attention in certain scenarios.

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