Everyone who would call Shivani and Payal would address them as “Sir”. The shock would come later at the face-to-face meeting. Despite going through several gender-affirming surgeries, vaginoplasty, hormone therapies, and chest feminisations, there was still something holding them back from being completely female.

“I got my sex change operation done from Delhi. My doctor mentioned that I would need to take hormone medicines before the surgery which I had for 10 months and then got my gender-affirming surgery done. But still, people would give me weird looks and address me as if they are talking to a man. That irritated me and I started researching if changing my voice was possible,” says Shivani Gupta, a transwoman who lives in Andheri.

Recounting a similar experience is Payal Nikumb, another transwoman who hails from Shirpur town of Dhule district in Maharashtra, and got her sex change operation done in Jalgaon. “I looked like a woman, but I wasn’t sounding like one. So, people would not know whether to consider me a girl or a boy. And right from the day I decided that I want to transform into a woman, I had decided that I would change everything — from my appearance to my voice to also being capable of biologically bearing a child. Thus, a few years after my gender-affirming surgeries, I looked for doctors who would help me change my voice,” shares the 29-year-old.