Out of curiosity, is most of your exposure to people doing voice training for trans folks online?

My default assumption would be most providers are cis, but I have approximately zero exposure to online voice resources and my limited exposure to IRL professionals has been entirely cis people. (A quick google does not tell me whether the authors of The Voice Book for Trans and Non-Binary People are cis, which seems to be the “modern” book rec.)

VisualStudio is different from VSCode.

What does stealth mean for you? What aspects have you worrying that it’ll result in isolation?

I’ll be honest, I have a bias here – I do find being in situations where I feel I can’t talk about being trans isolating and find/found stealth (or even the state of “waiting to make up my mind”) fairly unhealthy. But my definition of stealth is something like “willing to take steps to ensure others do not find out one is trans even in scenarios where safety isn’t a consideration”. I probably fit some people’s working definitions of stealth, though – I generally tell people I’m trans in two scenarios: it’s immediately relevant or I feel like our relationship has become close enough that I would like them to know. That has been how things have evolved naturally as I’ve gotten further from the “active” phase of transition and moved around the country. I actively talk about being trans at work (okay, that’s maybe no one’s definition of stealth), but only in diversity-focused contexts, so do my immediate coworkers know I’m trans? Nope, they don’t show up to that stuff. I personally value having trans friends/community, but if that’s not important to you, you’re not obligated to seek out trans people in a new place (and, honestly, a lot of trans spaces are very transition-focused by necessity, so finding community can be hard if you’re in a more steady-state transition-wise).

On the top surgery front, I have a friend group who figured out I was trans after, oh, a decade of knowing me. My entire medical transition, including top surgery, took place in front of their faces. I met them at a time where it was a tossup how people read my gender and it was more important to me then that they read me as a guy than that I be out, and then a decade went by and I’d became close to them (i.e. at least some entered the category of “people I actively want to know I’m trans”) and it was like “So, uh, funny story…”

tl;dr Moving as an adult is kind of isolating by definition and you have to rebuild community. If you don’t seek out trans community as part of that rebuilding, odds are you’ll end up as stealth as you want.