I really love how you reflect on your own biases here, as well as ways in which you've been pressured to silence your true voice. My dad's family were all self-hating "hillbillies" who had moved north and tried to assimilate. They discouraged and mocked one another's Appalachian accents as a means of policing eachother into emulating the 'neutral' Midwestern dialect. I internalized that sense of shame even though I wasn't from Appalachia and didn't have the same accent. That foundational embarrassment in who we were still carried over.

As a kid I was told my voice was too masculine pretty often, and kids in choir were sometimes shocked that when I sang, I sang like a boy. I created a fake-feminine voice for myself by the time I was a teenager so I'd stop standing out. It strained my vocal chords and gave me laryngitis. The breaking point was when I became a professor and couldn't project a fake, high pitched voice for hours per day. I was literally losing the ability to speak. Reconnecting with my lower pitch is one of the first steps toward gender transition I made.

Like you, I've been oblivious in the past to other peoples' struggles with tone and voice policing, despite my own firsthand brushes with it. I'm also reminded of how as white Americans we're conditioned to perceive Black voices as aggressive, loud, rude -- and how dangerous it can be when we misperceive Black people in those ways, or punish them for being assertive. So many nasty ways these biases manifest.