Translation, Adaptation, and Preliminary Validation of Dacakis and Davies' "Transsexual Voice Questionnaire (Male to Female)" in French.

Transgender MtF people (trans women) consult otorhinolaryngologists and vocologists with the aim of feminizing their voice and being consistently perceived as women. Treatment of these trans women always begins with a vocal assessment that is relatively unspecific as it was originally constructed for individuals with dysphonia.

OBJECTIVES: This study examines the subjective portion of the assessment and specifically the self-assessment questionnaire. There is no French-language questionnaire designed to identify the issues facing people who want voice feminization and quantify the impact of their voice disorder on their daily lives. We present a translation and adaption into French of the questionnaire developed by Dacakis et al [6].

METHODS: This work follows the World Health Organization recommendations [12] regarding translation. Thirty-six Belgian and French trans women took part in this study.

RESULTS: The results show excellent repeatability and reliability, while the construct validity measures show that the items correlate with six areas of concern for trans women identified by Davies and Johnson [7] in a previous study. The domains are the following: effect of voice on ease of social interaction, effect of voice on emotions, relationship between voice and gender identity, effort and concentration required to produce voice, physical aspects of voice production, and pitch. Concurrent validity could not be measured owing to lack of sufficiently detailed stories.

CONCLUSION: The psychometric properties of the French version of the questionnaire are acceptable. The questionnaire can be used as is in daily clinical practice.