Saskia Lilienfeld (SL) Speech Therapy

Saskia is my GO-TO when it comes to anything related to gender affirming voice and communication therapy or voice training. I've happily referred numerous clients to her for quite some time now. Not only are they one of the most knowledgeable and experienced speech therapists in South Africa when it comes to gender affirming care, she's also a lovely, compassionate professional who ensures every client is encouraged to be their most authentic selves with individualized goals and techniques. I can't recommend them enough! She also provides more generalised speech therapy services which include feeding and swallowing, neurological rehab, fluency therapy and public speaking skills. An all-round powerhouse!

Masculinization Speech Therapy: I live in Durban and have been seeing Saskia through video calls. In the past 6 months Saskia has given me an entire toolkit for lowering my voice and helped me with a variety of techniques to make my voice sound more masc, and comfortable at the same time.What I love about Saskia's approach is that they don't only work with gender binaries: Saskia consistently asks me HOW I WANT my voice to sound (stressing that it does not need to fit a stereotypical box to pass).I often hear FTM's ask if speech therapy is worth the money, and my honest response is YES! It does make a significant difference. Even though I am on HRT, without Saskia i wouldn't know how to make the most of my voice. It helped me understand my dysphoria, and as I hear my voice learning new tricks, lessened it.Currently, we are working on my confidence to implement the skills i have learned in a wider social setting; There's more to Saskia's speech therapy than just making the right sounds.