NIH Funds Trans Professor’s App to Help People Sound Like Their Chosen Gender

Panicky media coverage of the Trump administration’s cuts to medical research grants warns it will threaten the nation’s place as a scientific leader and put millions of American lives at risk, but a recent award illustrates the need for the president’s plan to reassess some of the projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The agency annually doles out most of its $48 billion annual budget to more than 300,000 researchers at 2,500 universities, medical schools and other institutions in every state. Since Trump got reelected, NIH funding has decreased by around $3 billion compared to the same period last year and it has caused quite a ruckus among the mainstream media as well as grant recipients who unanimously claim it is a matter of life and death.

This example, like many others examined by Judicial Watch, contradicts that assertion. It involves NIH grants of over half a million dollars so a transgender professor at a public university could create smartphone or computer-based software to help transgender individuals sound like their chosen gender. The first batch of NIH cash, $213,878, was awarded in 2024 with three additional awards of $114,998, $100,000, and $116,149 in fiscal year 2025, which started in October. The official purpose of the four awards is “Improving the accessibility of transgender voice training with visual-acoustic biofeedback,” according to the NIH. The recipient is a transgender—a biological man who now identifies as a woman— engineering and computer science professor at the University of Cincinnati formerly known as D. Novak when he identified as male and now known as Vesna Novak. The goal is to help trans people speak in tone that matches their gender expression.

“Transgender and gender diverse people exhibit a significantly lower quality of life than the general public,” the NIH writes in its grant announcement. “One reason for this is voice dysphoria: distress because a person’s voice does not match their gender identity (e.g., trans women with deep voices).” Reducing the “voice-gender incongruence can improve quality of life but is difficult to achieve,” the agency claims, adding that it can be accomplished with surgery though it is expensive and invasive. Gender-affirming voice and communication training (GAVT) with a speech-language pathologist can be effective but it is time-consuming and costly. There is also a lack of qualified providers so the government decided to fund the project to create smartphone or computer-based software that delivers information about voice, suggests exercises, and provides feedback on exercise performance. The trans professor’s project is expected to develop novel software that combines two main indicators of voice femininity and masculinity, according to the NIH which claims it funds research that enhances health, lengthens life, and reduces illness and disability.

The software is available for free to provide transgender people with critical tools for GAVT and can be expanded with other key features, the NIH reveals. “In the long term, GAVT software may become an essential tool to reduce gender dysphoria in transgender and gender diverse individuals, thus improving quality of life for this marginalized population,” the agency’s grant document states. “Furthermore, advancements in this area may generalize to computer-aided therapy for communication disorders, increasing potential impact.” To justify the grant the college researchers claim that their project is relevant to public health because it will provide critical insight into how smartphone or computer-based software can be used to help transgender people train their voices. “Transgender people often wish to modify their voice to match their gender, but voice training administered by experts is expensive and often inaccessible,” they explain in the grant document. “Our project will thus create and evaluate the first transgender voice training software that combines real-time information about vocal pitch and resonance with structured exercises.”

It is not clear if the taxpayer dollars continued to flow under the 2025 allocation after the Trump administration’s NIH funding cuts, but the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars have already gone to the trans voice app. Last summer a Cincinnati newspaper reported on the new publicly-funded app developed at the local university to help trans people make voices more masculine or feminine. In the story Professor Novak reveals that, while trans men often notice a change in their voice after taking testosterone estrogen does nothing for trans women’s voices, which can be stressful and scary.