Hi there and welcome to the community thanks for your post! Here are some thoughts for ya that you will hopefully find useful:

Firstly, I recommend treating yourself with grace and focus on progress, not perfection. In the early stages you're not trying to create a fully "feminine" sound, you're trying to learn how to LISTEN to various vocal aspects and then hopefully can learn to mimic them after hearing them and then juxtapose the physical changes you're making when mimicking a sound to that of your voice when you're not changing it at all. This process can help you learn how to further distill your mimicry into usable tools.

My second piece of advice is to start by establishing a framework of fundamental understanding. Within the teaching community, we recommend that people learn the following concepts to gain a fundamental grasp of what you're trying to do. Those concepts are the following:

1) pitch (and specifically variance rather than raising your pitch to a particular threshold and what vocal registers are) 2) vocal weight 3) vocal size 4) fullness 5) prosody

Start small and pick things up one at a time. Remember to start by focusing on controlling these elements and remember to take the feedback of others with a grain of salt and listen more to what your body is telling you and what your ears are telling you.

A good resource for learning about this is Selene's Vocal Archive . Selene does a great job of not only curating a lot of really high-quality research, but also presents them in a way that is easy to understand. Also given the fact that it's all presented in an audio-format will help you to hear the sounds and try to mimic them, which again can be a great way to learn.

Another major resource that you're going to need is community. R/transvoice can be a place for good information but it's also a bit of a melting pot between various approaches to teaching gender-affirming voice. This means that sometimes you'll get seemingly contradictory information from people which in the earlier stages can create a lot of confusion. I would suggest looking into joining one of the following communities:

1)the Vocal Team on Discord
2) Online Vocal Coach (OVC) 3) Seattle Voice Lab Discord Server

Joining one of these communities provides a streamlined source of consistent information, a space to seek feedback, a space to practice your voice around others, and often low-cost or entirely free group-classes and lessons.

Also start listening to the contents of people's voices in your area to really help ascertain how people in your region typically speak and how their voices sound. This will help you apply these skills in a more applicable way to where you live.

Finally, don't be afraid to reach out to a voice coach if you're ever struggling and need some external help. Many of us are truly passionate about making a difference in our community and actively love teaching people what we know about our voices! Furthermore, if you struggle financially, know that many of us will be more than happy to help out in ways that don't always strictly require a financial commitment. For example, the Vocal Team gives bi-weekly or weekly free group lessons for anyone interested through their discord with no strings attached. These can be a great way to learn about these topics, and even gain some feedback and insight to what your voice is sounding like as well.

I hope this helps, rooting for you!