NYC subway voice reveals she’s trans, but says she’ll use her famous tones for work

“The downtown local 6 train to Brooklyn Bridge/City is approaching the station.”

Any New Yorker or tourist has heard the voice of Bernie Wagenblast echoing throughout the Big Apple’s numbered subway lines, telling riders when a train is approaching a station or how far away the next one is.

Wagenblast, 66, of Cranford, New Jersey, is a staple of New York’s subway system, but few commuters can place a name or a face in the deep voice projected across the platform.

Now, Wagenblast, who also voices the AirTrain at Newark Liberty International Airport and the PATCO system in South Jersey and Philadelphia, has come out as transgender.

She first announced her decision to transition in December 2022. “Starting January 1st, I plan to start living as a woman full-time,” Wagenblast announced on social media at the time.

Although she now sounds a lot different after a speech therapist developed her feminine voice — since estrogen doesn’t change the depth of a person’s voice — she admitted to Anna Sayles’ Death, Sex and Money podcast that she still uses her “disembodied” voice. professionally.

“I’ve only been using this voice full-time since January 1st,” Sale told Wagenblast, which officially came out on December 28th. “Before that I was working on it, but most of my conversations were in what I call my boyfriend voice, and professionally I still use that voice.”

Wagenblast remembers being four years old when she started to realize she felt more like a girl than a boy, she said in an interview.

“I distinctly remember being at my grandmother’s house, sitting in front of her toilet, putting some necklaces on, and I think she had powder by the toilet and put it on my face,” she said.

‘Feel good. It felt natural. It felt like “why can’t I do this?:”

She doesn’t remember when it was instilled in her that boys shouldn’t enjoy these things, but “pretty soon I realized that wasn’t right.”

As a child, while playing with his girlfriend who lived across the street, she suggested they swap clothes. Her friend’s brother then told her parents, who then told Wagenblast’s family, who told her again that this was not “acceptable.”

She first shared her transgender identity with a teacher in a nearby town, Paula Grossman, who had transitioned and was later fired as a teacher.

Wagenblast found her information in the phone book and sent her a letter, and later made a phone call on a payphone half a mile from her home.

“We set up a time and I sent her a phone number and she called me and it was the first time I told someone how I felt and talked to someone who I thought could understand what I was feeling.

“And I have to give her a lot of credit because I was underage and she took risks,” she said.

She later told a college friend about her identity, and their relationship ended shortly thereafter. The next person she shared it with would be her soon-to-be wife.

“It was clear that I was going to ask her to marry me, but I felt that if I was going to do it, she needed to know about that part, because I knew that by then it would never go away, and whoever I was going to marry , you’re going to have to live with it to some extent,” she told the podcast.

She took her then-girlfriend to Liberty State Park in New Jersey and broke down in tears, fearing it would be the end of their relationship. Fortunately for Wagenblast, “she told me she loved me.”

“She told me it was okay, that we could deal with it, that it wasn’t the end of our relationship,” Wagenblast said. At the time, the couple had only been dating for a few months. “It was much better than I could have hoped for at the time.”

They will have three children, with whom Wagenblast shared her secret four years ago.

“All three of my daughters are married, so we had a separate conversation with each one. My wife and I met with them and talked about how I’ve always felt about myself and some of the things I do, but at the time I didn’t have any plans to transition or change my appearance, or even at that point my legal identity or gender,” she said.

“It was just letting them know something that I’ve always struggled with and wanting them to be aware of that. I didn’t want them to hear it from the other side if something happened to me. I didn’t want them to not have a chance talk to me about it, ask me questions and really get to know my dad on a much deeper level.

Soon after, Wagenblast would begin social transitions, first starting hormone therapy and then buying more androgynous clothing, eventually legally changing her name to Bernadette.

“I did what I think is a pretty slow but conscious transition and I started to change things here and there,” she said.

“One of the first things I did was put myself on the lowest possible dose of hormone replacement therapy, hoping that maybe that would be enough and it would put me at ease. And I think just knowing that I now had estrogen in my bloodstream felt so OK good.

Since transitioning, Wagenblast has opted for shoulder-length blonde hair and continues to work on getting her voice higher.

Wagenblast has been trying to use her new voice “more and more” to make it “more natural,” but for now she will continue to use her famous soft tone for subway announcements, which she did when asked to record. new audio to go along with Newark’s new airport terminal.

She said it was “weird” to record the new announcements in her “boyfriend’s voice”, but she now finds it “much easier” to switch between the two voices.

The MTA, which runs the NYC subway, supported its employee on social media, sharing a link to the podcast on its Instagram account, writing: “Meet Bernie Wagenblast! If you ride our numbered subway lines, you may have heard him announce the arrival of your train!

On his way to record the podcast, Wagenblast ducked into a subway station to “hear what it sounds like these days.”

“I thought it was a bit loud,” she laughed. “But you have to be loud in New York to be heard above all the other noise.”

Wagenblast’s voice rang in the ears of New Yorkers long before they began to hear her voice in the subway tunnels. She began her media career in the early 1920s as a radio personality on two major city stations.

“Not only was I on the air in New York, but I was on two New York stations during drive time, which is when most people listen [the] radio. So, it was a dream come true to be in this situation,” she told Seile.

She wanted to be a broadcaster since the fifth grade and was thrilled to finally achieve it.

As a child, she “picked up the newspaper and read it out loud to try to develop that kind of voice.”

“When my voice started getting deeper, I welcomed it. I knew it would sound more authoritative, and it sounded better than a higher voice,” she told the podcast.

When asked if developing a deeper voice hindered her, she said that “unfortunately, I have to live as a man for the rest of my life” and it was best to cultivate a voice that would lead her to the work she wanted.

“So playing deep voice was the best way to move forward and do something that I loved. And I think it was somewhat of a distraction,” Wagenblast said.

While the subway announcement and her other professional work will remain in her “guy voice,” Wagenblast will explore using her feminine voice in her work at Transportation Radio and Cranford Radio.