Association between the feeling of vocal comfort and social security when wearing a protective mask: a study with transgender people.

The sample was a convenience sample recruited through social movement contacts and passed on by participants, so it may not represent transgender people in general, and there was no control group of cisgender people or of people not wearing masks. Everything is self-reported, including the three yes or no questions the authors wrote themselves, so the study cannot show that masks caused any of the comfort, voice changes or sense of safety reported. The study measured mask use, comfort, voice and social safety at a single point in time, so no cause and effect can be drawn. The paper does not report what type of masks people wore or how long they wore them, so the results cannot be tied to a particular kind of mask. The regression is reported confusingly: one sentence names the feeling of social safety as the predictor rather than the outcome, while the table names comfort with the mask, and only one predictor was kept in the final model. People over 60 were excluded, and the authors say future work should use more specific exclusion criteria, such as separating out people who use their voice professionally, and longer follow-up.

The authors state that there was no financial support and nothing to declare.

Do not read this as evidence that masks protect transgender people from discrimination or that masks are good for the voice. It is a one-off survey of 85 people with no comparison group, so it can only show that comfort with the mask and feeling socially safer went together, not that the mask caused either one.