Meet New York City's Trans Voice Of Transit
The "Voice Of New York" Belongs To A Transgender Woman
If you’ve ever ridden the New York City subway, or perhaps AirTrain Newark, AirTrain JFK, or even just listened to the travelers' information station system at Newark or JFK Airports, then chances are high you’re quite familiar with the measured tone of Bernie Wagenblast, reminding you to "Please step away from the platform edge" or that the next "Northbound 1 train to Van Cortlandt park will be arriving in two minutes". Wagenblast has often been dubbed “the voice of New York”, greeting & guiding the paths of millions of commuting New Yorkers on the daily. Within the past week, however, major news outlets—including CBS News, The Guardian, & them, began reporting on the fact that Wagenblast has, as of January 2023, come out publicly as a transgender woman.
This now means that one of the most famous voices to reverberate through New York City’s subway stations and airports each and every day belongs to that of a transgender woman. To me, someone who aims to document and highlight physical queer spaces across New York City, this immediately read as major news...for what happens when Queer Happened Here in NYC...becomes Queer Happened EVERYWHERE? For the subway, itself a physical space of gathering for nearly every New Yorker on the regular, is comprised of railways that spiderweb out all across the five-boroughs, reaching nearly every corner of the city and affecting the lives of each resident, tourist, and visitor who ride go for a ride. And now that space is officially guided by a queer voice (and arguably has been for years).
Bernie Wagenblast was born September 1, 1956, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Wagenblast has been a lifelong resident of Cranford, New Jersey, attending Cranford High School, and going on to graduate from Seton Hall University, where she was active in the college's radio station, WSOU (South Orange, NJ), serving as the news director there in 1976–1977, and station manager in 1977–1978. In 2016, she was inducted into WSOU's Hall of Fame.
After transitioning in December 2022, decades after she recorded some of the city’s most iconic transportation lines, Bernie Wagenblast publicly came out on WNYC’s “Death, Sex & Money” podcast as a transgender woman. For decades, Wagenblast’s voice —which is also used by the AirTrain at Newark Airport, South Philadelphia’s Port Authority Transit Corporation and several other major transit institutions—is low, authoritative and benign all at once and has provided Wagenblast with both a career & livelihood. Yet she knows now that her transformation won’t be complete unless she replaces her “guy voice” with one that has the vocal register, timbre & tone of a woman.
“Because my voice has played such a critical role in my life, to me it's important that my voice sound as authentically female as it can", said Wagenblast. These days, Wagenblast’s voice indeed does sound quite different, after she began spending time working with a vocal therapist. Wagenblast always knew from an early age she wanted to be a girl, but was also pressured into thinking that desire was unacceptable from the very beginning. As a teenager, the most vocal expression Wagenblast ever made about her gender was to reach out to the only publicly trans woman she knew: Paula Grossman, a music teacher who once instructed Meryl Streep and who was fired from her job in 1971 for medically transitioning.
Wagenblast arranged to speak with Grossman on a nearby pay phone, seeking support from one of the only adults she felt like she could trust. “It was so helpful to me to have someone that I could confide in, someone that I could talk to and someone I knew who understood what I was feeling.” But over the ensuing decades, Wagenblast threw herself into playing the male role she felt obligated to fulfill, and carved out a home for herself in radio, emulating the dulcet masculine tones of older male news announcers who had come before her. Since coming out, Wagenblast has indicated however, that transitioning has been a lifelong dream. Wagenblast explained that 2017 was a turning point for her, a recounting an interesting sequence of events that finally led her to take the leap:
"It was a very innocent thing. I had seen on some late night comedy shows showing pictures of NFL quarterbacks as women and they were using an app [FaceApp] that had just come out to do that". After trying the app out herself, she said, "this was the first time I saw what I felt was a realistic representation of what I might look like." A few years ago, she came out to her daughters and their husbands and, more recently, to her grandchildren. "All of the people I shared this with, none of them had any inkling that this was something I had been living with all my life.”
Now at 66 years old, Wagenblast, who still goes by Bernie (short for Bernadette, Bernard is her dead name), is happier than ever. "There was not an hour of my waking life probably from when I was a little kid to when I socially transitioned that I didn't think about this at least in passing—every hour it was constantly there," she said. "The acceptance and support that I've had has just blown me away. That has been the best part of this."
