Voice of NYC Subway reveals she’s a trans woman, but says she’ll use her famous tones for work

By James On Apr 27, 2023

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

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

Wagenblast, 66, of Cranford, New Jersey, is an important part of the New York City subway system, but rarely could a commuter put a name or a face to the deep voice projected across the platform.

Now Wagenblast — who also makes the announcements for the AirTrain at Newark Liberty International Airport and the PATCO system in South Jersey and Philadelphia — has come out as a transgender woman.

She first announced her decision to switch in December 2022. “From January 1, I plan to live full-time as a woman,” Wagenblast said in a post on social media at the time.

While she sounds very different now after seeing a speech therapist to develop her female voice — since estrogen doesn’t change the depth of one’s voice — she admitted on Anna Sale’s podcast Death, sex and money that she still uses her “disembodied” voice professionally.

Every New Yorker or tourist has heard Bernie Wagenblast’s voice on the numbered subway lines of the Big Apple, but rarely could a commuter put a name or a face to the deep voice projected across the platform. Now Wagenblast — who also makes the announcements for the AirTrain at Newark Liberty International Airport and the PATCO system in South Jersey and Philadelphia — has come out as a transgender woman

“I’ve only been using this voice full-time since January 1,” Wagenblast, which officially came out on December 28, told Sale. “I’d worked on it before that, but most of my conversation was what I call my male voice, and I still use that voice professionally.”

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

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

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

She can’t remember when it was taught to her that guys shouldn’t enjoy those things, but “rather quickly I realized this wasn’t okay.”

While playing with his girlfriend, who lived across the street as a small child, she suggested a change of clothes. Then her friend’s brother told his parents, who then told Wagenblast’s family, who repeated to her that this was ‘not acceptable’.

She would first share her identity as a transgender woman with a teacher in a nearby town named Paula Grossman, who had transitioned and was fired as an educator for doing so.

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

“We set up a time and I sent her the phone number and she called me and for the first time ever I shared with someone how I felt and talked to someone who I knew could understand what I was feeling.

“There’s a downtown 6 local train to Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall approaching the station”: Wagenblast’s voice can be heard on subway platforms across the numbered lines, including the 4, 5, and 6 trains.

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

She would later tell her friend in college about her identity and their relationship ended soon after. The next person she shared it with would be her wife-to-be.

“Obviously I was going to propose to her, but I felt like if I wanted to do that, she had to know about this role because I knew this was never going to go away by then, and anyone I was going to marry would be should live with this to some extent,” she said on the podcast.

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

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

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

‘My three daughters are all married, so we had separate conversations with each of them. My wife and I met them together and talked about how I’ve always felt about myself and some of the things I did, but still at the time there was no plan for me to transition or change my look, or even at that point, my legal identity or gender,” she said.

“It was just letting them know something that I had always struggled with and I wanted them to be aware of that. I didn’t want them to hear this second hand if something happened to me. I didn’t want them to miss a chance to talk to me about it and ask me questions and really get to know their father on a much deeper level.”

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

Wagenblast would begin the social transition soon after, first starting hormone therapy and then buying more androgynous clothes, eventually legally changing her name to Bernadette.

“I did what I think is a rather slow but deliberate transition, and I was going to start changing things here and there,” she said.

“One of the first things I did was take the lowest possible dose of hormone replacement therapy, hoping that maybe that would be enough, that it would make me feel calm. And I think just knowing that I now had estrogen in my bloodstream felt so good.”

Since the transition, Wagenblast has opted for shoulder-length blond hair and continues to work on making her voice higher.

Wagenblast has been trying to use her new voice “more and more” so that it becomes “more natural,” but for now she’ll continue to use her famously soft tone for the subway announcements, and did so when asked to record the fresh audio which matches the new Newark airport terminal.

She said it was “strange” to record the new announcements in her “man’s voice,” but now found it “much easier” to switch between the two voices.

The MTA – which operates the NYC subway – supported his employee on social media, sharing a link to the podcast on his Instagram account and writing, “Meet Bernie Wagenblast! If you travel on our numbered subway lines, you’ve probably heard her announce your train’s arrival!’

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

Wagenblast came out publicly on Facebook and LinkedIn on Dec. 28, announcing that she would “start living full-time as a woman” on Jan. 1.

“It was a little loud I thought,” she laughed. “But you have to be quite loud in New York to stand out above all the other noise.”

“Not only was I on the air in New York, I was on two stations in New York on the ride, the time most people listen to [the] radio. So it was a dream come true to be in a situation like that,” she told Sale.

She wanted to be an announcer since fifth grade and was thrilled to finally have achieved it.

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

“When my voice started to deepen, I welcomed it. I knew that would sound more authoritative, and it sounded better than having a higher voice,” she said on the podcast.

When asked if developing her deeper voice bothered her, she said she “feels like unfortunately I’m going to have to live like a man all my life” and that it was best to cultivate the voice that would take her to the job she wanted.

So doing the deep voice was the best way to move forward and do something that I loved doing. And I think it was a distraction in some ways,” said Wagenblast.

While the subway announcement and her other professional work remain in her “male voice,” Wagenblast will explore the use of her female voice in her work on Transportation Radio and Cranford Radio.