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

“There is an inner-city regional 6 to Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall approaching the station.”

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

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

Now Wagenblast — who is also making 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 transition in December 2022. “As of January 1, I plan to live full-time as a woman,” Wagenblast said in a social media post at the time.

Though she sounds a lot different now after seeing a speech therapist to develop her female voice — since estrogen doesn’t change the depth of a person’s voice — she admitted on Anna Sale’s podcast Death, Sex, and Money that she still her “disembodied” voice is used professionally.

“I’ve only been using this voice full-time since Jan. 1,” Wagenblast, who officially came out Dec. 28, told Sale. “Before that I was working on it, but most of my conversations were what I call my male voice, and I still use that voice professionally.”

Wagenblast recalls at the age of four realizing that she felt more like a girl than a boy, she said in her interview.

“I distinctly 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 that on my face,” she said.

‘It feels good. It felt natural. It felt like, “Why can’t I?:”

She can’t remember when she was taught that boys shouldn’t enjoy these things, but “I realized pretty quickly that that wasn’t okay.”

As a young child, when she was playing with his girlfriend, who lived across the street, she suggested they swap clothes. Afterwards, her friend’s brother told his parents, who then told Wagenblast’s family, who repeated to her that this was “unacceptable.”

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

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

“We agreed on a time and I sent her the phone number and she called me and I shared how I was feeling with someone for the first time and spoke to someone who I knew could understand how I was feeling.

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

She later revealed her identity to her friend in college and their relationship ended shortly thereafter. The next person she shared it with would be her future wife.

“It was clear that I was going to ask her to marry me, but I felt like if I was going to do that, she had to know about that part because I knew that by then this was never going to go away, and everyone, who I wanted to marry had to live with 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. Lucky for Wagenblast, “she told me she loves me.”

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

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

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

“It was about letting them know something I’ve always struggled with and wanted them to be aware of. I didn’t want them to hear that second hand if something happened to me. I didn’t want them to not have 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 would begin social transition shortly thereafter, first beginning hormone therapy and then purchasing more androgynous clothing and eventually legally changing her name to Bernadette.

“I’ve made what I feel like a rather slow but deliberate transition, and I would start changing things here and there,” she said.

“One of the first things I did was go on the lowest possible dose of hormone replacement therapy, hoping that maybe that would be enough for me to calm down. And I think just knowing that I now have estrogen in my bloodstream felt so good.”

Since the switch, Wagenblast has opted for shoulder-length blonde hair and continues to work on raising her voice.

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

She said it was “weird” recording the new announcements in her “male voice,” but found it “much easier” to switch between the two voices now.

The MTA – which operates the New York City Subway – supported its employee on social media by sharing a link to the podcast on his Instagram account and writing: “Meet Bernie Wagenblast! If you ride our numbered subway lines, you’ve probably heard it announce the arrival of your train!’

On the way to recording the podcast, Wagenblast dove into a subway station to “hear how it sounds these days.”

“It was a bit noisy, I thought,” she laughed. “But you have to be kind of loud in New York to be heard over all the noise.”

Wagenblast’s voice echoed in the ears of New Yorkers long before they began to hear her voice in the subway tunnels. She began her media career in her early 20s as a radio personality on two major city stations.

“Not only was I on the air in New York, 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 a situation like that,” she told Sale.

She’d wanted to be a broadcaster since fifth grade and was overjoyed to have finally made it.

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

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

When asked if developing her deeper voice bothers her, she said she “feels like I’ve unfortunately had to live my life as a man” and that it’s best to cultivate the voice that brings her to that job she wanted.

“So playing the deep voice was the best way to get ahead and do something I loved. And I think it was a distraction in a way,” Wagenblast said.

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