2016 | Page 17 of 30 | Queer As Cat

[A]sexuality, Mental [Un]health, Queer[ness]

that time i did nothing: assumed consent & retraction thereof

July 11, 2016 / 1 Comment

content warning: non-graphic description of a questionable consent situation; non-graphic talk of sex, rape & trauma; self-gaslighting. this is the third and final post in a series of posts in which i’m writing about my personal experiences with sexual abuse / violence and consent issues. the first post on sexual abuse / violence can be found here. the second post on consent issues and asexuality can be found here. this post is about something that happened during a past relationship in which consent is / was questionable and the ramifications of it. consent. not a topic that i’m at all well informed about, but about which i’m writing a lot at the moment as i attempt to unpack and navigate things from my past that i have up until this point avoided doing. as i mentioned in my previous post, i’ve been in two long-term relationships spanning 9 years in total, 5…

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Vesper H.

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reflecting back on years of consent without information about asexuality

July 11, 2016 / 1 Comment

content warning: mentions of sex and abuse; talk of consent issues. this is the second of what has now become three posts that i’m writing about my personal experiences with sexual abuse / violence and consent issues, the first of which can be found here. this post focuses on how my ability to consent may or may not have been affected by not knowing about the existence of asexuality prior to consenting to sex in past relationships. even though there are those who insist that consent is as simple as “yes” or “no,” that there is no gray area involved– you either consented or you didn’t– for lots of people consent can be more complicated than that. in my time on Tumblr, various posts have come across my dashboard on the topic of consent and/or agency, specifically in the context of being asexual. sometimes when i read one of those posts, some…

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Vesper H.

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new look, same old Queer As Cat.

July 10, 2016 / No Comments

finally got off my lazy ass and designed a new logo / header for Queer As Cat, which has now been carried over to all the places that my exhausted brain can think of at the moment. there’s still stuff to do (need to update the APOC links page, my profile, etc etc), but the biggest changes have been made. what do you think…? i’m afraid to even ask. it’s such a huge change in design that it’s even going to take time for it to grow on me. i’ve wanted to move away from the halfassed design i had before for years now. yeah, it was halfassed and shitty (never imagined that this blog or my YouTube would amount to something worth investing time & effort into designing), but more than anything i wanted to move away from flags / colors because there are way too many flags /…

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Vesper H.

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A.F.K.
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…the state of this blog, basically.
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temporary hiatus
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. . . . . . . . .

July 7, 2016 / No Comments

…finished watching Orange Is The New Black season 4 last night and am still reeling from it the next day. a weird state of being both emotional and numb at the same time. it’s not helping that i keep listening to the song. why do i do this to myself? ;(

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Vesper H.

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navigating trans misogyny in the Japanese lesbian community…

July 4, 2016 / No Comments

translation: Accepting participants for the Ibaraki Lesbian Outdoor Meetup ★ [ …… ] Women loving women, FtMs, non-binary people & those questioning, let’s relax and chat together! However, this time only those who are registered as single and female on their family register are allowed, sorry. (Trying to gradually be a little more lax, but… ?) ….and THIS is why i almost always end up having to go all the way to Tokyo to participate in stuff, because the most (seemingly) active part of the LGBT community here (the lesbian community) is so goddamn transphobic. for the last two meetups, the OP was like “no trans women, sorry!” and that was the end of it. this time it doesn’t even mention trans women at all, only providing enough wiggle room for trans men and non-binary people provided they have “F” on their family register… am i or people like me supposed to…

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Vesper H.

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Q&A: “i’m a non-binary person and sometimes i feel weird calling myself bi/pan?”

July 3, 2016 / No Comments

anonymous said: so, i’m a non-binary (more specifically trans-masculine) person and sometimes i feel weird calling myself bi/pan? like, i have a hard time figuring out what to call my sexuality, since i feel that many of the labels for sexuality aren’t really designed with nb people in mind. i just… don’t know if you’ve ever had similar feelings? oh definitely, i have felt that way before. in fact, i was at a non-binary meeting yesterday and this was a subject that came up. some people took no issue with bi, while others did. there was talk of how pan was coined in response to (the assumption of) bi being binarist and erasing or exclusionary of non-binary people and how people felt about that. some felt it was a good thing that pan was coined, others had no opinion as they don’t identify as either and were sorely missing the…

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Vesper H.

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Q&A: “…the way mainstream media sexualizes wlw relationships so dramatically is making it really hard for me to figure out…”

July 3, 2016 / No Comments

anonymous said: Hi. I’m pretty sure I’m bi, but I’m on the ace spectrum and the way mainstream media sexualizes wlw relationships so dramatically is making it really hard for me to figure everything out. Does anyone else struggle with this? How do I get past it? i can’t speak for anyone else but myself, but at the same time i am fairly certain that many people (ace spectrum or not, woman themself or not) struggle with the hypersexualization of women in general in the media and trying to figure out one’s own feelings in spite of that hypersexualization. however, you’re not just anyone. trying to figure out your feelings in the midst of all this hypersexualization as a woman loving woman (wlw) yourself (or so i assume; apologies if i’m wrong) makes the stuff in the media feel all the more potent and difficult to navigate, i think. wlw…

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Vesper H.

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Q&A: “i’m a little confused why you tagged something as pangender which also has problematic implications…”

July 3, 2016 / No Comments

anonymous said: so i was reading your blog and since you are aware of the problematic connotations of third gender i’m a little confused why you tagged something as pangender which also has problematic implications without knowing what post you’re referring to, it’s hard for me to really tell you why i tagged any particular post that way. that said, if i do a tag search on my blog, the last post that i tagged with #pangender was an ask from 2015 in which an anon asked me how i feel about the term pangender, which you may be interested in reading, anon. either way, it’s a given that i would tag that post #pangender, just as i’m going to do with this post. i’m going to assume you ran into some old post of mine from 2014 or older since aside from the aforementioned ask (and the related response posts), that…

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Vesper H.

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Snapchat rant #163

July 2, 2016 / No Comments

…meanwhile, i went to an Xジェンダーオフ会 / non-binary meetup in Tokyo and snapped parts of my day on Snapchat. thought it might be interesting to some.

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Vesper H.

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the trauma i never knew i had: navigating childhood trauma 29 years after the fact

July 1, 2016 / No Comments

content warning: explicit talk of childhood sexual abuse & religous trauma without going into detail; explicit mentions of acephobia, biphobia, homophobia this is one of two posts that i’m going to (hopefully) post on the topic of sexual abuse / violence and consent issues. this specific post is a submission to @resourcesforacesurvivors‘ series on Intersectional Ace Survivor Stories and pertains to navigating childhood trauma and religious family as a not-so-young-anymore black, non-binary, bi / pan asexual. while i have talked briefly about the topic of this post in a video, for the most part the experiences discussed in both posts are ones that i’m only just now sitting down and thinking about. please bear with me as i try to put things into words. i’ll be honest with you. i’m extremely hesitant about posting this or drawing any kind of connection between myself and sexual abuse. why? well, for one, my online…

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Vesper H.

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