impostor.
…it’s always disconcerting to be reminded of how people seem to have an impression of me as a person / my personality that doesn’t at all reflect who i am in reality.
…it’s always disconcerting to be reminded of how people seem to have an impression of me as a person / my personality that doesn’t at all reflect who i am in reality.
it’s only been 48 hours, but i’m finally on T! 62.5 mg/ml of Enarmon Depot (エナルモンデポー) every two weeks, to be specific. The T Files is a series of videos documenting my journey to get testosterone in Japan and wherever i may end up with it from there. while this series may be helpful for those who are interested in the process of getting HRT (more specifically, testosterone) in Japan, it’s also just my personal playlist of [shit]videos about my adventures with T for my own future reference. watch at your own digression. :p more like 72+ hours on T now, but who’s counting. only YouTube, who immediately flagged this video as inappropriate for some advertisers, presumably just because it had “testosterone” and “HRT” in it. sigh.
posted with the permission of a friend, the above gem is but one of many examples of antiblack racism, transphobia and binarism that my friend is subjected to regularly on Grindr in Osaka and Tokyo. sharing it here as i often hear of this kind of thing happening on Grindr in English speaking countries, but see little about it beyond that. antiblackness is not unique to America or other English speaking countries, it is universal. and least there be any false assumptions made based on the above example being in English, my friend receives similar messages from non-English speakers in Japanese and has also received such messages during their time living in South Korea. this is Old News that is apparently Breaking News to some, but rest assured it most certainly is not Fake News.
ever tried to come out to someone only to be met with “i already knew that”? before last week, i couldn’t say that i have, but when a coworker thinks their “gaydar” is on-point, but that gaydar ever-so-predictably fails to extend beyond just “GAY”, mental eye rolling, story time and a mini word vomit ensue. what does it mean to be “visibly queer” and why is it that more often than not ‘queer’ is often taken to be synonymous with “gay”? and is there any such thing as “visibly trans” or “visibly non-binary”? don’t expect to find any answers here, as it took me considerable effort just to limit my apathetic word vomit to 5 minutes zzz… two days post-recording and much sleep deprivation later…
when i first started this channel not long after having just began to explore and embrace my gender, i didn’t consider HRT / testosterone to even be a card on the table for me to play. HRT was something that others did and that i was judged for not wanting to do; it was for people who experienced “real”, bodily dysphoria, not people like me whose dysphoria was largely derivative of society and whose complicated relationship with the very idea of medically “transitioning” was used as a means of invalidation by others. i can’t help but imagine 2013 Vesper looking at 2017 Vesper with silent, candid irony as they brush aside the years of others’ bullshit to finally confront their own.
as usual, i find myself turning to YouTube as a resource for information only to be reminded that…. YouTube is So Damn White. most things non-binary and / or trans are So Damn White. a search for “non-binary” and “testosterone” turns up almost nothing but skinny, short haired, white, non-binary people, none of whom i can really see myself in. which is nothing new. that’s part of the reason i’m on YouTube in the first place. beyond that, a bigger problem that i find myself faced with is that the very image / concept of “androgyny” or stereotypical “non-binary appearance” is inherently linked to whiteness. i want people to pause before they misgender me (seeing as how they will inevitably misgender me regardless) and the best way to bring about that is, presumably, androgynous appearance. however, androgyny feels unobtainable to me as a black person, because no matter what i…
after years of whining and moaning about it, i’m finally doing it; i’ll be starting HRT soon– and in Japan, no less. 2014 Vesper, who made an entire video about NOT “transitioning” in Japan, is eating their words. what’s made me change my mind now? how does one start HRT in Japan? as a non-binary person?? Gender Identity Disorder??? in this video, i talk about all the above, as well as recap the “highlights” of my recent appointment with a psychologist to get diagnosed with GID; a necessary first step to [legally] starting HRT from scratch in Japan. [ cw: vague sex mention @ 11:27 ~ 11:55; reproductive body stuff ] …took me long enough to get this video up, geez.
thank you @gc2b-apparel for the awesome sale! and thank you to BetterHelp.com, who sponsored this video about online therapy. most of all, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who watched it and to those who went a step further and even gave BetterHelp a try, you are The Awesomest Awesome to ever Awesome. i want you all to know that it’s entirely thanks to you that i can even afford these new binders at all. after nearly 4 years of wearing the same binders, which don’t even really bind at all anymore– which in turn has caused me many “ffffff– gotta layer! ffffff– layering does nothing– FFFFF” days– it’s more than about time that i get new ones. upcoming binder review once they make it to Japan and i’ve had time to try them out? probably. perhaps what i’m looking forward to the most is seeing how Nude No. 2 looks against my skin…
so, after going to an appointment with my psychiatrist and blabbering about how much being around my family fucks me up whenever i go “home” for the holidays, which i’d be doing in less than a month’s time, causing him to be like “but what if you relapse??? consider upping your meds before you go???” and me being like “at least i’m on meds at all this time around so lolololol nah”– i felt the need to just…. really DO something yesterday. so i did the something. and the something will happen 4realz for realz tomorrow. so yeah, Anxiety word vomit blogging at 9:35pm at Starbucks. over the past three weeks or so i’ve been emailing a clinic that had been recommended to me by a friend re: starting HRT. after three weeks of no response to said emails, i decided to sneak out of work yesterday (because the clinic is seemingly only…