Being Nonbinary in the ASMR Roleplay Community

Hello all! Today's Updates with Topi is brought to you by Rollie, who is very photogenic, and Topi, who didn't care to have her picture taken today. 

This is something I've wanted to talk about for a while and I might make a video about this a little later but yes, here are my thoughts because I do identify as nonbinay and the asmr roleplay community is a very binary community. 

I use F4 tags because my voice is feminine and for the most part I play feminine characters, which I don’t really mind. For me it’s just acting and I prefer motherly characters, and since I mostly write my own scripts I have control over how my characters present and I definitely find comfort in that. It’s definitely hard and I definitely get misgendered a lot, but at least for me, Rest is different than me. All my close friends know and respect my pronouns and that’s what matters.

I do think it’s an added challenge in this area of YouTube but I love what I do and that overrules the discomfort of being misgendered from time to time. 

I have no problem with femininity as long as I control how much. That way I don’t go over what I’m comfortable with. Even then is a level of disassociating from Rest so it feels more comfortable for me. Usually when people refer to me in the comments or whatever, they refer to the character, and since the character is female, they use she/her. This way I don’t feel disrespected bc they’re referring to a character, not me. 

Non-binary and trans audios, from my experience and research, don’t do well. The tags are more to show what voice the actor has than what they identify as. For example one of the major channels I follow is trans, she’s a girl, but has a masculine voice and uses M4 tags bc her F4 tags don’t do well bc ppl don’t expect a masculine voice. Which makes sense to me.

I really like being a nurturing caring character, bc im like that as a person. I rly care about the people that listen to me and I want that to come across in the videos. The whole feminine ties to that aren’t because I wouldn’t prefer being myself or more masculine, feminine is simply what people expect. I don’t really care how well the video does, but I like to get at least 1k views, and in my experience, using tags that match my voice make it easier. 

I’m not sure how my community would react to a non binary or male character with my voice. I’m not opposed to it, but I have enough people in my life who don’t accept me. At the moment I love my community and I feel like it’s a safe place. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize it. That might change, but right now, it’s not worth it.

But yeah, TL:DR, I'm nonbinary but I play female characters because that's what works on YouTube and, for now, I'm ok with that but it's a challenge.