JAV starlet Yume Ono made headlines back in March when she publicly revealed that she’s transgender. In a recent interview with Nikkan Spa!, she went into more detail about the path that led her there, including the years she spent living legally as a man.
Born in Okinawa, Ono said she felt a deep disconnect with her gender from a young age. By her second year of high school the discomfort became overwhelming. She started wearing the male gakuran school uniform, got a medical diagnosis, and began testosterone injections. With her parents’ help she also changed her name on the family register. “I just couldn’t accept my female sex,” she said. “I wanted to rewrite the social facts.”
The change didn’t bring the peace she was looking for. Realizing she still couldn’t become a “complete man,” she fell into despair and even battled suicidal thoughts. “I just wanted to live normally. I thought it would be better to be dead.” Her high school homeroom teacher, who had studied transgender issues, explained the situation to her classmates. They reacted more calmly than she expected, even as her voice deepened from the hormones.
After high school she entered a nursing university legally registered as a man. A psychiatric nursing instructor there helped her start thinking of gender as a spectrum involving physical sex, mental gender, and how someone presents to the world. In her third year she decided to stop the testosterone. The main reason was the severe acne it caused — she says she fell victim to “lookism” — and she also recognized that presenting as female came with certain social advantages. “My body was born female, my mind is male, but because of lookism and its advantages, my outward expression is female,” she explained.
The hormones had other effects too. “The testosterone made my sex drive explode in high school. I was wild, meeting men on dating apps,” she said. She later spent four years living with an older male university classmate who acted as an ally, shielding her from prejudice and helping her rebuild her self-esteem.
After graduating she worked as a nurse at an STD clinic before debuting in AV. When she came out as transgender in March she expected online backlash, but instead got overwhelming support from fans. These days she says she lives completely stress-free and sees the adult video industry as a place with relatively little prejudice around sex. “Finding a place where you can live without stress isn’t running away,” she said. “For me, that was working as a sexy actress.” She now hopes to use her experience to support younger people dealing with similar gender struggles.