I was going to make a long-detailed essay about the discourse, but honestly, I really am just so tired of it all. I am tired of us being a source of discussion and debate. I am tired of everyone and anyone needing to have a âtakeâ on our existence and our community even if they never post in our tags otherwise. I do not want to turn this into discourse and just vent my experiences which is why it has no title or word count.
My experience with therianthropy has been a really quite isolated one. I have clinical zoanthropy, and because of that I was never really welcomed into normal therian spaces, more of a tolerated interloper so long as I understood that my experience was not real in the same way theirs was and I did all the double bookkeeping and other dances they demanded.
Therianthropy is a pretty wide range of experiences, though the acceptable range is often quite narrow. I was often told that therians are a sort of Human+, and while that leaves room for plenty of people, it also excludes very many. There are those of use whose experiences are much less human with an animal soul or of psychological reasons but is far more visceral and literal.
When I came to tumblr I was not expecting to find others like me, it was mostly a way for me to log my process on constructing this whale suit. But I did find others like me. If you have not been so horrendously isolated and rejected by what is supposed to be your own community, it is hard to explain how freeing and comforting it is to find others and community. I imagine to some extent; a lot of therians can relate to this being rejected from wider society and finding therian spaces.
However, since then, I am feeling more and more pushed out of the spaces we curated for ourselves. It has happened with physical nonhuman, it has happened with holothere (not that I personally connected to that term), people have in the past at least appeared to appropriate zoanthrope and clinical zoanthrope, and it is happening now with transspecies. Most of the people using physical nonhuman even six months ago were talking about visceral physical experiences, but now much of the tag and much of the discussion is focused purely on this philosophical notion of âI identify as [X], therefore I am [X], therefore my body is that of [X]â.
This has happened for a lot of terms and subcommunities. Therians seem to have this overly entitled attitude and demanding constantly to be included in communities and practices and that they cater to them. Although this discussion is on how therians appropriate terms and take over spaces, this sense of entitlement extends beyond them to continued use of slurs towards intersex people to describe their type or the use of a spirit-creature from a number of northern American indigenous cultures despite both those groups asking repeatedly for people to stop. It also extends to the creation and demand of the use of the term alterhuman, or even of the term therian itself demanding others submit to those terms even if at the same time making them unwelcome.
There is this attempt of overinclusion to make sure that anyone can feel represented by a term. Physical nonhuman has gone from having a wide range of meanings to being dominated entirely by the philosophical argument. Even as we can celebrate physical nonhumans being more accepted in the community, looking beyond a surface level still shows the same biases. People with âdelusionsâ that is that our animality is literal and not of metaphor were pushed out of the community â it is hardly a month since discussions of a zoanthrope exodus were filling our tags. Similar has happened with the term holothere. There was even a thing recently of methylation as figurative.
This is happening again with transspecies. The tag even a month ago focused far more on physical experiences and processes or plans to transition (at least for the parts that werenât porn bots or radqueer tagspam). There was a trend recently of species transition plans. At first it was cool to see different ideas people had, but it very quickly turned into consumption and shopping lists. Since then, the tag has been different â less physical and more metaphor and I and others are starting to feel pushed out of our community again.
[Therians,] Not every term has to be for you. Not every community has to cater to you. Not every space has to include you or your experience. In these sorts of spaces, therians, you -are- the hegemonic power. You find a new term, appropriate it, and effectively colonise the community, demand definitions change to meet you, and then throw ablism back at us until we feel we have to leave.
It is not wrong for us to want our own communities and spaces to discuss our experiences that are unique to us. My experience as a zoanthrope and as someone who is transspecies is not something I can simply take off. My struggle to properly interact and imitate human behaviour. My crutches and gait from a body that does not fully understand what legs are cannot be taken off. The gloves I cover my hands in so I do not see my human skin are something I can literally remove, but metaphorically I cannot when I do literally remove my gloves (either because of heat or need for function) I need to be careful not to look at my hands where I would see the human flesh (though this has improved over the past year). My schizophrenia which the humans use to explain how I experience the world is not something I can take off. It defines how I exist, how I interact with the humans around me, what care I can receive, and even what opportunities I have. This in particular also affects how and where I can interact with the therian community and how they in turn treat me. There is nothing metaphorical about my experiences, and my hopes to return to the water are very literal.
The reality for myself and others is that we cannot relate as fully to others whose identity is less literal. I am very glad for the people I have met here in particular Sonar and Sigr, I am glad to no longer be alone. Still as I look at the feed and my tags, I am watching as my community is again taken over. I am reminded over and over that to many therians we will never really be equal or welcome and we will never have our spaces. They will constantly be taken over as therians seek terms they think will make their experience sound more ârealâ or unique or special while further subjugating marginalised sections of their own community.
I am watching seemingly in real time spaces that were once special for me and welcoming to those like me be taken over and destroyed. The freedom and community I once felt is being destroyed by entitled therians demanding every space. And I am left now feeling once again isolated on here except for my kind friends in the personal messages.
With how things are going this is really only going to end one way. Eventually our communities will go from semi-open and public, to private and closed. We will have to secure ourselves and our communities to be allowed to exist as anything beyond lunatics and delusional. We will also likely need to bring back the harsh grilling people used to experience so the people that join our communities are genuine and will not try to appropriate and dominate our spaces. And unfortunately, this means that inevitably, people will be hurt. Some will be hurt in the way I was - a crushing isolation and understanding you are not really welcome anywhere and unable to find others like yourself. And others will be hurt by bad actors who use the new situation for power and control as people commonly reference with P-shifters. If things continue as they do, this -is- an inevitable outcome. We have already been forced out of many tags, and others have sustained harassment and have left the site, some forums have even already started to be made, there are discussions of making a new term though that seems only a temporary measure until that too is taken from us. Just let us alone.
