Someone who wished to be anonymous messaged me this, and I asked if I could respond publicly, because I thought it was a very interesting question.
I have a probably offensive otherkin-related question that I’ve been sitting on for a long time, and you more than anyone else I know seem likely to a) not be upset by me asking, and b) be able to give me a satisfactory answer. But please don’t treat this as a demand for information or anything; only answer if you actually want to.
People compare species identification to gender identification, but as far as I can tell there’s a pretty fundamental difference in what’s meant by “I identify as a woman” and “I identify as a cat”, say. When I tell people I’m a woman, I want them to consider me a fully-fledged member of the category of women, treat me as they would any other woman, etc. (Which doesn’t mean I want to be subject to misogyny! But that’s a tangent.) That doesn’t really seem to apply to transspecies identification?
Like right now, I’m interacting with you in a way that’s fundamentally different from how I would interact with another lizard (or with a cisspecies lizard, if you prefer). And beyond that, treating people as literal members of their kintypes seems to mess with our ability to describe the world in some pretty serious ways. Like people talk about having fictional or extinct kintypes, but I don’t even know what “fictional” or “extinct” would even mean if we consider those people to be actual living elves and dinosaurs.
So I guess my question is, what does it look like for someone to maximally respect/take seriously your identity? As in, what’s the ideal, not what you feel like you can reasonably ask of people. Since the obvious answer doesn’t really seem to apply.
Not offensive at all! And there are a number of answers, depending on what kind of world we’re assuming: the world as it currently is, or a future world with the kind of transition technology I hope will exist someday.
You’re right in that there’s a pretty huge difference between transgender and transspecies people in the sense that right now, it’s not feasible for the latter to live fully as a member of their identified group, and many (though not all) species-dysphoric people wouldn’t wish to.
Transitioning from a “male”-coded body and social role to a female one is a big change, one that can result in losing friends, family, financial stability– but it doesn’t result in completely removing the person from the sphere of everything they’ve ever known and placing them in an entirely new environment. A person raised as a boy in British Columbia still knows how to live as a girl in British Columbia; it isn’t all that much different. Even if you’re forced to move, even if your social skills learned in one gender role sometimes fail you in another, you’re still human. Most of your toolset still works.
A person raised as a human, who’s lived for 32 years in a human body, has no idea how to live as a reptile. Even if someone were to flip a switch on their Lizard-A-Tron 3000 and turn me into one right now, I sure hope they’d poof the appropriate reptilian development and survival knowledge into my head too, or I’d be screwed. And since that technology doesn’t currently exist, and I have no choice but to be in the body of a human, my transspeciesness can’t quite manifest in the same way.
Right now, taking on the social role of a reptile would basically mean becoming something that, to the human society I was born into, would seem unacceptably distorted, to the point that if I did so I would probably be branded as a lawbreaker and be imprisoned. (Imagine a human-looking person scurrying around the city on all fours, ducking under bushes and doing angry little lizard push-ups at people who stepped in my path.) There are a few people who’ve basically taken on an animal social role (see Shaun Ellis, Charles Foster, and the Leopard Man), but almost always with similarly-sized mammals like wolves and lions. I can’t go and live among iguanas in the wild; even if I knew what to do, I’m simply too big to fit in.
So in many ways, I can’t be fully a reptile, and to do so would require letting go of so much that I currently have that it would essentially be death and rebirth. Some people are okay with that idea, and if full human-to-animal or human-to-fillintheblank transitions existed, they’d run off into the wild and never look back. I’ve thought about it, and some days I’m closer to that feeling than others. But at the end of the day, I’ve been doing this human thing long enough that I’d probably prefer to keep my friends and family until I pop off this mortal coil.
If I could poof into a partially-reptilian body that could keep doing human things, however, hell yes I’d go for it. I obviously don’t mind doing human things, since I’m using the internet; a lot of my dysphoria is body-based, being related to how I feel physically and how I look to others, so that would work well for me. So assuming the tech existed, what I’d probably want to transition into would be something that was mostly reptilian in appearance, but anthropomorphic. A furry, or a Zootopia person, basically. I would expect that others would do similarly, and we’d create our own little Zootopian enclaves (probably in the Bay Area), and there’d be a word for us that wouldn’t be reptile but wouldn’t be human either and we’d want to be called by that. (I’d imagine “reptile-person” or “anthropomorphic reptile” would cut it.) Alternatively, a fully quadruped reptile, but with a humanlike brain and some ability to work things like keyboards and doors (even if through assistive tech), would also work.
As things stand now, I envision myself as a reptile, but I also participate fully in human society. I accept that that dual nature is my lot in life, and I wouldn’t want people to pretend otherwise. For example, if I were to feel settled on the idea that my identity was dinosaurian, I wouldn’t say that that means dinosaurs are not extinct: “dinosaurs” and “extinction” in these senses obviously mean something unrelated to me. However, I also don’t consider myself human. I guess I consider myself a third thing, something not yet scientifically classified because it doesn’t physically or culturally exist yet.
I’d ideally like people to treat me as if the theoretical reptile-person culture above were a thing I was transitioning into, because it is a thing I would transition into, if it were possible. (In fact, I imagine I’ll be there at its inception, helping to define it.) So I’d like them to picture me as a reptile-person behind the keyboard (I don’t much mind what kind - some people have said they see me as a little dragon or gecko running around on the keyboard, others see me as an anthro lizard or a full-blown dragon typing with claws, and I’m fine with any of these), and to think of me as a member of a group of people that obviously isn’t Reptiles As Zoologists Define Them, but also isn’t human. That group doesn’t exist, but since I’m confident it will, I’m not sure it’s any less accurate to think of me as a reptile-person – reptilian in some aspects, humanlike in others– than it is to picture a trans woman who wishes to transition, but hasn’t yet, as having the face shape and hair and figure that she wishes to have and is intending to acquire to the extent that it’s possible. (Not all trans women want to be thought of this way, of course, but some do.)
Also, supporting things that will help that community come about, like speaking in favour of morphological freedom or simply acknowledging the fact that some people feel the need for those communities and want them to exist, would be great. This doesn’t make sense from any one individual, but I’d really like society to understand that my identity is a thing and that some people with this identity want to transition, and to do studies on it, create therapeutic programs for those who are psychologically distressed by it, etc.
In a way, I guess it’s a lot like being a non-binary androgynous person. In the sense that intersex people and NBA folks tend to see themselves as separate groups, there isn’t anything that it is to be physically, culturally and socially NBA (at least in US/UK cultures) other than what we make up as we go along. There aren’t any existing non-binary social roles to slot into; there’s nothing that it’s physically like except to say that the bodies of people who are NBA are NBA bodies, and some people have modified those bodies along intersex-like lines and some haven’t. NBA is not intersex, just as reptile otherkin is not reptile, and it’s accurate to think of it as its own thing. But some NBA people wish some features of being intersex, wish to have been born intersex, and so while it’s not accurate to call them intersex (both because that word means something different and because it’s its own thing with its own complications and challenges), it’s also reasonable to think of them as “intersex-like” in some ways.
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