I’ve rewritten this post like 3 times and at this point I think I just need to post it to get it out of my drafts lol. Anyway! I’ve seen quite a few posts over the last few months that I feel are misrepresenting and making assumptions about the type of physical therianthropy I experience so I wanted to share my own thoughts about it. I’m talking specifically about the philosophy and experience that gets simplified as ‘I am a nonhuman animal therefore my body is nonhuman’.
I’ve seen a few posts now talking about this as if it’s a copycat version or less serious form of physical nonhumanity when compared to, for example, clinical zoanthropy or holothere identities and like. First of all I don’t think it’s useful to compare these things to each other in the first place since they’re all pretty different experiences of physical nonhumanity. Secondly ‘I am a nonhuman animal therefore my body is nonhuman’ is actually something I take very seriously and when I say ‘I am physically a dog’ I mean it.
I don’t look like a theriform dog and my body also functions differently to that of a theriform dog, but I do still view my body as fully canine. My own experience of physical nonhumanity started with the desire to examine and challenge the social constructs of both humanity and of species classification and where I fit into all of that as a non-theriform canine. My gender transition also involved a similar process of changing the ways I viewed gender and sex as classification systems, and changing the way I view my own body and the relationship I have with it as a dog was a massive step in my transspecies transition too. Back in 2020 when I first started exploring the idea of being a physically nonhuman therian it really wasn’t a standard or established way to talk about therianthropy in any of the community spaces I was active in (and it still isn’t in many of them!). My goal when I first started exploring these ideas was to challenge the ways therians were (and still are!) expected to have to constantly acknowledge that our bodies are physically human when I didn’t feel that way about myself.
I’m definitely not the first or only nonhuman to have thought about this but for me personally it was a conclusion I reached about my own relationship with my body by myself that was based on my experiences exploring sex and gender as a trans guy. ‘I’m nonhuman therefore my body is nonhuman’ isn’t just words that mean nothing in the same way that ‘I’m physically a man because I identify as a man’ isn’t just words that mean nothing - I’m a man because I reject the ways gender and sex have historically been socially constructed to exclude me from manhood and I’m a dog because I reject the idea that I have to view my body as physically human. My first public posts about being a physically identifying therian and having a canine body are dated to 3 months before the coining of the term endel and I think the community discussions that led to the term endel being coined were actually part of what made me feel comfortable enough to be open about my own physical nonhumanity.
I’m sure not every physical therian with the same philosophy as me will feel as strongly about this as I do but they also shouldn’t have to for their identity to be respected as it’s own thing and not a less serious version of something else. I do wonder if some of the conflict and misunderstanding I’ve seen is coming from the fact that ‘physically nonhuman’ is a phrase in the English language with a number of different meanings and interpretations while a lot of other nonhuman and alterhuman terms are created and defined specifically for the communities they represent. I understand why folks who’s physical nonhumanity involves them having the appearance, physical organs and dna of theriform animals want their own separate community spaces but if I’m not ‘physically nonhuman’ because my body and organs don’t look or function the same as a theriform dog then the only alternative is to insist that I’m physically human which, as I have stated above, I am not. On tumblr I normally use the transspecies and therian tags instead of ‘physical nonhuman’ because it’s more in line with the intended audience for my posts, but I still have the right to describe myself as physically canine because that’s what I am.
[Xazz’s 30 Day Dragon challenge + Kal’s 30 Day Lore Challenge]
Day 4:
Favorite double color dragon + A traveler
Not many of my doubles are travelers, it seems! But for today I’m saying that Raisa counts! He is a Harpy Scholar who met Klec and Rereer while on a field study about beast clan distribution, culture, and disruption from dragons. But that also means he’s been all over! (He’s an orca/orca/crimson stained.)
I was just thinking about how my nonhumanity doesn’t really affect my life in any major ways and it suddenly hit me that actually my nonhumanity affects Most things in my life, I’ve just adapted my entire life around being a dog so I don’t really notice how canine I am anymore ^^’ I had the same realisation about my neurodivergence + mental illness recently where I forget how much they affect my life until I’m in an unfamiliar situation or I suddenly loose one of my coping strategies because I’ve shaped my entire life and routine around effectively managing my symptoms. now that I’m actually thinking about it everything from the ways I communicate to the way I dress, the things I like to do and even my job is affected by me being a dog :-) Like I ‘mask’ my dogness in certain situations just like I mask my neurodivergence and mental illness but it’s just so much a part of my daily life that I don’t even notice it most of the time. I really should try using the term transpecies for myself bc I already identify as physically nonhuman but I guess I live socially as a human-dog most of the time too. Taking testosterone is definitely something that’s given me a lot of canine species euphoria too so I’ve really just been living my best dogthing life this year~<3
I’m a physically identifying therian and a dog alter in a system and I kind of thought that seeing our body as fully canine only applied to me, but I’ve heard from both human and cat headmates now that they get species dysphoria when they front from being in a canine body instead of from being in a human body which was interesting! The majority of alters who regularly front in our system are dogs so maybe that’s why it’s taken us so long to notice that? We’ve also committed more to being transpecies this year so maybe that’s influencing it too. I feel like I have more to say abt this but ough brainfog so I’ll just leave it here for now ^^’
headcanon that brambleclaw got a fair few scars while training in the dark forest (most of which were from tigerstar) so he covered them with golden flowers in remembrance of his mother
