Sometimes I wonder about the nonhumans who say they don’t want to be called a person. Imo “person” does not imply humanness except to anthropocentrics who can’t see things other than humans as having personhood. I’m a wolf and I’m also a person. My wolfness does not take away my personhood; my being a person doesn’t mean I’m not a wolf. It feels like a very anthropocentric worldview to see “person” and read “human.”
And. I wouldn’t say this to someone actively telling me not to call them a person, but: if you’re not a person then you don’t have the agency to decide what you are or aren’t called. Right? Is personhood not our individual sovereignty? Personhood is our agency, our possession of rights, our consciousness. If you don’t have that then do you have the right to say you aren’t a person? To me saying “I’m not a person” reads as saying “i am not the kind of thing that gets to decide what kind of thing it is”
I’m ALSO very curious about the demographics of nonhumans who say they aren’t people. How many are white, able bodied, and/or neurotypical? I feel like a good amount are probably at least one of those things and that probably is affecting their view of the word “person” and what it might be like to not be a person
