Yikes lol, therians have a right to exist but it is a wack belief system for sure. What’s wild is I totally get the appeal of playing pretend and wearing masks and hanging with ya mates. What I don’t get is the leap to it being a full blown spiritual belief. As someone who doesn’t know better, therians come across as just super intense furries.
Wikipedia link for those who are confused: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therian
So… it’s basically furry spirituality? 🤔
what I’ve heard about otherkin is that it’s like being trans but your dysphoria is about feeling like a dragon in a human’s body rather than feeling like a man in a woman’s body
Except that being trans typically doesn’t entail a quasi-religious/magical understanding of gender.
Me being a therian doesn’t imply that either. I have dysphoria related to my species, phantom sensations related to parts I don’t have like big cat ears or a tail. These phantom sensations can be very unpleasant too, downright painful. Also the lack of these parts feels inherently wrong.
I don’t entirely know why I feel like this either, but I found the therian community and related to a lot of similar experiences they’ve had with this.
Yeah it shares more in common with a gender identity. For example I do experience a kind of species dysphoria if you will. I even get phantom ears and phantom tail sensations which is unnerving and also just makes me more sad I don’t have those parts.
Can’t work the same way though. By now trans is pretty well explainable given all the evidence of how brain structure differs between e.g. cis women trans men (i.e. trans men’s brains do show male characteristics connected to the male human phenotype). Even though we need a really big study yet (the evidence fromes from three small ones) the trail is there. So our mind probably tries to make sense of the signals those “lower-level” brain functions emit, very angrily so when they’re presented with hormones they’re not made for.
Hence for otherkin it got to be quite different. We still don’t know anything (like, more than a few %) about the nature of identity and “self” yet given it’s an emergent property, that’s why I ended up with “furry spirituality” as it made most sense to me.
Isn’t brain sex contested? I mean I’m NonBinary so that already puts me in a weird spot, but also I do indeed have dysphoria related to physical characteristics that don’t have to do with gender like my ears and my tail, or rather lack of them. I actually get phantom sensations and pain, and it can be pretty upsetting and also pretty severe. Tail pain can be excruciating, but there’s nothing physiologically wrong with me (that doctors can tell) that would cause these sensations, nor would explain why I have so much discomfort around the lack of these very non-human traits.
I don’t think Non-Binary is a weird spot or anything. To my knowledge the whole brain structure thingy is on a spectrum anyway (I mean, makes most sense, doesn’t it? Any sex trait can be somewhere inbetween), and then there’s how every individual interprets what their mind and their environment tells them. The whole societal gender idea sucks anyway.
Phantom pains are just awful… for the brain emotional and physical pain is the same anyway, it gets treated the very same way. Extreme pain about it will eventually get experienced in the way it makes most sense to you, so if you feel there should be something and you’re in constant pain it’s missing eventually your brain will elevate the pain into your conscious the way it makes most sense to you. 😟
Sorry if this sounds cold to anyone, it’s just my way to make heads or tails of it.
My humour is awful too.
I don’t understand yet
Not this shit again
I don’t understand why you are seemingly bothered by who I am
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You can’t identify as an animal in any more meaningful way than an animal can identify itself as a human
How do you know what animals identify as? Cats who grew up surrounded by dogs often time behave like them and see themselves as a part of the pack. What you identity as is up to you, on itself it’s not really a claim about biology.
Now, if you believe in past lives and stuff you are being silly IMO, but I also believe in weird shit that makes living more comfortable so who am I to judge.
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