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Building solidarity between nonhumans and other alterhuman communities

vagabondsun - 2019-12-30T21:49:16.977Z
This topic came up out of a conversation me and the Flock were having, namely: what’s up with sysmedicalists in the alterhuman community? We talked about the fact that there a lot of pockets where ‘alterhuman’ is still being treated as synonymous with ‘nonhuman’, and how that allows people to discard a lot of the radically inclusive rhetoric of the term (if they’re even aware that exists to begin with). The Flock posited that:

“…alterhuman as an umbrella should be treated similarly to queer and LGBTQ+ as terms bc queer gives u the permissiveness to talk about things that are broadly queer, but LGBTQetc+ sort of reminds us that we’re a coalition of many different groups, some even with very different needs (see: trans needs vs cis lgb+ needs)
so alterhuman gives us the wiggle room to talk about things that are broadly alterhuman, but I see nonhumans and people with alternative experiences of humanity as two groups and right now only one of those groups is being counted in alterhuman”

We asked of ourselves: how do we bridge the gap in the coalition? I have some thoughts myself (which I’ll put in their own post) but I really want to hear what other people think about this - what their observations are about how the word alterhuman is used, how different groups are represented under it (especially comparing how it’s used on tumblr to the broader landscape), and how we can promote more mutual respect and empowerment among those groups that may not initially feel that. What do y’all think?

vagabondsun - 2019-12-30T22:02:27.722Z
I think, continuing with the comparisons to the LGBT+ communities for a sec: the main reason that there’s as much comraderie as there is between trans folks and cis LGB+ folks is because of the huge intersectionality of orientation of gender. I mean this both in the sense that there are a lot of trans LGB+ people, and in that it’s pretty easy to point out where gender-as-a-social-phenomenon and orientation-as-a-social-phenomenon are intertwined.

So by analogy, I think a concrete place to start for alterhumans would be to

Because we do! The coining of ‘alterhuman’ was a response to the observation that nonhumans, plurals and fictionfolk (among others) have been forming communities together since the inception of the internet, really. It’s not a coincidence that we end up in the same spaces. So what’s uniting us there?

I think that could be a topic unto itself, really, and I might fork it into one if there’s enough interest. But at the moment I’m a little more interested in the material, in my point 1, and in any other practical ideas or thoughtful observations regarding the state of things people might have.

The_Flock - 2020-01-09T06:50:29.253Z
Replying as the human-alterhuman facet here, I think there also needs to be more attention paid to those of us who are alterhuman, but not nonhuman. Part of the issue is that alterhuman is being used synonymously with nonhuman, sometimes even synonymously with otherkin, and there are people who would fall under the alterhuman umbrella who are alienated or upset by the implications of inherent nonhumanity we’ve got kinda tangled up in alterhuman as a word?

Because, just as one example, human fictionkin certainly exist and still find enough commonality with otherkin experience to be called 'kin in the first place. So there must be something there besides just the nonhumanity that the two groups have in common. And I’d bet those commonalities extend to adjacent groups.

Here’s some things I feel I, as a human-alterhuman, have in common with nonhuman-alterhumans:

I guess all this rambling points to alterhumans as being united by alternative experiences of Selfhood, embodiment, relationship to humanity, a preoccupation with subjective worlds and ideas of self, challenging what it means to be a “human” and a “person” (sometimes on a very political level), and generally all falling under the category of weird ontological Stuff. I think it’s also important to note that many many alterhumans are targeted by ableism and LGBTQ+phobia, either as a direct attack based in actual identity, or as a general attack based in assumptions and ideas others have of us being “crazy” and “special snowflakes” they can use to fuel their Attack Helicopter jokes. And ofc that’s not everything we could talk about there, but it’s really important to make a note of.

I think figuring out what we all have in common is important not only in bridging gaps between communities, but in figuring out what our goals and needs are as groups and as a whole as far as acceptance goes.

~ Heather

marron - 2020-01-11T04:56:26.239Z
I think often a problem is run into where our concept of hegemonic humanity is so strong that many nonhumans can’t imagine a deviation from it that would still be human. Which I find really sad, because being denied hegemonic humanity is a huge problem for a lot of alterhuman humans (and some non-alterhuman humans, too, I don’t mean to pretend it’s only an alterhuman problem).

I don’t necessarily know how to build solidarity - even the nonhuman community is extremely divided, with many otherkin not getting along with other nonhumans, and even in the otherkin community, many therians not getting along with fictionkin, and so on. I think a lot of it, though not all of it, comes from respectability politics and a need to form hierarchies, and some of it also from things like species dysphoria (that is, there are many nonhumans, especially younger otherkin, whose feelings of it are so intense that to be compared with a human feels terrible, even though we’re all in this boat together.)

So I guess I mostly have problems and not solutions. I don’t really identify as human at any level, but even before I understood the idea of being nonhuman, I felt separated from my human peers - not because of my species, but because I was schizoid and they weren’t, and it was an experience of existing in a wholly different world. So it’s not even just alterhuman, really.