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Species Dysphoria Experiences

vagabondsun - 2020-02-19 18:56:32

(Disclaimer: This is partially motivated by wanting to collect info for the pamphlet but stands as its own topic too :v)

(Disclaimer 2: This has the potential to be a pretty heavy thread so I'm gonna go ahead and stick a general content note for, y'know, discussions of dysphoria and the mental health issues that can arise from that, as well as maybe touching on discrimination and harrassment.)

Making this thread to swap experiences with species dysphoria that are maybe a little more in depth and touch on some different stuff than typical convos about it. For example, I'm particularly interested in things like:

Or, y'know, anything else you want to say about your experiences that doesn't fit into the normal 'i'm a fox so i wear a fox tail' kind of discussions.

shield_badger - 2020-02-23 23:06:49

Honestly, I'm not sure if I experience what I'd call species dysphoria or not, but maybe I do experience enough that it could be useful?

Because feeling dysphoric about being an angel, for me, is more subtle and roundabout. It manifests as serious anxiety around mortality and sickness and damage to the body, since I was previously a spiritual being who didn't have to face any physical consequences for anything I did disguised as a human on Earth. Now I do have to face those and it's pretty scary and it's given me clinical anxieties :v:

I also get the classic "I miss my wings" thing angels talk about, but I think it's less about the wings and more just that I miss feeling strongly connected to my angelic nature?

And to cope with that, really, I converted to Judaism. It was the path that called me back to G?d the closest, and when I worship and I do feel connected it's the best feeling in the world. But feeling disconnected from G?d is a big struggle for me.

Thankfully, being Jewish doesn't require that you know if you believe in G?d or not, and the community and culture is enough to make me feel like I have a safety net, community, and thousands of years of advice and spiritual guidance at my disposal to work out this whole "incarnate angel wrestling with G?d" thing whenever I get worried about not feeling very spiritually connected.

Lopori - 2020-02-24 00:57:56

I was dysphoric over my mermaid kintype from a very young age, I didn't know the word dysphoria until later on but I could pinpoint what the feeling was.

As for my therianthropy, I was dysphoric as soon as I knew bonobos existed but I didn't quite recognize it as such until later. I used to get this weird feeling where if there was a similarity between them and humans I'd like it, when I read about a difference I didn't like it. I didn't know why, I figured I thought it was a bit lame that there was still that distance there. After a while I realized that I didn't want them to be more humanlike, I wanted to be more bonobolike and was disappointed in humanity. I used to look for similarities in myself and the people around me, getting irritated by human specific features. Looking at my hands or teeth and feeling frustrated that it was so close but not close enough. For a while I called it "species envy" until I knew to look into dysphoria as an explanation. Also in my youth prior to knowing of bonobos' existence, I still felt I should've been lankier than I am which is an odd coincidence.

Yep, even to this day I find it embarrassing and futile. As a child my dysphoria over not being a mermaid wasn't something I was particularly ashamed of, I hadn't the self awareness to not accept it off the bat. Bonobo on the other hand started in my mid teens and developed into adulthood and with that comes self consciousness. One I realized I was dysphoric I didn't suppress it but I did kick myself over it. It helps a lot to speak to people in similar positions.

How has it affected your interpersonal relationships? Have you been harassed? Have you found community?

The intricacies of romantic relationships can be a dysphoria trigger, even when I'm actively in love. Monogamy is a deal breaker because it really fucks with my head. Human politics too. Otherwise how I conduct myself with people isn't particularly affected. I've never been harassed over it. I have found community and a support network but I'm still a little guarded and shy when talking about my own dysphoria. I don't like to come across whiny so I tend to suffer in silence. The few times I have opened up like on tumblr posts I got concerned DMs and that's really embarrassing.

Eh, it affects my mental health only a tad. Not enough to be a concern but it causes occasional emotional distress in the form of wistfulness and frustration. I'm still learning coping mechanisms now through trial and error. When my mental health is rocky in general then dysphoria is more likely to spike, but it doesn't feel disordered in itself. It's just a thing that's there.

I like being casually referred to as a bonobo or merperson, I tend to stick to social circles where I'm more likely to receive that. The furry fandom is a good one for that. It serves the same purpose as social transition. My best friend calls me Fish as a nickname and I feel seen.

Rather late edit: I forgot to add that social dysphoria and homesickness are also present, not just body. It feels a bit lonely at times being human and not being able to live like either of my kintypes. This causes more distress than body dysphoria sometimes.

marron - 2020-02-24 17:19:22

Honestly, my dysphoria still feels like I don't quite know what it's about. It's less that I'm not what I want to be - I have several beings I am that share nothing in common with one another - and more a distaste for being human in particular. And I've known I didn't want to be human from a pretty young age, as long as I can remember, really.

But to identify that as dysphoria specifically took a long time, and it was difficult to accept putting a word that seems so serious to feelings that I had accepted as part of me, but maybe didn't see as more than one of my various affectations.

As for my interpersonal relationships… it's really difficult sometimes. I don't really see myself as a human, and I often feel a weird gap when I'm talking to human people; I don't quite know how to navigate that. Spaces like this, with other nonhumans and nonhuman-adjacent people help, but I wish I had something similar in person.

Which I think is probably the biggest negative effect it has on my mental health! Dysphoria is of course always stressful, but I understand how to cope with my species dysphoria in much the same way I understand how to cope with my gender dysphoria. But the social aspect of not being the same thing as the human people I have to be around all the time is really pretty unique to the nonhuman experience, and it results in a kind of constant imposter syndrome.

And as for what I do about that, and what there is to be done about that… I really don't know! I find it comforting to do thing like play games and read fiction, where I can interact at least superficially or parasocially with a nonhuman conscience, and to be in communities like this one, but mostly I grin and bare it. /:

Juushika - 2020-02-25 05:39:14

Sorry for incoming wall of text, but dysphoria is my Biggest Mood.

Dysphoria may be my biggest mood, but untangling which type, internalized sexism or gender dysphoria or species dysphoria, is difficult. Pinpointing causes can help me alleviate symptom, although solutions overlap.

Non-stigmatized discussions have given me vocabulary and glimpses into others's experiences, and as usual the knowledge that this exists elsewhere, has a name, is "allowed," all aids my comprehension.

I've also benefited from approaching things backward, by learning about body positivity/experimenting with gender expression or identity/experimenting with species expression or identity first until something does or doesn't click, and then backtracking from the solution to pinpoint the cause.

I'm surprised by now often presumed-normies are unfussed by learning that I'm Cat, and how frequently they resonate with, if not (but sometimes!) as, non-human concepts. Those that don't personally resonate tend to be accepting, but their ability to comprehend varies; in particular, they may not realize how essential my cat-identity is to me, and yeah, that's frustrating. No one else can legitimize (or delegitimize) my identity, but species-affirmation (just things as small as nicknames, but also through agreement or recognition) from friends has helped my dysphoria and was actually part of discovering my therianthropy. In safe, secure friendships I say: absolutely broach the topic.

Presenting as non-human in public forums (like altering appearance or changing pronouns) is another kettle of fish but I feel applies under this same heading. I don't have coherent thoughts on this yet, but my rough notes might be: Large-scale internet forums are toxic places in general, but esp. to be publicly weird; this is where I expect to see harassment. Smaller-scale online interactions (either in private spaces or on smaller platforms) are a great place to practice being weird, because most of the internet is weird, too. Non-normative presentation in meatspaces is diverse and complicated, and is further complicated by intersections between various types of dysphoria-I'm still figuring out how to navigate it.

I have both major depressive disorder and dysthymia, and trying to unpick "why sad/types of sad" in my life is impossible, but species dysphoria is a huge element of my general discontent. It causes mental distress for a combination of reasons: a homesickness (self-sickness?); a pseudo-neoteny/social dependency which makes daily human life distressing; the funhouse mirror effect of being in domestic cat spaces while not being a domestic cat makes me persistently aware of my dysphoria; and the places where my human body and my would-be cat body do and don't overlap relate directly to my chronic pain and mental health issues, so issues that would be bad regardless feel worse because I'm not "supposed to" have them-or this body/cognition/etc.

Conversely, some of the specific things I do to help my dysphoria (spend time with bio-cats, mimic kneading, listening to purring [in lieu of being able to purr], be pet and make purr-equivalent sounds) are soothing. The overlaps between my mental health and therianthropy/dysphoria are ubiquitous-but not all bad.

I don't have anything approaching a solution. Mostly I fold it into my experiences with longterm sad, using the same coping mechanisms to acknowledge/honor my experiences and to process/balance/distract. "Heal" isn't on the table for my depression, which in a way is productive for my processing of dysphoria, because "become bio-cat" isn't on the table either-I'm able to recognize that some things can only be alleviated, not cured, and have experience coping with that.

Spend time with my theriotype-I know this isn't accessible to everyone. In lieu of or in addition: observe or study my 'type, spend time in/observe or study my 'type's environs.

Use knowledge from the above to alter my behavior and/or environment. Unlearning human socialization/expectation by copying cats works side by side with seeing myself in cats-and doing that "relearning" from the source prompts behaviors etc. which feel natural.

This involves usual things like vocalizations, play, prey-/window-watching. Social interactions (with humans) help both because they make my cat-actions feel more concrete and legitimate, less "in my head," and because a lot of my cat identity revolves around domesticity and thus, ironically!, around humans.

In my experience, pretty much every means of alleviating species dysphoria carries the risk of increasing dysphoria-cats will never see me as cat, being in those spaces/performing those behaviors reminds me of how my body is wrong, etc. Sometimes I just have to inhabit that contradiction; sometimes I can pick and chose behaviors which are more productive than harmful.

Sometimes the solution is compromise and/or adaptive tools. Playing with bio cat toys triggers dysphoria because the scale is wrong; instead, I play with dryer balls-right material/shape, comically overlarge objectively, but in scale with my human body. It's about finding what works best, not what's most correct. Sometimes it's mentally framing "normal human behaviors" in cat terms to emphasize similarity over difference ("can't groom with tongue, but am grooming, just with comb").

cryptonomica - 2020-03-04 00:08:27

Yeah, the dysphoria's pretty heavy for me.

Most of the time I'm not dysphoric. I have maladaptive daydream disorder (MADD) which means most of the time I'm not even conscious of reality, I'm five layers deep in a fictional world. But in my fictional worlds, I have the perfect body. I have six wings, six eyes, cybernetic limbs, a draconic tail, and elf ears that ombre from my normal skintone to a beautiful Dunmer grey. And when I 'wake up' from my dreams (which is the phase I'm in as I'm writing this) I am so… aware. Of the fact I am never going to have the body that I always think I'm having, that I basically live in because my daydreams feel more like my real world than this one.

I don't really know how to cope yet. So far I've found a nice seller that makes the ombre style elf ears! I've never seen those before and I sent the seller an ask about them (It seems that you can either get skin-tone match Or ombre, I would like both and am willing to pay more for it) I would wear those every day if I could.

No one really knows about it except my partner system and maybe two or three close friends. Well, I just vented about it a minute ago to my friend group? No one other than a friend who already knows I'm alterhuman said anything. I'm terrified of people thinking my dysphoria isn't important.

[archive note: post redacted]