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Choosing to call yourself transspecies

vagabondsun - 2020-02-28 15:19:46

While 'transgender' represents like 90% of gender-diverse experiences, and is an umbrella term itself, 'transspecies' is but one of a lot of things you could call yourself as a nonhuman, and a lot of people very explicitly don't feel represented by it.\ So if you use transspecies to describe yourself, what does it mean to you? What makes you feel that that word is accurate for your experiences over anything else?

cryptonomica - 2020-02-28 16:42:08

For me, it's the want of being socially known as what I really am. Basically its just like my transgender shit, but I just want to be able to have clothes and mods and the social attention to my identity for not being human.

vagabondsun - 2020-02-28 16:48:00

The funny thing for muis is that only one of muis self-describes as transspecies, and wei don't quite know why that's the case.

For Dirk, it really is about the actual transition part. He ought to be a troll, he isn't yet, but he will be eventually, through his own work.\ But that's the only part of muir identity that wei feel like that about. Wei don't feel trans-dragon or trans-drow or anything, because wei feel like wei're those things inherently, even if wei haven't always been them.\ There are things Dirk feels that way about too, but they're usually our hearttypes - he vibes particularly strongly with the big cat feelings, even though that's supposed to be muir collective sona :v And even though there are plenty of hearttypes wei relate to in an 'I am' way rather than an 'I am like' way, maybe there's a difference there for the same reason wei call them hearttypes rather than kintypes (or anything else)? Maybe there's a difference between saying 'I am this thing' and 'I want to be seen and treated as this thing before anything else'.

For muis, anyway. Because, obviously, there are plenty of nonhumans who want to be referred to as such who don't consider themselves transspecies, and presumably there are people who use that word but don't intend to transition, or consider what they're doing transitioning. It would be problematic to wholly equate transness (of any kind) to the material act, even if there are linguistic and social elements to it too.

I think there are a lot of people who choose to use 'transspecies' to state 'my experience of species identity is comparable to experiences of gender identity'. And I think a lot of people mean that it's comparable to their own experience of gender identity, but I'm not sure if that's quite true for me.\ Because I call myself transgender according to Leslie Feinberg's definition, and if my nonhumanity was like that, all of my identities would be transspecies ones.

Ultimately I guess it's probably a case of muis being, y'know, different people with different takes on things. Just because we're not fully discreet headmates doesn't mean we have to resolve all differences in our worldviews. But of course I'm me and I overthink everything, and I do think it opens up some interesting questions about the word and its context for us to chew on.

The_Flock - 2020-02-28 19:14:58

I've written an [entire essay] on this, already. :B I kinda had to after an amount of negative attention.

Different facets probably identify directly with the term to different degrees. It definitely doesn't refer to any one of muis, but muir collective relationship as non/alterhumans in a human-shaped body to species and how wei want to be seen, species-wise.

For muis, it really is mostly about three things:

So yeah, a short take on why wei use that word sometimes.

~Wix

[archive note: post redacted]

Anomaly - 2020-03-18 21:58:44

Piper [Mew]: We've been identifying as transspecies a lot more lately and have kind of become more comfortable with the identity, and in some cases prefer that to otherkin or other nonhuman language.

The main reason for that is we just don't consider ourselves to be human at all, and transspecies we feel communicates that. Almost all of us get dysphoria over our species and as we talk about transitioning we realize that we also want to transition in terms of species to alleviate some of it. We feel transspecies overall best communicates that extreme desire to physically be nonhuman that we feel, and in otherkin that can be overlooked.

We're also seconding what The Flock said, and their essay was actually one of the reasons we started identifying as such! It definitely crosses with voidpunk for us too, and it feels almost rebellious in identity against sort of the constructs of what it means to be human. It also feels like we're reclaiming dehumanization, which we get for being ND, nonbinary, and aspec.

Lopori - 2020-04-28 00:34:26

It's something I've toyed with calling myself more often, it fits my experience to a T. Therian/otherkin is the closest thing, but I don't mental shift much and the dysphoria aspect of it is the greatest one, atleast where bonobo is concerned. Mermaid is more of a stereotypical otherkin experience, but trans species also fits there too. Much of why I refer to myself as either of my kintypes is as a response to dysphoria, like how I call myself transmasc and use non female pronouns to ease weird feelings surrounding gender. I'm kinda doing it on purpose, even though the inspiration behind it isn't a choice. I'm a bonobo and a mermaid because that's the only thing that makes sense to me, it's what I wish I was physically though a non physical identity is all I can have so it'll do.\ I used the furry fandom as a way of socially transitioning even before I found the alterhuman community, being "Lopori the bonobo" feels great and helps me break out of my social anxiety a bit. And I had the same boost of confidence and self assurance socially transitioning in the gender sense too.\ In spaces where it's more socially acceptable, I do refer to myself as transspecies as well as otherkin/therian.