On the 3rd of December, Wolf was released – a movie
which features a protagonist with species dysphoria being committed
to a mental asylum. It’s been getting bad
reviews, but many critics mention one idea in particular: that this is a metaphor for mental illness or gender identity.
[image ID: snippets of reviews criticising Wolf as ‘social commentary’.]
Non-alterhuman transgender people are affected by the film’s messages too. But it’s critical to understand that we are the people
this movie is about. We deserve to be seen as more than a metaphor for transgender issues – especially when so many of us
are transgender ourselves. We also deserve to be seen as people
capable of living happy lives, not pathologized for our
experiences.
We’re calling for society to recognize that
people with species dysphoria are not an allegory. We’re real, and
we’re affected by these representations.
And you can help us make that happen. If you’re a person with species dysphoria or an ally, we’re asking you to join us in sharing your feelings about the movie using the hashtag #WolfGetsReal.
We’re interested in:
Opinions
on the movie, its production, or the critical response to it
How species dysphoria affects you and how other people have treated you for it
Experiences with the mental health system and hospitalization as a nonhuman
How your
species identity and gender identity intersect, if relevant
Anything else
you think people need to see and know about!
We’ll be
boosting and promoting content that uses the tag #WolfGetsReal
anywhere we can. Anything from a full blown video essay to a
single tweet is welcome. If you’ve got stuff to say but you’re nervous about putting yourself out there? Send us an ask, email us, or come discuss it on the discord or forum, and we’ll publish it on your behalf.
You can also help by:
Sharing your perspective in conversations about the movie in your social spaces
Leaving reviews
for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and other review sites
Leaving comments on articles reviewing the movie (or even directly contact the journalists writing them!)
For better or for
worse, nonhuman identity is entering public awareness. Other recent films like Wild Mountain Thyme show that this is not a fluke, but the beginning of a potential trend. But if we stand together and speak out, we can prevent these careless depictions and incredulous critical responses. It all starts with raising our voices
and taking the narrative into our own hands.
Let’s get real.
As someone who has suffered psychiatric abuse during inpatient hospitalization, and who struggles with species dysphoria and has needed help for it in the past, this movie absolutely terrified me to see.
Please speak up and don’t let other people speak for us. Don’t let them envision a future like this for species dysphoric people.
Oh, so that’s what this is about. Folks on twitter, come back swingin’, I’ll make a thread myself after my final tonight.
I could probably write an essay on the subject, but in short, something I’ve been thinking about for a while now - the problem I have with the statement “I have no issue with “kin-for-fun” people as long as they’re respectful,” which I see around now and again (and please understand I’m not vagueing anyone in particular), is that misusing ‘kin terminology to mean roleplay/relating to/projecting onto/etc. something is inherently disrespectful. It’s not possible to be kff and respectful to actual otherkin at the same time. You either respect us, or you think it’s okay to mangle our terminology to mean something it doesn’t instead of using your own words. You can’t have both.
(Obviously this is assuming the person in question has been/is being told the actual meaning and is continuing to use “kin for fun” language anyway, not someone who has no idea actual otherkin exist at all - true ignorance is another matter.)
Please for the love of god remember not to support LycanTheory, the owner of the Therian Guide forum. He’s been more and more recently showcasing just how pro-bestiality he is as an individual and as a forum owner, including through attacking other forums’ anti-bestiality policies and through attacking explicitly anti-bestiality posts.
Don’t be fooled when he says he’s a “zoophile.” He’s a bestialist, there are archived website pages of him talking about his past inappropriate “encounters” with animals (including losing his virginity to his dog!), and he’s very openly advocated in both the past and present for people to be “pro zoo sex’” and “pro zoo rights” which are, let’s be real, just euphemisms for bestiality.
He’s also recently been seeking out vulnerable demographics to target and ‘convince’ of their 'zoosexuality’, most specifically minors 13 and up– if you’re a therian or otherkin who is a minor or who knows minors, please make sure that you or your friends are aware to not respond if he reaches out on social media platforms.
Wow this blew up a bit! It blew up enough to, in fact, get my unused account from Therian Guide banned by LycanTheory:
Unfortunately for LycanTheory, he was not quick enough on the draw to prevent me from quietly searching the forum’s threads and posts these past few weeks to use as citations and sources for my updated Beware (Be-were?) on Therian Guide.
The newly updated Beware on Therian Guide can be found HERE.
Funny thing with that I was 14? Confused and thought I wasn’t human. I didn’t know exactly what I was but I knew enough that I was really unhappy being human and that being an animal sounded like me. I wasn’t sure how to express that. Soi just googled werewolves and real werewolf sightings. Then how to become a werewolf.
How convenient that the p-shifting community is marketing themselves as exactly that. The ability to be a real werewolf. They called themselves therians who could p-shift. I had 0 clue what a therian was and looked into it finding an entire community and got my badic knowledge from therian guide (which is pretty not great)
I deicided in my trauma induced brain I wanted all or nothing and jumped for the p-shifting community and ignored the rest. Therians in that were inside that community said they hated otherkin so I jumped on the bandwagon and hated them to. After a bit of digging I got into blazes p-shifting guide. Then proceeded to practice to p-shifting everyday for a whole year.
It was a brutal and bloody self initation i cut off so much of my identity to fit the p-shifting mould and forced myself to assimilate all in hopes I could turn into a wolf and escape my abusive household. The community itself was very strict from how you meditate, to what animal you were, to what your mindset was. If you thought any part of it was fun they would kick you out. If you claimed it to be fake or questioned what was going on youd be yeeted or told you must not be a true werewolf.
Plenty of people hyped up success stories and encouraged people to just keep trying. Often every night i’d be running around outside in the cold trying to trigger a shift. Instead I’d just get hands full of splinters.
After awhile I gave up and sided that p-shifting was fake. All the members I knew none would ever show a p-shift. No one got into details of how it was. No one really tried to show this supposed success. Sadly though while I could walk away from an online cult its mantra stayed with me.
I would get anxiety attacks from not being able to p-shift and developed uncontrollable m-shifting which i now call dogging. I would repress the parts of myself that wasn’t just stereotypical wolf. It took many years for me to accept I was a threatening wolf and not just a wolf. That i was my own species and had my own behaviors not just wolf behaviors. I stopped looking into the otherkin community after that p-shifting cult and only came back about 2 years ago. Knowing about otherkin from browsing distantly time to time and staying in plural communities instead.
I would not recommend starting your otherkin journey with p-shifting lol
My experience with exotrauma before antidepressants was, primarily, an almost daily barrage of violent flashbacks. Like an amv, but worse and not fun. I would be sitting on the bus to work and be lost, far away Somewhere Else, feeling my teeth in the neck of my opponent - just as often someone scared and following orders; you have to swallow that with the rest. Or with a blade dragging on my spine. It would make the brain fog worse… Or come with it, not sure which.
On meds these lessened considerably. Weeks could pass without so much as a twitch towards violence. I focused more on what the sun offered me today, instead of what the moon saw a lifetime ago. Or whatever, it was.
I wont say they’ve come back, because I have much better control over my thoughts now, but something tickles back there again. Without the depression and caged in panic feeling. Is it worse if now I can even enjoy some of it? Empowering? Progress or regress?
The spiritual/psychological divide becomes more nitpicky and pointless by the day. If you take it literally, spirituality is to focus on one’s soul or spirit, your place in the grand scheme of things, and you can do all that and be a hardcore atheist if it suits you. You’re a higher thinking organism conscious of existence in a profound way; that in itself is a spiritual act, even if it all comes down to atoms and electrical impulses to you. You are here and that means something *now*.
Your psychology affects your spirit and vice versa. Even if it wasnt literally a past life, if it manifests that way in your mind in exactly the same way then what is the difference in each moment? I’m agnostic. I dont know what happens after you die, I just have guesses based on my feelings and some observations of death around me. That’s all anyone has, no matter what they tell other people; our very best guess, maybe a wish. When I think of my timeline it feels like a real thing that happened a long time ago, with memories as patchy as the ones from this world. I’m skeptical but open minded.
And if you do think you were reborn, then that does something to you. I know because I was there and sometimes still am. It changes the way you respond to the stimuli around you, to other people and places and events. Your mind adapts to your beliefs and you behave accordingly without really noticing it unless you try. If you try too much then you just make a science experiment out of yourself. The past may reach across time to grab you, and it doesnt make you a helpless puppet. The things you believe in will change you cognitively forever, even if you stop believing in them later or the shape of them evolves over time.
This website, unlike A Chiemras’ Library, it is dedicated to information about us personally as a system. (A Chimeras’ library is dedicated to essays and other media mostly about information regarding various alterhuman and adjacent communities with a personal personal essays about us on the side.)Our new side website is just information regarding our plural system.
Its pretty simple right now. A page listing most of our system’s common fronters, another listing people who “project” instead, and several pages with info about the basic dynamics of our system (what terms and labels we use to describe our system, a simplified explanation of our system origins, a copy of our system rules, etc). However, hopefully having a website to point to again when people want to know more about our system personally we’ll have something to point to.
So… Kinning huh. I generally struggle to see how things like people using the wrong word affects communities because in general I just pick and choose who I interact with from any given community and assume everyone does the same. In this case it’s kind of unavoidable. I like to look in the otherkin and the therian tags, because I like reading essays and the occasional aesthetic post, and since KFF started rearing it’s head, I’ve noticed the tags becoming a lot more, depressing really. Like granted ten years ago when I joined it was kind of silly in there, but a lot of people my age who have grown up as alterhuman have lost their sense of fun. It usually seems to loop back to “Well people need to know that being alterhuman isn’t *fun* I’m raising awareness about-” and so on. But what it really feels like is people trying to avoid being accused of being KFF.
I’ve been thinking about it since the other night where some of my friends held a mock trial accusing me of secretly being a human, all in good fun and I laughed until my stomach hurt (I was found not guilty btw). But it made me think how bad the accusation would feel if it was a tumblr anon. “You’re not REALLY kin, you’re just a kff”. That would hurt a lot! I suffer quite a bit from my identity but try and only share the pleasant parts because it suits me more to dwell on that. And thinking about that led me to think, maybe I should make a post about how bad species dysphoria has been kicking my tail? Oh, suddenly it all makes sense.
KFF, by using and diluting a commonly accepted term (though I still remember a shuffling about Otherkin as a term, I arrived during the ‘are fictionkin valid’ debate)have made it so we’ve felt the need to defend our place as a serious member of the community. Like if I made 90 posts about how much I just love being a wolf you’d all be like yeaaaah riiiight sure kinnie. But if I posted about how miserable it is to be alterhuman no one would really question me.
But what about the times where we ARE having fun? What about the days where your species fits well with your activities and you’re enjoying yourself to the fullest. What about the days where you’re grateful to have a dual perspective on life? What about the days where you’re just having fun? We’ve become so doom and gloom out of fear of being mistaken as KFF that, yeah of course their community looks more inviting. That is not to say there are no positive posts in the tags but it certainly looks a lot bleaker than it used to.
In my years of study I believe that all otherkin is psychological in nature, including "kin for fun", and that systems are typically formed due to trauma and it is extremely rare that someone could be born multiple without any outside factors. However, I enjoy looking at your blog and becoming educated on perspectives like your own. I don't think that you are going to change my mind, but I have definitely had my thoughts provoked by your posts.
I’m glad you’re seeing other perspectives, and I’m glad I could provoke your mind a little!
KFF are probably psychological, because it’s an entirely normal part of being a young teenager. I don’t know enough about how they actually think to guess how much of it is actual spirituality, so you’d have to ask them.
I definitely don’t agree that plurality is as rare as you say, or that it needs to be traumatic: I wasn’t born plural, nor do I have any sort of trauma that most traumagenic models of plurality would insist upon. I’m just out here vibing with three fish and a dragon and various theories on what the psychology behind it is. Running theory is that we just had the ‘capable of plurality’ bool set to true, since brains are still very much a black box program that never generates their code the same way twice.
While I really dislike bad-faith discourse, which is most of tumblr tbh, I do enjoy genuine debates of just bouncing ideas off each other. Worst thing that happens is that you have a few new arguments to chew on and analyze. So if you want to come back and talk a bit, I’m game.
"peppermint is a mineral" candy corn is a naturally occurring element with corresponding elementals in my headmate's hearthome. Holiday Sweets Come From The Ground
…what have you done… what kind of ancient knowledge have you discovered
I am begging the both of you to read the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire, partly because they’re very good books, but mostly because #3, Beneath the Sugar Sky, will make both of you cry so hard and probably hit very close to home.
