I feel like often what younger therians mean when they say ‘therians still identify as human’ is actually ‘therians understand we live in a human society and must function within our human body, despite our being not human.
Despite who we are, we still live in a society of humans. Unless you have (with all hope and luck) moved of the grid and into nature and live amongst the animals, we will have to preform human tasks in order to survive. That is just simply a given for any person within a human body, human or not.
We understand we must pay taxes. We understand we must go to work and school. We understand we must care for our human bodies despite how incorrect they may be. We understand that we will interact with humans, and doing so typically requires us to preform human.
What they have yet to understand is the point is to be as animalistic as possible. If I get stabbed, I’m not just going to lick my wounds and bleed out. I’m going to get in my human car and take my human bleeding to the human hospital so they can fix me as they would a human. We can still preform human and we understand we must. However that does not mean we cannot act as animalistic as possible. Everything I have just listed above can probably be altered a little bit to most accommodate for us. We can wear a tail and go outside in nature with our laptop when we do our taxes. Those who can work can find jobs that are closely related to their kins. At school you can find likeminded people, develop a safe group for everyone to express their animal nature when not doing work. We can draw paws on our feet. We can bark. We can go on rollercoaster and try so hard to pretend we are flying. We can do human things in animalistic nature, and that is ok, and that is the goal.
We are not human, we are whatever creature we say we are. It was not our choice to live in this human world. If we could pick I know most of us would choose differently. But we do live in this world. And we will respect that, but we will also live as truly to ourselves while doing so. And that cannot be stopped.
‘Therians don’t identify as animals’ I feel is young therians trying to say what I just said. In their attempt to do, make antis understand this, they said something extremely incorrect and extremely bad for furthering our normalization in society.
Side note: this, both my claim and what the younger therians think, also leaves people who DONT understand all these things in the dark, with no representation, or love and acceptance towards them and their lived experience. I need to understand their perspectives a bit more before I can make any conclusions on where they fit in this conversation. All I knows is this leaves them out, and they should not be left out.
Plz add on with any additional thoughts/comments or any points I was incorrect on and need to be re-educated. But also plz be nice I’m very sensitive to criticism.