Bugs

breathe. breathe in. hold it. breathe out. feel the weight of your wings shift and settle on your back each time it rises and falls. breathe in and stretch your wings upward, then out, then fold them back in as you exhale. repeat this a few times to really shake the dust off your wings

keep breathing. clear your mind. sway your hips from side to side, and notice how the weight of your tail adds momentum to each mighty swish. tilt them forwards and back, and feel how your tail pulls your hips down. curl and uncurl it. try to move it a little bit

nuzzle against your scales. maybe even lick them a bit if you’re feeling particularly fastidious. how do they feel? rough? smooth? warm? cold? if you have feathers, do you feel them? your hide is tough and impenetrable. consider how it envelops your body and keeps you safe

flex your claws. they’re sharp, aren’t they? be careful with them. you don’t want to cut anything by accident. run your tongue over your teeth. those are pretty sharp too. you’re built to hunt. you were designed by millions of years of evolution to catch and eat prey. you’re the perfect predator

focus on what your highly-tuned senses are telling you. what can you hear? what can you smell? how does the environment around you feel on your scales? think about the taste of prey on your tongue? does it make you salivate? are you hungry?

And. I wouldn’t say this to someone actively telling me not to call them a person, but: if you’re not a person then you don’t have the agency to decide what you are or aren’t called. Right? Is personhood not our individual sovereignty? Personhood is our agency, our possession of rights, our consciousness. If you don’t have that then do you have the right to say you aren’t a person? To me saying “I’m not a person” reads as saying “i am not the kind of thing that gets to decide what kind of thing it is”

I think everyone should be allowed to identify as they feel right, and personhood should not be a core component of determing who has, ahem, self-determination.

Rights, as in that thing we all should have, of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as in the US consitution, that thing, should not, in fact, be contingent on personhood. Or identity.

I do consider myself a person. And a nonhuman. And a human. (Look - it's complicated. I both am and am not human.) Fighting against the anthropocentric view of "person = human" is super important, too, in numerous factors.

But I think it's important to avoid falling into other semantic traps, too. I'm sure a nonhuman nonperson could explain this better than I could, with their perspective, but... something about this attitude just rubs me the wrong way. Like something is missing in the context/concept of it.

Idk. I consider myself a person but I don't equate personhood with having rights, with having the ability to self-determine, etc. Personhood is an arbitrary category that people can (and have) taken from me. I'll yell eternally about being a person, but I think whether or not someone identifies as a person isn't necessarily someone saying they can't determine what they are, but perhaps a fight against a category that fundamentally feels arbitrary and subjective.

in other words, as @clowncaraz put it in "Gender Modality for Physical Shifters"-- "I had to be a person in order to reject it, because people are able to make those choices, unpersons have that chosen for them. Undesirables and thrown-out humans who are dehumanized are not rejecting being people, they are forced to live with punishments for trying to be people."

(CW/TW: Violence, insults)

A lot of therians have already spoken in about this, me included, but my blood is boiling.

For everyone, especially Spanish people, DO NOT GO, ORGANISE OR HYPE ALTERHUMAN MEETUPS.

The Spanish community, both in Latin America countries and Spain, has been getting a lot of media attention. TV, radio, content creators are all talking about us. Definitely not in a good light.

The content that went viral was created by teens, and it was simply doing quads in full streets, Barking at people and following them... , and while most of us are annoyed at that image, because in the end people confused content with reality, it's been the media that has blown this up.

THIS IS NOTHING MORE THAN SHIT TO HIDE THE REAL PROBLEMS: Epstein files, job issues in Argentina or money, housing issues in Spain between others.

The therian community has gotten extreme attention. And it's generated fake therian meetups.

DO NOT GO, ORGANISE OR HYPE THEM UP.

These are the consequences that are happening. This might be a hard watch.

The next images are from BARCELONA, Spain, from 21/feb. DISGUSTING.

These meetups can easily be recognised by shitty posters:

THIS IS DANGEROUS, DUSGUSTING BEHAVIOUR FROM PEOPLE. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE AND SCARY.

Please, DON'T go out with gear, please DON'T go to meets.

Please STAY SAFE.