Furry and therian broadly overlap, even though both groups try to deny this. Like, the furries don't want to be associated with freaks who actually think they're animals, and the therians don't want their deeply held personal identity to be reduced to just a fandom or fetish. However, just from orbiting around furry spaces for as long as I have, I am convinced that basically all furries are also therian.
When I first started toying with the idea of identifying as something inhuman through a furry lens, a lot of annoying therians told me that what I was experiencing is not just being really into furry stuff, it's a sign I was never human to begin with. I don't really understand this impulse, it felt like just the same thing. Are you going to diagnose every furry with therianthropy? I mean, you probably could, but it's not a distinction worth splitting hairs over.
My therian identity IS kind of fandom-like in its conception, like I do think I reasoned my way into it somewhat. I was made to feel inhuman by my upbringing, but I could have landed on many different metaphors. I think part of species dysphoria and my intermittent phantom tail/ear phenomena is really a manifestation of wanting this metaphor to come true. This is the reason I've felt a little alienated by therian spaces, I felt like I was being smothered with the reading that I literally had a non-human mind, and that doesn't make sense to me. "Dog" is an externally defined category, if I'm anything, I am a human's idea of what a dog is.
All that being said, this doesn't diminish the importance of my identity. I'm really starting to think that one of the main boundaries you need to break in order to be happy is to erase the distinction between "i identify as" and "I AM." Like maybe you don't just love and relate to that character in your favorite manga, maybe that's you. Perhaps, you were the fursona all along.
jacobvanloon
stormborns
gummygunk
dededos
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
