mouseteeth

This isn’t rude at all! Thank you for this ask! I appreciate folks who reach out to learn more about alterhumanity.

I apologize if there’s been some confusion around my posts. The thing is: alterhuman is an inclusive term. It was coined to be that way. I often compare it to the term queer when explaining its purpose; in its current usage, queer is an umbrella term that’s inclusive of all who are LGBTQIA+ in some way. Similarly, alterhuman is an umbrella term encompassing many experiences that are considered “non-normative” to *(ortho)human society and its concept of identity.

(*Orthohuman is the antonym for alterhuman. Envision your average person on the street who has no connection to this subculture. That’s an orthohuman. This is distinguished from humans since there are human alterhumans, but I digress.)

The issue isn’t a lack of inclusivity. Alterhuman was coined for everyone. The issue is that there’s many folks who assume alterhuman is synonymous with nonhuman, which it isn’t. This leads to the erasure of other alterhumans and their experiences, largely because nonhumanity is centered a lot.

❤️💛🤍💙💚

Hi there friends! Unfortunately I've been struggling with a painful nerve condition that causes me to faint quite a bit. I've been dealing with this for a long time now and this Disability Pride month I've decided to open up semi-emergency commissions in order to afford a mobility aid!

More about that under the cut- But first! The commissions!

I'm opening general digital art commissions for 10$ to 20$

Simple sketches or partial color for 10$

Flat color or finished Painting style for 20$

I'm open to drawing just about anything, Including NSFW, furry, anime, realism, gore, etc. Fair warning though, I'm most practiced with Anime and Realism, so Sci-fi and Mechs are a bit out of my wheelhouse. I'm willing to try! As for payment, I made a Kofi for this! ( https://ko-fi.com/smolpaw ) but I also have venmo or paypal if that doesnt work. Just feel free to DM. When DMing, please say the word Lemons so I know you're not a bot.

Thanks! Paws and love to all you fellow creatures.

additional Medical details below vvvvv

I've been prototyping a kind of Momento/Keepsake style pendant for fellow Nonhumans! Meant so that you can hold small things that remind you of your kin/theriotype!

Im still practicing placement and making sure I do solid lines. Theyre a little wonky as theyre hand paw-etched and not done using a laser engraver. Laser engravers are nice, but theyre both expensive and lack that handmade feel.

Heres the one Im currently wearing with a little bit of bobcat fur inside :3

I also plan to mess around with ink to make a nice contrast. But ink on etched glass does eventually fade with use if you dont seal it right. So I gotta fittle with that.

Something that is a constant point of talk in the Alterhuman community is "Where are the Elders at?" "Why don't Elders post as much anymore?"

And as someone who's been in the community for over 10 years now, I distinctly remember thinking "Hah, that'll never be me. I love posting about my alterhumanity" But low and behold, I've kinda fallen off from posting daily. Heck its a miracle if I make a post once a month! Sure I lurk around the tags and forums. I'm active in the comments at least. But I've definitely noticed my presence in the community falling to the back burner.

So I'm calling all "Elders" and "Greymuzzles"

Go ahead and pick a couple of questions from the following and answer them (or answer them all, I'm not a cop) vvvvvv

What are some ways that you still struggle with Alterhumanity?

What are some Alterhuman Success stories you have? (Whether it be finding a neat hack for dealing with species dysphoria or a fun affirming encounter you had such as coming out to a friend)

What are some lessons that you've learned after all these years?

What are some writings that you've done that you think are still relevant now? (feel free to link to them!)

What are some major differences in what the community was like when you discovered it vs how it is now?

How did you deal with the "Hype" of discovering your Alterhumanity wearing off?

1. I still struggle a lot with my alterhumanity namely in that I feel like I'm acting too human a lot of times! While I believe myself to be nonhuman down to a physical level, the fact that I still have to walk around mimicking a human routine and doing human actions can be pretty distressing. I catch myself feeling and thinking "I'm not even a human I shouldn't have to do this I could just run away right now." quite often, but less so than I did when I was in my teens. Especially early teens.

There is also an ever present worry that I've made it all up even though I've been reminded again and again by everything about my life that I absolutely am not. I don't know if it will go away, but it's gotten much easier to ignore.

2. This is more of an Adult Money Can Be Used For Goods And Services type deal but I got a human sized dog bed and set myself up a den with a nest inside of it beneath my bed so that I have a comfortable, dark, and cozy place to relax and hide away when I'm feeling stressed out and unable to function around others. My roommate very much so understands as he is a dog in some way, and so he's very supportive overall of my lack of human behavior and need for space.

3. Don't worry about it. It's very basic advice but it's the one I stick to the most closely. Constant worry and examination of your own identity will only lead to more doubt and distress in the long run. While I do participate in a bit of discourse from time to time and generally encourage people to use the correct definitions and terminology, I am not the identity and microlabel police. If that's what works for you, good on you, but please don't feel pressured to attempt to label and explain away every aspect of your identity. Also, Write. Please write. I already have a whole post detailing this but please write about your experiences. We lose out on hearing the voices of our whole community if they refuse to speak.

4. My neocities holds all my essays I think are relevant and some that are outdated but I keep up for posterity and archival reasons. I actively encourage anyone who may read this to keep a Neocities, Dreamwidth, Strawpage, Carrd.co, etc. About themselves.

5. In a way I feel the community now is both more open and less policed/harshly restrictive towards new members. I remember the 2000-2010s Period in which every new member was holding up Thorn of Therian Territory as their primary source of advice and the older community had reactively closed off in response to the very unflattering and rude portrayal of Naia Ōkami in the documentary she featured in as well as the rise of "therian" documentaries that depicted our community as being weird and cringe which in turn encouraged folks on tumblr to begin making otherkin and therian cringe posts. (Take this with a grain of salt. I was born in the early 2000s. I mostly experienced the 2010s aspect of this which had a huge uptick in bullying over youtube.)

We were policing the community out of a need to protect our own. And while there is certainly less now, I think we may fall back into a level of gatekeeping with the uptick of bullying on tiktok and us being present in the news now. I don't think we'll ever be allowed the same level of privacy and secrecy that we once had again, but I fear we may repeat ourselves out of perceived necessity.

I enjoy, genuinely, how open this community is. But between the misuse of terminology that's been around for ages, the attempted re-coining of some terms by certain individuals or the coining of new terms for experiences we already have words for (ie. The whole "Faunaluna" situation that went down on Tiktok late last year/earlier this year.) or the rise in folks claiming others are "larping" their alterhumanity, I think we may backslide into restrictive attitudes again if we cannot handle these with grace.

6. All that was exciting will eventually become mundane. I did feel disappointment and disconnect after the "wow" of discovering my alterhumanity wore off, but through keeping up with myself(selves) and engaging with my nonhumanity in little ways each day I've been able to keep that connection. Through how I dress, speak, act, eat, make art, etc. This is how I stay connected.

I also remind myself (and others) that it is well ant truly ok to feel disconnected some days. It will happen. Be gentle and kind to yourself.

7. I think from our newest generation I've rediscovered a bit of the spark I used to have back around when I was a similar age. Which again, not very long ago, but so much has changed. The emphasis on gear and masks and quads especially, and I do love the crafty part of our community.

do this picrew

then tell me how you chose your username!

i'll start. i have two usernames: one on main and one here. on my main account (@/depressinge), it was a reference to rush e. i thought "what if it was played really slowly and sadly instead of properly" and then i thought that idea was the funniest thing ever. so that became my username. yeah. fourteen (or fifteen? i can't remember) year old me was an interesting creature.

my user on this account was just something i thought sounded cool. because sky rhymed with jai and then i thought i'd add storm because it sounded cooler. it kind of alluded to nya and jay so i also liked that (because sky and storm are related to their elements). i came up with before i even had a tumblr account, wrote it on a scrap of paper, and hid it in my desk so that no one would but me would ever know about it. when i finally made this sideblog around a year later, i had my username burned into my brain, so i didn't even need the paper to remember it. i tore the paper up into a hundred pieces so that there would be no evidence left. again, i was an interesting creature.

my user is pretty simple - my name's kiyo, and i think of this blog as my den !! like a safe, warm space for me ✩⃛( ͒ ु•·̫• ू ͒)

Ironically, I did this exact picrew years ago!! So I did it again and dug up my original to compare.

Heres the original vvvv

Vs the new one vvv

:3

Its kinda interesting how I've only leaned into my nonhumanity over time. All the same, Im still me. And I still love pastels

🐾🩷🩵

You can still see the themes of Voidcat in the original, its just more prominent in the new one with the grey and white.

My username is stupid (loving) and convoluted (not really). Ill save that for another time if people are actually interested. Lol. Ive already added so much to this post.

Tagging @mouseteeths @vas-rayya @roboticthing @cryptidanomoly

Here's a decidedly non-nonhuman take on myself. That part of myself has been hard to express lately. And the picrew kemonomimi solution doesn't do it for me! This is just as close as I could get to the outfit I wore today. I need a hotter wardrobe.

My username comes from a song I really liked at the time I made my blog. I used it as a username for a bunch of stuff, and I was one of those people that would change usernames very frequently. This one just stuck for some reason. I have close friends that literally call me "Mouse" now.

Ive been dealing with some mad genital dysphoria this spring. For both species and gender reasons.

And for whatever reason, my usual species affirming packers arent helping much. 😔

Ive found that general gear seemed to stop helping altogether recently, but thats a different post.

Preface: Although my concentration is on therianthropy, a lot applies to general nonhumanity regardless of label.

It is often commented that it is difficult to define what a 'therian' is whilst being truly accurate. It is a source of frustration that this is so, as it makes it feel vaguer than it really is and yet, it cannot be accurately described at least not in a concise manner, whilst attempting to provide full information.

The most accurate definition to me is;

Fortunately they allowed you to opt out

Unfortunately you have to literally go through every single video you posted in order to opt out.

In the privacy settings on each video, you have to turn off "Allow AI to remix content" on EVERY video. That includes all your old videos and any new ones made.

I want everyone here to be fully aware that TikTok is actively hurting people who make ANY type of videos on their platform by even having this option in the first place.

“well isn’t that a good thing since you’re an alterhuman?”

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

Authors have until March 30th, 2026 (That is just 9 days as of this reblog, which I am posting on March 21st, 2026) to file their claim against Anthropic to be reimbursed up to $3,000 per work found in the list.

There is currently no word for "the experiences that give rise to therianthropy." The therian community has a million different terms for pieces of it - mental shifts, phantom shifts, sensory shifts, etc. I propose a new term. Hear me out:

Zoesthesia ("zo-esthesia", from the Greek "zōion" [life/animal] and "aisthesis" [perception]): "The subjective inner non-human animal experiences that give rise to therianthropy." Therianthropy is an identity. Zoesthesia is the root of that identity, and can include all forms of shifts therians have previously described. Zoesthesia can be experienced from a young age and can occur before one's identity forms, before one knows the words for what they're experiencing. It is the "happening" behind the curtain - instinct. Consider:

It's neutral, even if it sounds like it implies a neurological bias.

It doesn't replace "therianthropy" as a term.

It sounds similar to synesthesia - the crossing of the senses in the brain, which is not seen as a disorder.

It's a spectrum, just like synesthesia - everyone's experiences are different.

Using "zoesthete" instead of "therian" is possible, though it does not imply any sort of identity, nor does it imply that one interprets these experiences as belonging to any specific non-human animal. This is primarily to describe "therianthropy underneath the hood."

It is not exclusive. We could use it to account for spiritual experiences as well - past life memories, "auras," the whole nine yards. If you think about it, all of those things also occur in your brain. Literally everything does. Your brain is hallucinating its own version of reality right now, and everything "spiritual" that you believe is just based on something your brain experienced. And everything that appears to be "external" is a recreation of it by your neurons.

What's The Point?

I suggest this because of the latest happenings globally within the therian community. A lot of young people in China, for example, think that "therian" is a fandom they can join. Younger folks globally should know that becoming more aware of the happenings in their consciousness is the point - not joining a fandom or getting likes on TikTok.

I believe that the way we do that is by turning the focus beyond identity, toward the inner experiences that lead to that identity. Time and time again, I've heard non-therians say "You can't identify as an animal, that's just not possible." There are significantly more convincing ways to talk about the experiences we have. Zoesthesia has my vote.

A more general, similarly neutral version of this that would apply to all alterhumans would be "allosthesia," from the Greek "allos" (other) and "aisthesis."

And you know what, they never have a very clear response to that. They're always kind of banking on getting to use voluntarily trans people as a prop and don't expect one to show up and crash the party.

Like, transmedicalist ideology was rancid enough applied to being trans. It's not any better applied elsewhere and it belongs in a hole in the ground, not in the alterhuman and nonhuman communities.

Edited to add because it just occurred to me: For extra batshit-sounding opportunities, imagine someone being like, "You can't call yourself a trans woman. You have to call yourself a womanlinker, because you're choosing to be femme, and that's not the same thing as actually being femme!"

Like, there's no reason you cant actively choose to be a therian or otherkin. Hell, back on the forums a HUGE talking point was how to INDUCE shifts and create more voluntary nonhuman experiences for yourself.