sawyer

I have written a fair few times now about how the therian community has treated myself and others. I for years did not feel comfortable to call myself therian. I existed in therian spaces but I was an interloper. I stayed in therian spaces because I felt really I had no where else and because some places did tolerate me in time. However there was always a price for being tolerated, that being "the dance" - in which I would have to make clear my delusions, make clear that I was seeing a doctor, and minimise the validity of my own experiences and often reassure -real- therians their experiences were different from mine and real.

I have not met terribly many other zoanthropes through the past decade or so. I have met a few here and there but our interactions were always fleeting. Few would stick around in therian communities because of how we are treated. The endless demands to explain your delusion or censor yourself, people would always come and go. I have met a couple zoanthropes that just would not talk about their experiences so they could hide among therians and have the limited community they were allowed. I have also met zoanthropes that existed in P-shifter communities rather than therian communities because they simply were not allowed to exist in therian communities.

The therian community has long tried to "protect" itself and root out P-shifters to a point of zealotry. To be honest I do not care to reclaim the term P-shifter, but I can understand why many would want to. P-shifter or accusations of being a P-shifter have been used against zoanthropes for as long as I have been in the community. It becomes a demand to kowtow and reality check yourself and deny any of your experiences as real or genuine and that they are delusion. And then from there it would be decided if you were allowed to stay in the community or be removed anyway. Accusations of P-shifter have been used for a long time to downplay or deny the experiences of zoanthropes and remove us from spaces that we are ostensibly supposed to belong to. To very many therians, your experience being from "delusion" makes the experience much less valid, despite that under certain circumstances their own identity could easily be declared delusion.

People say and tell me that P-shifters are dangerous and are a cult and how P-shifters hurt and abuse others. I have to wonder though if that is "inherently all P-shifters" or just a perception because of who and what people talk about. There have been many times in many discourses that the opposing side becomes flanderised into this horrible abusive monster or are considered deeply problematic or inherently harmful - shipping discourse, syscourse, radqueers, MLs vs anarchists, etc. I have no doubt that there are P-shifters that have deeply hurt and damaged other people, but this is something that many I have talked to acknowledge and understand. Some people say that the term never was applicable to delusional people, but then I have heard the same thing about 'therian' from many therians, a statement I know does not represent -all- therians. And I should ask as well, what about those zoanthropes who would not or could not double bookkeep? How many of them may have found themselves in P-shifter communities and associated themselves with that? Of the dozen or so zoanthropes I know, it is two or three.

At least for myself, my relationship with therians has been more abusive and done more damage to me than my interaction with P-shifters. It does really become an abusive relationship where I am reinforced over and over how those people over there are dangerous, how they would hurt and abuse me and how here is the only place that I can be tolerated so long as I know that I am lesser than they are and not a -real- therian. I never interacted with those communities until around a year ago because of what I was told, and those that I have interacted with, do in many ways remind me of my own experiences, and many of them have been far more accepting than therians.

People often say that we should find a different word and that it is really about the word and nothing else. But it isn't; it was never about the word and it was never about the problematic individuals. Whenever the topic of P-shifters come up there is almost always this same question of "why are [CLCZs] accepted in the community but P-shifters are not?" The answer always comes down to that we (CLCZs) acknowledge our experience as delusion, while P-shifters do not or that we do not make claims about "Capital-R reality". If it was truly the problem being that it was the word P-shifter, the response would not be relating to or predicated on our ability to double bookkeep. It would be something like "that word has a lot of baggage, [X] have similar experiences but are not associated with that community".

The core of us being tolerable among therians was -always- the minimisation of our experiences. It has -always- been sanism. What happens to those who cannot double bookkeep? They are labled P-shifter, demonised and expelled. Even if we can double bookkeep we might still be expelled. I have had it happen to me, and it would not surprise me if many other zoanthropes have had similar experiences.

I personally do not wish to reclaim the term P-shifter for myself. For how I have been treated by others I do not feel attachment or desire towards the term and it still gives me a bit of discomfort in the way some other reclaimed slurs do. However, I can understand why some people would want to reclaim the term. For some it might be reclaiming a slur, for others being allowed to exist in both communities at once or allowing others like them to be acceptable in the community, for others it might be that making P-shifter acceptable means that they can express their experiences wholley without the demand for double bookkeeping. If you want to accept the full range of therian experiences, you cannot exclude a group of people simply because they cannot double-bookkeep or cannot realiy check themselves.

There is a particular irony over this whole discussion, in that people supporting the inclusion and destigmatisation of the term P-shifter and by and large CLCZs, Endels, and holotheres - groups either directly claiming their identity is associated with delusion or who others often associate with it. Many of the people opposing it almost always include how P-shifters harm delusional people and claim it an effort to protect others. Delusional people are not incapable to protect ourselves, we are not incapable to reason or make decisions for ourselves, and we are not incapable of seeing how others around us or what they think of us, nor are we incapable to see the harm others do to us under the promise of help, protection, and good intentions. So often in these discussions mad people are spoken over, silenced, or dismissed by "sane" people. The level of sanism that pervades every aspect of therianthropy is honestly extremely disheartening, and ironic for a group of "wierd animal people" that plenty of outside society thinks are lunatics.

In the past couple years there have been points when CLCZs were becoming more acceptable and more tolerable, there were even points a couple years ago I did feel finally I could call myself therian and that I could be genuinely part of the community. Even when I started posting on tumblr again there was really very little available and that was only around a year ago. Since then I have met and interacted with more zoanthropes than I had in the 8 years before. I have also been able to get to know some zoanthropes like Sonar/Dune and Ike particularly well. The feeling of not being alone is wonderful. But with our increased visibility and acceptance came ironically with more harassment and more negative posts about us. So many of the various discourses on therian tumblr wind up surrounding us in some way. I am pretty insulated from things in my bubble of mostly other zoanthropes, so I only really see something if a mutual reblogs it, and still it is so regular I read comments how we are dangerous or should not be included for various reasons. If you go to that therian confessions blog you will see so many comments about those like me. All these discourses do is again remind me of how much we are not wanted and not accepted by the broader community. Several months ago I took off my theta-delta necklace for the last time, and it has been hanging on my shelf since. I had gotten two, one for myself and one for my companion. They still wear theirs all the time but for me I simply do not feel represented by the symbol or welcome by it (even if I did replace the cord that was irritating my neck). My companion tries to reassure me that I do belong, and I am welcome in therian spaces and that my experiences with transformation -are- therian experiences or even more than normal therians. Others will try to reassure me that I am therian because I fall under their definition (and some even demanding I do), it is however to me not reassuring. Definitions and labels are much more about community than strict definition as there are plenty of labels people could claim me under. Still I have attachment to the therian community, and I want to see it grow to be what its ideals claim it is. It is honestly a lot of why I write these long emotional pieces, that others like me might not feel so alone, and that hopefully I can convince others and help the therian community to become what it promises it is. Although I feel continuously rejected by the therian community and as an outsider and interloper I do really hope someday we can -be- therians and not treated differently to others.