Sir, That’s My Emotional Support Yeerk

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also, we really think other people need to think about this a bit more deeply than they probably are

So.

Don't you think it's a little weird that people have this sort of purity test for the definition of "therianthropy" where they try to restrict it to extant living animals?

As if maybe it has to be based on some kind of ancestral or genetic memory. Or, if it's spiritual, then it has to be spirits of things that are living, or at least, have once lived.

Because, wolves? They aren't anywhere on the human evolutionary tree. You cannot go back far enough into prehistory, into the ancestry of humans, and find wolves.

And this goes for absolutely every extant lifeform today, including primates. We're all descendant from a common ancestor, but we are not ancestors of each other.

So, that means, whatever's going on with therianthropy, it's not genetic. At least, not in the sense that we have some kind of biologically based memories, or mix up of instincts like that.

Now, humans are neurodiverse and extremely complex. And, really, so is a lot of other life. Life is a complex system that shows many, many countless instances of chaotic fibrillation and development.

It's not inconceivable, as an example of one possible explanation, that sometimes someone is born and develops in such a way that their own personal drives, instincts, and sense of identity better match another animal, just by chance. By an act of chaos (in the chaos theory sense of the word).

So, if you're going to base your understanding of therianthropy off of anything scientific, you have to recognize this. Otherwise, there's nothing scientific about your model of therianthropy.

And just what is it, exactly, that makes that more possible than someone also growing up to be a dragon? Nothing.

Of course, there are also spiritual explanations for this.

But there are so many different spiritualities out there, who is to say that one model is more accurate and true than all the others?

And, the line between a mythical creature and a spirit is a really super blurry one, that changes depending on your own religion.

So, when someone says that they're a dragon therian, the only counter argument that can really be made is something along the lines of "that's not what the word was supposed to mean when it was coined."

And that's a bullshit argument, because not only does language evolve, it should evolve when it needs to. And this is a case of it needing to. (Assuming this is a case of it evolving in the first place, because we don't trust claims that therianthropy was meant to only include extant animals when it was coined by people who identified as werecreatures, a mythical type of being [and a totally legit thing we're not criticizing], and the past is also so easily rewritten.) Whatever the history of the word, there are mythical and fictional people and beings today that need the word "therian" to describe themselves, and in this era of discrimination and crushing oppression of so, so many people, it's fucking awful to try to take that away from them.

Anyway, so, dragons.

Dragons are neat because we were not invented by just some guy.

We're a catch-all umbrella category of a myriad of both mythical and extant living organisms. (Komodo dragons, bearded dragons, and leafy sea dragons are dragons.) Some of us are fictional, some of us are mythical, some of us are extant species of animal, and some of us are plants.

There is no one myth that you can point to and say, "that's where all dragons came from". And there is no singular characteristic that a dragon must have in order to be a dragon. Not flight. Not even breathing fire. Not even scales.

And we're ancient. We grew up with humanity and humanity grew up with us. We are embedded in their psyches and cultures as far back as the earliest pieces of art that have been dug up (or damn near it), even if the word "dragon" isn't nearly that old. The seeds of our memetic identities were there in creatures with horns and wings and long tails and monstrous moods carved in stone and bone and horn, all along.

(scientifically speaking, we probably don't predate dogs, but it is possible. there's no way of proving it one way or the other)

It should be absolutely no surprise that a child of humans wakes up periodically and goes, "Oh, I'm a dragon, actually."

It has historic precedence, after all. Like, even royalty does it occasionally (though, that might be a slightly different thing).

The trans community has a specific type of transphobia towards nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth, and that is forcing womanhood onto them posed as purification or salvation.

The reverse, forcing nonbinary people assigned female into the man role, also exists, but it's frequently done with open hatred (e.g. "those they/thems are actually men trying to sneak into women's spaces") and therefore it has been called out by several people I interact with.

The former, not so much.

Many tend to see misgendering of someone amab towards womanhood as fundamentally benevolent or unserious. Real people develop new kinds of dysphoria and quit trans spaces because of that, including some of my acquaintances, but it's all seen as accidental collateral damage for the noble goal of making more women discover themselves.

"But what if you're denying a closeted self hating trans woman a chance to be called a woman" is seen as a more valid argument than the distress being actively done to people of other genders, and it's fucking bonkers.

I refuse to keep centering non-abinary* perspectives in this conversation.