Shedding Skin: Reflections on Community, Species Transition, and Moving Forward

[liondrakes]

It’s been a while since I’ve wrote something like this. Ever since I started working on my zine, I’ve only put out a few shortform writings. I discussed identifying as transspecies with a philosophical approach to transition. I’ve also shared a bit of created knowledge on Verza. Lately, I’ve been floating around on social media. I answer prompts if they interest me, and occasionally I’ll help out new members by leaving replies in the Alterhuman Tumblr Community. Besides that, most of my activity is through Discord. I’ve never stopped writing, but I think I’m at a crossroads with myself. I've only been in the community for a couple of years, and I'm thankful to have met a lot of friends in the process. Yet, I feel so blasé about it. Our community is almost exclusively online. That isn't an issue on its own, but it's hard to reach out when you have limited options.

 

Bluesky's side of the community is a toss-up between folks I know and chat with elsewhere, folks who stick to their own devices and take a fairly casual approach to being in the community, or kinksters who post their petplay antics or other types of animal roleplay. I don't get much out of it, but it's still preferable over the next example. TikTok's side of the community needs no introduction. Given TikTok's position as Censorship Central, I have no interest in familiarizing myself past the point of sending funny things to my girlfriend. Moreover, I'm pretty burnt out on discourses stemming from that app. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way either. Twitter's also a cesspool that I'd rather not dip my toes in. Funny enough, it's through this platform that I discovered my nonhumanity. From what I remember, Twitter was split between IRL/DA discoursers, syscoursers, and KFFs/"kinnies" in fandoms. Needless to say, Twitter (2020-2023) wasn't the best place to operate. I can't say for certain that it's changed. I'm lucky I met Rafael and Coyote when I did. I'd like to think Twitter's got some chill alterhumans like them around, but this is also Twitter that I'm talking about. There's no guarantee of anything chill coming from that site.

 

Then, there's Tumblr. Tumblr is the kind of space that I'm into, but there's been a few hitches in the road lately. Nowadays, discussions lead into tension instead of anything tangible. Granted, you could argue that it's par for the course in any community. That's true. Still, it sucks seeing these results once a discussion opens up. Can't say I haven't been there since I witnessed firsthand how ugly things can turn when taken in bad faith. Additionally, I've been less enthusiastic about interacting with my peers (besides friends, that is). I don't know how, but I'm drained.

 

Regardless, feeling a little listless in our spaces isn't the sole reason for my melancholy. If anything, the main reason is more personal. I'm mulling over everything again. I’ve found myself in the same position as I was when I started exploring my gender identity. Except this time, it's with my species transition. With gender, I knew for certain that I was transmasculine. I knew I wasn't a man, but who was I beyond that? It took a couple of years for me to learn that I’m genderqueer. That came with a lot of trial and error through exploring other gender identities. Knowing the margins of species and selfhood, it’s taking me even longer to suit out.

 

I'm transspecies for a few reasons. Besides the obvious reasons (my fictionhood, my fluidity between humanity and nonhumanity, etc.), I am transspecies because I feel welcomed by its framework. Described as “crossing the cultural boundary of species”, the label is intentionally left as open as possible in recognition of its diversity. I like that approach as opposed to having a set structure. Whereas with otherkin and therian, I stepped away from these labels after coming to terms with how I feel about voluntary and involuntary frameworks. Treatment of spiritual and psychological experiences as binaries also contributed to my detachment. Whether or not these matters have changed depends on who you’re talking to. I know some therians and members of otherkind who don’t particularly care for these frameworks, and I know some who still use them in reference to their own experiences. They were still prominent when I first entered these spaces, hence my decision to drop them later on.

 

Labels are only stepping stones in the grand scheme of things, though. My transitional journey has been full of ups and downs, discoveries and doubts, etc, because of my introspections. The closer I think I am to mapping myself out, the farther I get in retrospect. I’ve held off on publicly discussing my questionings after coming to the conclusion that my time as a daywalker really was just a cameo shift. Furthermore, I’ve found that being a fallen angel is more of a paratype and an archetrope than a personal species. These instances made me take a step back and reconsider where I’m at. I get so caught up in the "What if...?" portion of the questioning process that I forget to give myself some time and consideration before making any definitive statements. Being a shapeshifter doesn't help much either. I'm prone to taking the shape of anything around me, and that often skews my sense of self. The same happened when I identified as a polymorph, and it shows how little things have changed. 

 

I'm glad that I haven't lost myself in the process, though. I still know the difference between my base forms and my core forms. For me, a base form is the baseline of my identity. That baseline is a concept: fantasy, a genre of fiction. I am the personification of Fantasy, a gijinka even. I have no set look as Fantasy because fantasy can be anything. From Discworld and Tales from the Flat Earth to Skin Deep and Fable comics, my appearance varies. This is why I am a shapeshifter. On the other hand, a core form is a literal core experience. It’s not the foundation of who I am, but it's significant to my journey as a personified medium. The difference between my base form and my core forms is origin. Before I am anything else, I am fantasy incarnate. Because I am this genre of fiction, each core form originates from me, which is why they aren’t the baseline of my identity. It’s a little difficult to explain, but I’m just glad that this part of my experience has stuck. 

 

That leads me to my dilemma. I can't decipher what is or isn't a core experience. I've struggled with this for the past year. I took down my rentry, which serves as a "kin list" of sorts, to restructure it and organize my current thoughts on my alterhumanity. I'm realizing that my alterhumanity wasn't quite what I thought it was, and as of now, I'm trying to put the pieces together... again. I know who I am, yet I don't know at the same time. Are some of these memories my own, or are they products of a fleeting (cameo) shift? Everything seems so real in the moment, but when it passes, I'm stuck wondering if it was truly me at all. What feels right? What doesn't? It's all so strange and frustrating. 

 

Worst of all, I keep thinking about removing a lot of my previous writings from Tumblr. I've already chosen to keep some of them off of my website. There's older writings that I think are worth preserving, although I may not identify in the way that I used to. For example, I'd like to keep my essay on discovering the quoiian label and eventually quoiluntariness as a form of experience. I don't use the quoiian label anymore, but I think the piece still holds up since quoiluntariness shapes my personal identity to this day. However, that's only one out of a few exceptions. On one hand, preservation is important. On the other hand, I still reserve the right to do away with my writings if I see fit. I don't know how to approach it, though. I don't want to stop writing about alterhumanity (far from it, in fact), but it's become a guessing game of how well it ages before something changes. 

 

All things considered, there's positive changes that I do want to write about. Although I no longer think that I had a past life in Tamriel (or any past lives for that matter), Tamriel still holds relevance within my alterhumanity. I've chosen to be a Redguard. It's not the first Elder Scrolls fictionlink I've had; I once linked Dwemers and dropped the race as a constel. Since then, I feel more at home with being a Redguard. I tend to gravitate towards desert and grassland biomes, but I wouldn’t make a good Alik’r warrior. I think I'd be better suited as a civilian in the Dragontail Mountains.

I'm also revisiting my creature collector fictomeres. I still believe that I'm a Pokémon Trainer, but I'm not sure how. I think it's in relation to another fictotype I've questioned. I once thought myself to be a Necrozma who became a trainer, but Necrozma wasn't the only species I've questioned in regards to Pokémon. Others include Koraidon and Hoopa. I briefly identified as a Koraidon and later realized that wasn't accurate to my experience either. I feel that I may have been Hoopa after all this time, but I take on the appearance of a human from time to time (think of Latias's disguise as seen in the anime's movies). I want to stop and process this before going further. Maybe, I'll answer some of the fictionkind dreamwidth's prompts in private to sort this out. If not that, I could try the Turnskin Tavern's grilling channel again. The server's not as active as it used to be, but I do appreciate that the server introduced a healthy approach to grilling. Basically, it's self-initated. You address something that you're questioning or kinsidering, and you invoke other members of the server to ask you questions on the subject of your concern. Last time I did it, I got good responses from the folks in the server. I didn't feel pressured or scrutinized in the process, so it might help to try that out again. 

 

Trying to understand one's species is an experience that I'm surprised I don't hear about as often among transspecies folks. For context, this is in regards to Tumblr's side of the community. Communal discussions tend to revolve around transitioning, as one would expect. I'm used to the discussions of body modifications. Occasionally, I've speculated on what modifications would be of interest to me in the future. No matter how you slice it, everyone's doing their own thing.

 

That said, many of these discussions are in context to physical nonhumanity. I'm well aware of the overlap between these two communities, but I'm also noticing that transspecies as a label is starting to be treated as synonymous with relatively new labels (ex: holothere, deviae, and physical nonhuman in general). There's a considerable amount of transspecies folk who identify as physically nonhuman, so that's to be expected. That said, I find it ironic that some folks are okay with grouping transspecies under their personal communites/umbrella(s) but take an issue with our community being associated with others (otherkin, therian, alterhuman, etc). After all, the transspecies community has stood as its own community for quite some time.

But, I digress. Although I'm interested in seeing the progress of our community, I also don't relate to a lot of perspectives within it. I don't have the financial means of pursuing body modifications, despite my considerations. Thus, none of my current goals involve it. Similar with gender, I don't see any physical changes to the body as an absolutely pressing thing. It's uncommon to see other transspecies folk who lack interest or drive in pursuing a physical transition. Yeah, there's posts about questioning kintypes or theriotypes every day. Otherkind and therianthropes see that often. That's not what I'm talking about, though. I'm talking about the difficulty of finding yourself when everything you once thought turned out to be different. I'm talking about the earliest parts of a transition when you're bouncing around different labels and getting tired of it because you just want to find the right words for what you experience. Many transspecies folks seem to have a solid idea of who or what they are and know where to go from there. I'm still juggling between what identity goes where and whether or not something is an identity at all. Meanwhile, the only ways that help me understand who I am are also waved off because they aren't "real" enough. 

 

It's isolating in a way. When sharing my own experiences, I also watched as metaphorical and/or philosophical means of self-expression were treated as outliers within a community (transspecies) that's always been open about the diversity of its transitional journeys. If anything, I felt like I was the one being pushed out of my own label for having a nuanced perspective to our community. It makes me wonder if experiences like mine would matter at all. Nonetheless, I still want to share them. I need an outlet for the inferno raging in my mind, and I want to be involved regardless of my struggles. I don't want a few troubles to spoil my relationship with my community. 

 

The same goes for the alterhuman community. Granted, I'm annoyed with the misinformation that's been spreading around about... a lot of terms, to be frank. I also don't relate to new members of the fictionkin community, especially with some folks' reclaimation of "kinnie". There's other things I've seen that I don't get either, but hey, to each their own. I think I'll keep running my blog, if only for the opportunity to talk with my peers. I know we still have to finish the carrd for our system blog as well. I don't know if I want to continue writing on Tumblr or if I want to post exclusively on Dreamwidth, but I'll make my decision sometime after I finish my zine. As for my website, it's best used for archival purposes. It's definitely rough around the edges, but that's a given since it's a work-in-progress. For someone who hates coding, I'd say it looks pretty good for what it is. All in all, I'm going to take these slow for a bit. Do some self-reflection. Hopefully, it'll come to pass. I know I'll find peace of mind. It'll take some time, but I'll find my way.