Why is therianthropy involuntary? A definitional boundry.

(2026-07-11 22:07)Abelioscruxthymn Wrote:  What's the appropriate response to the next generation who much more widely things therianthropy is a more malleable and subjective mental construct? There was an interaction on another server where that sort of belief was widely pervasive, and folks mentioning their perspective of it being involuntary were dismissed; it is my understanding that scenario sparked interest for this thread.

Ceding ground on terminology or perspective with a large group for substantial time creates a morass that is hard to undo.

That's a good question, since it's so wide-spread now on the internet.. My own (probably unpopular) opinion would be for us to cut it off at the source and distance ourselves from the Alterhuman umbrella. The anti-questioning culture and much of the identity-only concepts seem to have derived from it being a vehicle for ideas that originated in echo-chambers on tumblr and Alt+H's attempts to classify various communities as related identity groups without a clear understanding of what any of them were originally describing themselves as.. Other than that, I think we have to keep trying to find better ways to introduce and break down concepts of Ontology for an audience who likely has never encountered it.. I'm hoping it'll get easier once the social media craze dies down and the next generation tries to distance themselves from it; fads tend to come and go in cycles and, from what I've noticed, few seem to persist past the 10-year mark.

Much of what we're seeing now seem to have been recent developments occuring within the past 6 years.. The constant joining and leaving of people in the greater community sets up a situation where we have a lot of relatively new people teaching the completely new, with all of their information stemming from wikis, one-off posts, and whatever the spaces they join promote as acceptably-true..then the new ones branch out and propagate those views as if they're long-established community understandings when they're really not. TG isn't exempt from this either; the breakdown of views and experiences described here don't always represent what you'll find in other spaces, but we try to promote general critical thought, and we have a number of members who are still around from the early community who try to make it known when something is completely inconsistent with how we understood things.

Even so, you can't really have any cohesion of ideas if everyone's giving vastly different versions of what the single thing we're all supposed to have in common even is (that we're animals in some way). I think we could remedy this if we worked on improving our messaging and descriptions to be clearer and less up-for-interpretation, and if we try to foster a cultural shift, starting with the newcomers, that emphasizes the importance of understanding ourselves as animals over the more human-centered arguments that seek to emphasize it as separate, ephemeral, and non-essential to the experience. I realize it's kind of a vague statement, but we need to bring back the emphasis of the *animal* in animality..

As a final thought, I also think we should try to discourage advertising of the ideas of therianthropy to people who have not actively sought them out. If someone is really experiencing therianthropy then they will be drawn to find us on their own, and the community as a whole will benefit from having those who have had more time to consider what they are and establish their own understandings, without outside influences guiding their views and beliefs about themselves..

(2026-07-11 1:56)FernFox Wrote:  I believe (my) therianthropy is involuntary because I didn't choose my experiences, nor did I consciously decide to perceive myself as an animal. My behaviours came prior to any self-identity I had of being a fox.

My experiences began in very early childhood, and while there were times where I did the normal child thing of pretending to be different animals, there was never a time that I looked at a fox and thought "This is the creature I'm going to pretend to be from now on". In fact, behaving like a fox preceded any knowledge I have of reading or learning about canine behaviour. My body posturing, social cues, vocalizations, and other non-human-like instincts came naturally. And it took me a veeery long time (until adulthood) -- and lots of miserable masking and suppressing -- before I accepted that I was more fox than I was human.

I really relate to this!!

The shapeshifter side of my identity probably stemmed from my voluntary, playing-pretend years and turned into an involuntary experience and identity (in a sense, because I'd rather not identify as a shapeshifter, but I feel unfulfilled if I don't as it's an experience I'd be leaving out of my identity) over time.

The cat side of my experience is also involuntary, but it never started as a voluntary thing. I feel like I must have imprinted on cats due to my exposure to them at an early age. I never meant or particularly wanted to pretend to be a cat, it was just learned behavior I supose.

It's my wolf side that's really interesting, though. Originally, I thought I had developed canine experiences over time from media exposure, but I've had some memories come back to me recently and some stories told to me, and I know realize I displayed specifically wolf-like behaviors at a very young age before being exposed to canines in the media and in real life. Perhaps since humans are social animals and similar to wolves in some ways, this is why I was very wolf-like as a child? But then again, I still had behaviors that were noticeably different from other children's.

So what I do know is that even if, in my younger years, my cat experiences were much stronger and more visible (to myself and others), there were still those wolf behaviors that came from... absolutely nowhere. There is no way the experience of therianthropy could be voluntary, in my opinion. Just because there is absolutely no way I could've chosen to be a wolf and a cat.