For me, doing research is learning about myself, exploring my identity, learning about others' experiences, asking myself questions, thinking things through and just talking to people and getting their opinions!

I think that therianthropy is involuntary because you don't wake up one day and decide I'm going to be an animal today and I'm going to act like this and I'm going to pretend to have shifts and similar.

Therianthropy isn't a conscious choice for me - it is just simply who I am and who I will be.
Choosing to wear gear and do vocals and quads is a choice, a personal choice but being a therian in itself is just who you are.

(2020-07-26 19:06)DustWolf Wrote:  What if Therianthropy is more of a connection than a condition?

Given the context, it might be helpful to define those words. Is having been in an abusive relationship a connection or a condition?

(2020-07-26 19:06)DustWolf Wrote:  Like, we like to think that therianthropy is something we are born with, but the more I've tried to understand my own therianthropy, the more I realised the reason I can relate to wolves, is because of a number of things I've been through in my life, that made me end up this way.

I wasn't simply born as a wolf therian, I was moulded, admittedly by forces outside my control (abuse, etc), but who I am and why I am more like a wolf than a human was something I've become through both nature and nurture.

Ultimately if anyone looked deep enough into their Therianthropy they might find that the reason for their animal traits is... that they're a person who is like that animal. You can find some of those traits (in therians) also in family members who are clearly not therians or in human cultural norms, etc.

What I'm saying is that for different reasons we as people develop traits that make us like certain animals and then that connection we have to those animals -- that is our therianthropy.

This is akin to the nature vs. nurture argument (highlighted above by @BearX ) brought forward in some other areas, such as with queerness. Generally, my stance is nature gives you the biological/neurological hardware necessary to be able to experience the dimension of the subject in question. The nurture component determines, perhaps with some additional help from nature, where in that subject you land. For example, in the abusive relationship situation mentioned above, someone without a limbic system - the portion of the brain that processes emotions - will not experience emotional trauma. Someone with a hyperactive one may not only be very traumatized from that relationship but see every subsequent partner who even mildly resembles the prior abusive one as triggering in some way. Therapy - another nurturing effect - can help mitigate these effects.

With therianthropy, I think while almost all people have the necessary neuro-hardware to understand the idea, only a fraction of those have the nurture to give it due reflection. Within that group, some have the nature that gives them phantom limb experiences. I don't yet know about the various types of shifts to assign them to one or both categories, but that would be my schema for analysis.

(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.

(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 15:54)Cygnus Wrote:  I think confusion/conflicts over this crop up specifically because the modern community is so fixated on therianthropy being thought of as an identity, and it's led to a lot of weird grey-area arguments about things that could be possible if therianthropy were merely a malleable and subjective mental construct that was more a part of their formed personality than any sort of pure-ontological state, no matter how far such an idea veers away from its original understanding(s).

What's the appropriate response to the next generation who much more widely thinks 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.

As someone who has searched far and wise for a label that fits my sexuality (I'm asexual, but romantically I had no idea) I eventually came to realise bisexual (or rather, Biromantic) fits me best.
Microlabels can feel nice but also very niche and small. The broader label bisexual has a simple definition and yet is such a wide range of experiences - sometimes I think it's best to recognise that people can have a general shared experience with many differences and nuances.

Also, just wanted to say, a furry is someone who likes Anthropomorphic animals (animals with human traits like being bipedal, talking etc) so otherpaw technically wouldn't fit into that group.
It's definitely not an alterhuman label. I think it would fit into a sort of a bigger group including Furries and kemonomimis. And yeah, the term could definitely be clearer.. otherpaw doesn't convey much.

I think confusion/conflicts over this crop up specifically because the modern community is so fixated on therianthropy being thought of as an identity, and it's led to a lot of weird grey-area arguments about things that could be possible if therianthropy were merely a malleable and subjective mental construct that was more a part of their formed personality than any sort of pure-ontological state, no matter how far such an idea veers away from its original understanding(s)..

I don't believe someone can voluntarily make themselves into an animal anymore than I think adopting beliefs or stereotypes from another culture can allow one to claim membership within that culture (such claims are frowned upon for good reason).. I do, however, believe people can convince themselves that they're something they aren't, and that's more of a cautionary situation than something I feel should be knowingly legitimized. This is the opposite of trying to verify something true about yourself with evidence.

As far as I'm concerned, one is either an animal or they are not an animal; this is a statement of ontology (A sub-branch of Metaphysics that deals with abstract concepts about the nature of "being"[existing] and reality). The only exceptions to that state being present since birth reside solely within the domain of the "supernatural", and even within that framework those rare situations are not something that is generated by the will of the individual.

It should also be noted that being something doesn't necessarily mean you consciously understand it, just that you are it; your recognition of, or identification with, the state has no bearing on whether said state exists. Everyone is free to disagree, but the concept of not being human was always about ontology. The way it was discussed just changed over the years, and that meaning often goes unacknowledged in favor of discourse about the forms of self-identification that have become very popular with the marginalized groups a lot of us also belong to. I wish we would move away from this because we are shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot with how poorly these ideas are being communicated and understood.

..And seriously, being an animal forced to masquerade as a human isn't all it's cracked up to be for all of us; the young ones make it seem all-positives, but it isn't. There are a lot of us who experience negative, vivid, and frightening phenomena that don't get written about in the popular spaces, so nobody ever hears about it. If someone was actually looking to force these kinds of experiences upon themselves that would be like pining for a life of misery.

I’ve said elsewhere here before that labels (the identity side of these things) have their place, particularly as tools for communication, but also for a sense of belonging and understanding of oneself. However, they also have a tendency to be very limiting, and when someone rushes into finding a label they want to apply to themselves (or otherwise is not basing their taking of the label on anything substantive), then the label is being misused.

Anyone knowingly misusing a label will not maintain that label forever, unless doing so out of spite, in which case you should find something better to do with your life. I said as much on the Discord, but your labels should be informed by your experiences, and pushing it the other way around is just wishful thinking at best, and lying at worst. It’s obviously not impossible to craft your own reality if you try hard enough, and in certain situations it’s good to change how you think about things, but there’s a very big leap between “I need to take a more positive look at my life, even when it feels like it doesn’t make sense to,” and “I want to be X (a therian, for example) even though I’ve never felt that way before, so I’m gonna force it.”

A lot of it is unfortunately just young people wanting to fit in; it’s much easier to lie about yourself when clout is on the line. But I hate lying to people, and if you claim to be something when you’re not, then you’re just lying, no matter how good your intentions.

So yes, you have to have experienced something involuntary that led you to conclude you were nonhuman in some way if you want to consider yourself someone who experiences therianthropy (that is, a therian). If you had never heard of therianthropy, you wouldn’t have even considered this type of experience, unlike us who found therianthropy as a means of explaining something we’ve felt for a long time. That is a hill I’m willing to die on.

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 didn't choose any of my experiences, and if I had the choice, I'd much rather be comfortable in my human body, it would be a lot easier. But I suppose I did choose to call myself a therian, so the interpretation there was a choice.

Ultimately, I think the 'involuntary' part of the definition is indeed a boundary. It exists to make clear that therianthropy is an identity that stems from experiences, (even if said experiences are a spiritual phenomena or a persistent personal gnosis), which come naturally and honestly. It wasn't something that was forced or consciously chosen, and it's a life-long affair -- something that is part of you -- not a temporary label or affliction.

[Edited because I got off-topic! I'll save it for another thread]

- Fern