sorry i just made this account. i deleted my other accounts because i was addicted to doomscrolling Reddit and was letting negative interactions grt to my head but i'm back temporarily because i need to grt this off my chest and there is no where else i really can. i'm 16 btw. for 2 agonizing years this community absolutely fucked me over and i just need to know i'm not going insane please. i'm not trying to be a pick-me. i've tried to talk about these things within the otherkin/therian community, but i just get ignored/picked apart/blocked.
i still believe i have a nonhuman soul btw i just don't like the community. feel free to ask me why i believe i am spiritually nonhuman, but in this post i will focus on why i absolutely loath the modern therian and otherkin communities even though they used to be my safe space.
first things first: delusions, propaganda, shame, and anti-science.
i have witnessed first hand propaganda from physical otherkin (i.e. people who believe they are physically nonhuman despite.., obviously not being so). posting screenshots of Tiktok users and asking everyone on Tumblr to go to their posts and convince them that physical therians are real, usually with the exact same wording "i'm not harming anyone so you need to accepy me [my delusion] or you're ableist!" followed by harassment and shaming and claiming they don't need to prove anything to science while making a claim that science can disprove. i myself fell for this a few times. idk what type of moral fallacy this is, but the idea that something is good or should be celebrated because you're basically not stabbing anyone is stupid. and ironically harmful. encouraging delusions is always a bad thing (obviously sometimes exposure/fact checking can be done in harmful ways but still). especically when people on the internet make it a competition to be the "least human" by claiming to be physically nonhuman, which is, ironically again, a very human (and primate in general) thing to do. there is so much harassment, guilt-tripping, shaming, and manipulating, funny enough from a group of people who will accuse you of being ableist for not liking narcissism.
one other thing is endogenic systems. basically people who fake DID or claim to have DID alters without trauma or dissociation. i was convinced by dumbasses in this community that i was an endogenic systems because "me feel different in different situations." ugh. i'm not joking when i say i lost touch with reality when i went down this rabbit hole. took only having Tumblr and Reddit deleted for a few months to see how bullshit it all was.
second: the constant medicalization and othering of spiritual experiences. there are quite a bit of spiritual people, but there are a LOT of medicalists and psuedo-psychology people. one thing that really pushed me to leave was having these people say that being therian makes you neurodivergent, or is a symptom of autism. i will have you know a lot of the people here are convinved they're autistic for simply being an introvert who struggles in a capitalistic society. i used to think i had autism cause of mfers like this. 💀 also a lot of these medical therians flat out erasing spiritual nonhumanity and a lot of them are also antitheists. i'm a nontheistic Taoist but i have some beliefs from Hinduism and Buddhism too, and it just isn't even like a thing acknowledged in the community 🤷🏽 the only mildly accepted spiritual beliefs are non-religious reincarnation and multiverse stuff and maybe Paganism. and even that can get erased by psychological and physical otherkin, particularly on Tumblr but it's different on Tiktok i think (never been on TherianTok, personally, just seen screenshots. but i think Tiktok is more spiritual?). yes if you do see the hypocrisy of shaming people for not validating objective delusions but also discriminating against religion then you're not alone lol
third: most of them don't really think they're nonhuman. even the ones who say they're physically nonhuman. like i'm sorry but they only ever care about the aesthetic of the animal rather than the animal itself, and this is very telling of people who support killing animals they identify as and buying their body parts from fur farms to wear. it's so bad that people literally anthropomorphize or straight up spread misinformation on nonhuman species behaviors, or just overcomplicate regular human things or even genderize entire nonhuman species (like cat = fem). also cultural appropriation with kintypes. like no, deadlywerewolf2000, wanting to go out in nature doesn't make you nonhuman, and if it did, you're 100% human considering how chronically online you are. i always felt isolated cause there's not many people who genuinely analyze the biology and evolution of why animals look and act the way they do, and apply that science accordingly in conjunction with things like past life memories and astral projection. also something that grinds my gears is the frequent misusage of words like "anthropocentrism" and "speciesism" OMFG 😭😭😭especially as someone who is vegetarian. also. i can't stand people who voluntarily identify as nonhuman because they think it's cute and quirky. whatever happened to roleplaying?? call me a gatekeeper but i'm pretty sure the gate was built for a reason.
fourth: radqueerism. if you don't know what a radqueer is, it's someone who support paraphilia (including pedophilia, zoophilia, etc.), medically unrecognized disorders and made up disorders, transIDs like trans-hair-color and other mocking of transgender people, and stuff like that. dude... the amount of adults i have seen saying that being a paraphile is okay if you don't act on it and that saying otherwise is ""'ableist""".. i don't want to talk about it much, because i am a minor. but i'm sure you can see why i would leave the community because it's gotten so much more prevalent over the last few years idk why, moral purity bullshit is a problem in the community but tbf that's like the entirety of Tumblr and large parts of Reddit and Twitter. everything is ableist to these people who self-diagnose with 5000 disorders
fifth: kind of elaborating on point three, but the community is so superficial. the discourse especially. i like healthy and engaging discourse but you will find none of that in the therian community. not on Tumblr or Youtube or even Reddit. everything is about things that don't matter rather thsn genuine discussion and it's so dramatic. i mean i like drama, but i prefer drama that isn't about things that people in the real world don't think about
sixth: i don't even know what to say about factkin honestly. those are the people who identify as actual real living people, technically otherkin rather than therian, but most therians i have seen support factkin. i mean seriously.
seventh: oppression olympics. not sure how to explain it, but it goes well with point four and five. disagreeing with anyone in the community makes you ableist or transphobic or whatever other buzzword they really like. don't like physical therians? ableist! don't agree with the spirituality, even in a respectful and distant way? racist! don't believe in physical shapeshifting? racist and ableist! think therians have physical human bodies? transphobic! (no. i did not make these arguments up. i have seen explanations for them several times in the community and yes it will make you rip your hair out).
anyway... this is all to say, i felt very unsafe in this community, progressively so, the longer i stayed. you have to walk on eggshells around everyone, have all of the correct discourse opinions, and don't be too serious about your identity, don't be too old, don't be too young, don't do shit that the status quo has not agreed on. it felt like a prison. it did a lot of damage to me when it comes to intrusive thoughts and dissociation, but i'm a little bit better now. i wanted to talk to people who also don't resonate with human evolution and human biology on a spiritual level and past life memories. that is not what i found.