three genders in a wenchcoat

important note for the next cadre of pure-hearted fools who decide to make something wonderful

frequent sentiment amid the lamentations: "this place made me a better person."

no exception here. and it's not really the lack of numbers and whatnot... it's the community who self-selected to a site like this one, the lived values which made this the first place we have ever felt genuinely safe exposing every part of ourself. our darkest shame, our rambling explorations of plurality, the therian identity we've carried since before that label existed but always anticipated a mob of gatekeepers if we claimed it. Akhra, Lenestre and Rhiannon were first named and expressed as fursonas in the 90s, but even that community has limits to the degree of open weirdness it'll celebrate rather than merely permit. here? we're surrounded by systems and critters and critter systems. it didn't feel like putting things out there, it felt like joining the party and that is an incredible, magical difference.

in short, cohost made us realize that transition was only the first of many steps in living openly as our entire self; and it provided favorable terrain to actually get there.

three weeks ago we spent an evening at the bar with @atonal440; one of several since meeting here in early April and discovering we were co-local. we realized, he knows the system individually from #onhere... why not talk individually? 🦡 chatted for an hour, then 🐲 for another hour. 🍯 left the bar and walked with him until our paths split. we've talked quite a bit about how this evening led us to the novel experience of Having a Boyfriend, but it was huge in another way too: this was the first time we ever openly, explicitly, not dressed up as fictional roleplay, spoke face-to-face as individuals, separately named and recognized. the joy and freedom of that was enough that we decided to fully come out as plural to the offline world as well; all our friends and family know now. cohost did that. we can think of no other catalyst that might have ushered us to this point.

the shutters may be closing, but thousands will remember this space and what it enabled. its presence will echo through our futures and it will live piecemeal in the lessons we carry and share forward. maybe, if we're lucky, it will live again more cohesively in some other new place that gets made down the line. and it hardly matters if that one only survives this unworthy world for a few years too: it will do so much good in so little time.

look I get it. I grew up autistic in a homogeneous community too. I have gotten enough parsing shock to immediately recall it decades later from:

• leetspeak
• SMS abbreviations
• phonetic spellings
• cutesy spellings
• phonetic noise interjections
• lack of commas
• lack of capitalization (!!!)
• middle English
• dialect English
• written Dutch that I mistook for English
• spoken Dutch that I mistook for English
• American English spoken by other white people who only speak American English, but with a regional accent I'm not used to

some of these really pissed me off for a while. some made me lament the state of education. (racistly, in quite a few cases.) and some, I immediately identified as my own mistake because that's just how someone habitually communicates; I'll just have to get used to it.

turns out that last thing got a lot easier with practice. which is good, because it should have been my reaction to all of them. they're all either things a person was raised with, or chosen cultural identity signifiers¹, or both. autistic structure-comfort is a thing, and being raised without enough exposure to different modes of expression compounds it, and it sucks to sit through the shock of that, but we can learn and it stops hurting once we do and the fact we were unprepared is on our upbringing, not the people expressing themselves around us.

if it's too much at once, you probably should silence a few accounts so you can expose yourself more slowly. keep a list of them, so you can undo it later; I promise there aren't that many yinglets in your feed. because the alternative lies somewhere between "Oxford English only!" and, frankly, "therians are fake and their expression is a game they can play elsewhere." and I would rather be surrounded by scavs than cops.

1. in before someone tries to whatabout hate speech

really appreciating the cohost feature to put a little private note-to-self on someone's profile, this week. it's gonna be great in six months when I'm not sure exactly why I blocked all these people.

(for extra convenience, most of the notes were just copy-pasting their own comments)