• it / its

local queer disaster pack of critters | ΘΔ &
mid 20s


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

Anyways I was ruminating on why I feel like a living cartoon animal, the observation that a lot of animators and children's book illustrators were some flavor of queer, and the way you can grow up with a sense of what it means to be "human" instilled by your parents while also having characters who are not human but feel extremely real and relatable in the way that the people around you trying their best to be human do not


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

I get kind of sick and tired of people saying "instead of identifying as nonhuman you should just expand the borders of what it means to be human" because I never quite realized how limited my scope was until I started experimenting with nonhuman identity. You might as well be commanding me to build an expansion onto my house without setting foot outside.


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in reply to @DiscoDeerDiary's post:

That totally makes sense. Any attempt to define an idea-space is necessarily going to involve taking some steps outside of it, otherwise how would you know where one definition stops being useful and the next one starts?

I really struggled early on with how to positively define "non-human" without setting it up in opposition to something that humanity inherently possesses. I'm still not entirely certain I've got it but I had some really helpful people in my life to work through it with. That was clutch for me

That makes a lot of sense! For me I was mostly just getting tired of the bait and switch where people would be like "of course you're human! everyone's human!" and then once I had agreed that yes I am human they would act like I had signed a contract to behave and experience the world in ways that felt very uncomfortable to me.

I think this gets at the problem I was/am having. If you just want to define "non-human" to be "not human", then you have to draw a circle around everything that defines a human to be human, and then look at what falls outside that, rather than defining non-human as an entity in and of itself. To your point, when I was unemployed and living in a car, I didn't consider myself any more or less human than I am now, with a job and a place to live. I would argue that the having of a job is not intrinsically necessary to a state of humanity, no matter how much capitalism wants it to be.

Sorry, I was a bit terse because I was out. What I meant is, even my fursona who is literally just an idealised version of me, still has a job because despite not wanting to be human I still want to participate in society as a person, I just want be fluffy and have four legs while I do it. Does that make sense?

Definitely! The English language struggles with the distinction between "human" and "person" because there's been no need to differentiate in the past. While I'm not a big fan of the current flavor of AI, this actually might be something tech bros could help us out with. By pushing for some legal definition of "personhood" for sufficiently advanced computer systems, it would be my hope that an unintended but very welcome side effect would be the ability to separate person status from human status, not entirely dissimilar to the states that allow X gender markers.

That is, of course, entirely a legal construct and has nothing to do with your self identification, which is totally valid as is. But society being forced to have that conversion would help to define these terms better, similar to how sex and gender were fairly synonymous up until trans rights forced them to be better defined

You might as well be commanding me to build an expansion onto my house without setting foot outside.

Wasn’t ready for how much this statement resonated. Clearly, this is the phrase I needed to read today, thank you.