Okay, so maybe I'm just incredibly dense, but there's something here that has been bothering me for quite some time as someone who primarily works in a TF headspace. I ask this question out of a genuine desire to understand my peers in this area:
What part of this is kink? Why does it get an 18+ flag?
I 100% understand most cases of TF-as-kink, because many, many works depict it as a visceral, powerful, often pleasurable experience, and even if it doesn't directly contain sexual gratification, it could easily provide it to the audience or be construed as such by them.
This, however, is just... normal? Or rather, it's a launching point that can go in any number of directions. It's neutral, and it being labeled as kink raises a few big questions in my mind.
Is species euphoria kink? When I put on my headset and log into VRChat and look down and see my wings and bird talons, is that spark of joy I feel a kink?
Is my writing kink? Is my ongoing web novel in which different characters grapple with the wildly varying feelings they get when they look down and don't see human hands anymore a kink-focused work? Is my webcomic about a man transplanted via microchip into the body of a lab animal a kinky story, despite the fact that it grapples with struggles and ideas completely independent of sexuality?
I want to really make it clear that this is not to call out this post specifically, this is just an immediately available example of an attitude that I feel has been haunting me in the background since I started publishing my work publicly. I'm extremely asexual, and oftentimes I will not even recognize something as an intentional kink work until someone points it out to me, especially if it doesn't otherwise contain anything suggestive. But on that same point, I don't want to write kink. I want to explore the philosophical and emotional ideas presented in transformation because I find them fascinating. Is it just unavoidable? Should I be tagging my work 18+ anyway? I know I shouldn't, but my work goes into way more detail than this post does, hence my confusion.
More than once I have had people assume things about my tastes, and in one particularly unpleasant case solicit me for an explicit kink commission which they described to me in great detail unprompted, entirely because I write about transformation. Am I being unreasonable in being bothered by that? Do I just have the wrong idea about my chosen area of narrative interest? I don't know. I really, really don't know.