As social beings, a sense of identity plays an important role in our relations – and in our own happiness.
But identity doesn’t have to be narrowly human. In an essay looking at the groups that exist on the edge of conventional boundaries, and are often subject to prurience and ridicule, Pedro Feijó considers those who feel different, other than human. [...]
{same "logic" applied as in gender issue.}
Feijó embarked on an exploration of people who are more, or other, than human –
and how such people have been perceived and treated by those around them. “We have witnessed, in the last half a century, an
explosion of politics grounded on new identities, and on their overcoming. People have been experimenting with and transgressing the limits of what it means to be a woman, of what it means to have a gender, a sex, or a sexual orientation,” Feijó says.
{again, the same logic: because they're a minority group, they are automatically being "oppressed" by majority by not being accepted as normal part of community, and "transgressing the limits" is something desirable in itself.}
“Across the western world, individuals and collectives are defying our identity as organic beings, in contrast with mechanical ones, and exploring cyborgism.
{how does one exactly defy being an organic being!?} Social movements of trans and disabled people started questioning what it means exactly to be an able body. The neuro-diverse and BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder – people who would prefer to be ‘disabled’) have followed in the same footsteps. I thought it would be worth exploring the worlds of those who clash with one central dichotomy: humanity and non-human animality.” [...]
“During the 18th century, accounts of lycanthropy were left behind as the European Enlightenment movement classified them as irrational and obscure.
But people who belong to a kind other than the human seem to have sprung from the blind spots of modernity, and have grown strong and visible for the last four decades.” {even though the author is probably clueless why, this is quite an eerie remark.} [...]
In his essay, Feijó highlights the contrast between communities which
embrace the experiences of otherkin and the medical corpus which regards non-human identification and behaviour as a subject of inquiry insofar as it is a problem to be treated. He observes: “Psychiatry sees individual patients, otherkin sees a community and a
safe space. Where medicine has seen a syndrome to be explained, otherkin have seen affinities with no need for a unified metaphysical justification.”
{this seems typical language, where words like "embrace" and "safe space" are used, in a way implicating that acceptance towards something is always desired, and "diversity" being a goal in itself. And if you don't "tolerate" this, you're a bigot.}
But tolerance of difference is shallow – and acceptance of people who feel different, and visibly don’t conform, is frequently tinged with ridicule. Their perceived absurdity was capitalized not only for diagnostic purposes, but also for mercantile ones. “Post-1970s medical literature presents lycanthropes as curiosities, as fetishized subjects and ultimately as immaterial commodities. Lycanthrophy is written about not so much for reasons of intellectual inquiry but because it sells. Something analogous happened in the general online community, where otherkin are routinely laughed at,” says Feijó.
{gee, i wonder why?}
“The problem is that the ridicule seems to reside elsewhere: modern psychiatry and psychology have not been able to keep up-to-date with new post-human perceptions, which have been unable to admit the problems of distinguishing between a phenomenological symptom and a voluntary behaviour, and
furthermore which have chosen to pathologize and ruin the lives of many through the insistence on an obsolete paradigm, while the same people could have found a supporting community off- and online.” {these people feel so progressive and superior yet they're just using the same irrational reasoning no matter how absurd or unacceptable the minority in question.}
Homo sapiens has existed for a mere 200,000 years or so; the earliest land creatures crawled out of around 400 millennia ago. In the tree of life we share our inheritance with creatures as diverse as amoebas, flatworms, insects, fish and birds.
{all righty then, i'm a banana.} In 1997 Pat Califia, the well-known queer author of erotic essays, wrote: “I’m never sure if I have gender dysphoria or species dysphoria. I often try to explain that I’m really a starfish trapped in a human body
and I’m very new to your planet.”
{perhaps there's some truth to this in a similar way as there might be with why some people are attracted to flat-earth theory? I.e perhaps they're "young" souls, as Pierre wrote in his article while ago.}
Thank you for sharing that, Tim.
