Following that up. Here’s the problem with non-kin people co-opting and appropriating our language and narratives and changing them to fit their needs: then those words have lost meaning completely.

They have become useless to us.

When people stretch and bend otherkind and therian to mean something outside the unique experiences we as otherkind and therianthropes (and other nonhumans) have: we no longer have a concise way to share and communicate those unique experiences. There are no longer words to represent those experiences, and feelings, concepts.

There is no point in our vocabulary continuing to exist at that point because it’s not being used as intended.

We are forced into two positions.

1. We create new language to represent our unique experiences and wait for this to happen again.

2. We forsake shorthand language and write nothing but lengthy descriptions of what we mean everytime we want to say something, rather than being able to reference a common language. (Hope you’re all articulate and enjoy essay writing! /s)

Except you’re not all articulate! Many of us are not good at describing what we are and what we experience. Those people are helped immensely by and often rely on a common language.

Perhaps one of the most infuriating things about this appropriation is that our words aren’t even being used to describe experiences and feelings that most people don’t have. Instead they are describing common experiences that already have language available.

We do not have this.

We were never given this.

The privilege of having language to describe our nonhumanity, at least in the English language, doesn’t exist. So instead we have either made our own words or taken the closest English language available to stand in.

The latter creates a nuanced situation. ‘Therianthropy’ is an English word anyone has a right to use in any way they desire, so is 'shift’. But when people co-opt and pervert the narratives of the modern therian community that is a problem. This is not solely about just words. Mental shift, phantom shift… this is a part of the nuance. Context is so important.

When (particularly nonhumans who have been in the community longer) get impatient and pissed off about this we’re not trying to ruin someone’s fun cause we think we’re superior.

It’s that we had no language. We had very limited ways to share before finding each other.

Most otherkind and therianthropes grow up thinking they are alone. Then, suddenly, we’re not! We find each other. We find various communities and make friends.

And then people who don’t care and don’t know what it is like to be nonhuman or to be alone with no way to describe yourself, sometimes thinking you’re fucking losing your mind, that you perhaps shouldn’t even exist… those people who don’t care and don’t think try and take that from you, of course we’ll bite.

We’ll bite and refuse to let go.

Because we’re being pushed into a place where we have nothing again.

And I’ll die on this hill.