Right, I think I need to get something off of my chest, and since it has a vague relation to minority sexualities, I figured the Rainbow Connection was the best place to bring this up, where I'll be secure enough to know I am talking to people who procline towards more tolerance on the subject than a mainstream audience. It's difficult for me to say whether the subject I am going to bring up would still be too taboo for any place, but I figure that it is playing an important role in my development of a more keen self-identity. It's a story I've only really shared with one or two friends thusfar, but I think I've built the confidence and the right way to put this to words to tell you this.
So, I will begin with a little backstory. On a different forum, there was a discussion surrounding furries -- and from that, you can tell that this confession will be going in all the wrong directions, but let's not digress -- the question in the thread was to ask why furries had, and have, such a negative image. Of course, one of the answers welled up that there were some minorities like the otherkin insisting that they are not humans or things like that, people whom he found to be just screaming to be slapped around. Of course, being not one to take conversations seriously, I just asked whether my habits of meta-roleplaying a kangaroo wherever would count, written in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner, but I actually got sort of an answer from another person. It is commonplace to adapt an alternate persona, and adapting a fursona in internet interactions wouldn't be any worse, though if I really were to believe I'm a 'roo I would need psychiatric help.
Now, about a day or a week later, the sense of how much time passed I have lost my grip on, but I remember that I received a private message from the person who made the final comment, apologising to me for telling me to seek psychiatric help. He found that he was acting hypocritically to claim that I was insane to think I didn't feel comfortable being the species I was born as while he so vehemently stood up for transgenders, people who don't feel comfortable being the sex they're born as, and whose genders don't correspond to their sexes. Naturally, I brushed it off, and told the person that I wasn't really being serious, and that he should've just taken it with a grain of salt, and at the time, I really didn't think I was being very serious.
Now that was over a year ago, and I've sorta moved on with my life since then, not really giving it much attention, but somewhere in the back of my head it just gnawed on me.
I realised that I was deceiving myself by just joking about it, not considering it a serious possibility, but I've come to realise, almost a year after the fact, that maybe he was just right. I think I do have developed a strange discomfort with what species I am, as silly as it may sound. Now, sure, a lot of people say this is just wishful thinking, and perhaps it is, but I've come so close to realising my identity just by coming to accept my dysphoria as a part of who I am. Coming to terms with this big part of mine that I tried to deny for so long -- because it seemed too much of a taboo, too weird, too silly, that even the furries think these kind of people were odd -- helped me to create a more authentic sense of the self than I have ever had.
Now what does this mean? Well, I am sure a lot of people would say I am just being a whiney stereotypical teenage fur who's just begging for attention, but I've seen otherkin communities, and they tend to just religionise their identity, claiming that it is in their spirit, or that they were an animal in their previous lives and have reincarnated as a human but they'd rather just yadda yadda. I don't think I belong in that group. Rather, I feel that I have species dysphoria. Yeah, I was stunned that it had a word too, but it's apparently a phenomenon that has only recently gotten serious consideration. The connection is sometimes made with gender dysphoria, but alas, there have been some who consider this type of dysphoria to be 'offensive against the far realer struggles of transgenders', which makes it an immense task for me to speak honestly about this, when there's the visceral fear that someone, somewhere, might find this offensive or not take these words seriously.
This also isn't something that people very loosely consider like "Oh, how cool would it be to be a frog/bird/'roo/pokémon/pangolin." Rather, it's something more...chronic. The feelings are surreal to describe. The occasional supernumerary phantom limbs come to me when I concentrate, and they feel so vivid. In my dreams, I am almost never a human, something I am -supposed- to be, and instead, I seem to live in the form I feel most at ease with, which is a kangaroo. But isn't this just your own thoughts trying to project your love for your favourite animals onto your species identity? I do not think so. I have long struggled with this. Longer than I've realised. I have been searching for that identity that is at harmony with the contours of my personality, and brings me to live my life as authentically and sincerely as possible. 'Roos make me happy because they fit perfectly. They're, to me, the most valuable creatures I have ever loved and felt at comfort with, so that makes zooromanticism a real thing for me too, though I could not for the life of me ever force anything physical on an animal that can not think with clear judgment.
To end this, I do not wish I was born in any other body than a human body. For those who may be familiar with existentialism, there's a fantastic concept of the facticity. It sets both the limitations to one's freedoms as well as forms the condition to freedom. They are the concrete details about the person that set the backdrop on which the values are created. The facticity includes things that are unchangeable, including a person's environment, his or her languages, the past, and the one we're discussing right now: the physical traits a person is born with. The facticity forms the origin of one's values. It is like the fundament, without which you could never be able to build something, and the values one builds must be congruent to their facticity if that person wants to live his life sincerely and passionately, or authentically in existentialism.
I think that this is something that many transgenders struggle with as well. Their facticity dictates that they were born with a body that is of a sex that they don't personally feel comfortable with, yet, in order to live it sincerely, there needs to be an acceptance of this facticity -- even with the possibility of sex change operations -- that at least somewhere, it is unchangeably stored there that they are or were once part of a different sex, and that perhaps only with this facticity, they could have found the strong identity that they can be at comfort with. I wouldn't have wished to have been born with any other body than a human body, because only with this human body -- and the facticity that set the conditions and limitations to my freedom that came along with being born with the species I am -- I was able to come to the values that I hold today, and led me to live the authentic lifestyle that I feel so bloody comfortable with, which is to say that I know I couldn't possible be any happier if I were living like a kangaroo in the same way a man without legs would be the happiest person in the world if with the medical advances he could one day in the future run. If I were born instead as the species I know I would feel best inside of, I'd be disenchanted. The facticity wouldn't be there anymore. I'd just...well, be a kangaroo, and that kangaroo would be none the wiser. That'd be sad. It'd be inauthentic to who I am: a human who -- limited by his facticity -- would be the happiest kid in the world if he were a fuzzy wuzzy eastern grey kangaroo.
End of rant. I hope I've managed to sketch an objective image of the situation I am in and that I didn't cause any hard feelings, and I hope my ironic style made this more of a breather to read through than it would have been otherwise.