Poems and writings
Sociopolitical alterhumanity
Posted on Tumblr on February 18, 2026(Original responses from @dinocanid, and @anendoandfriendo)
(I originally posted this on bluesky, but I'm expanding on it where higher word counts are easier)
As different facets of alterhumanity gain more of the public eye with each passing year, the more I ask "Ok so, what are we going to Do sociopolitically. When are we going to organize and start advocating for ourselves". Because eventually that will be necessary, and "let's bury our heads in the sand and hope we become obscure again" isn't realistic in any way. We've gotta start organizing and teaming up with our allies (queer groups, neurodivergent groups, mad pride, etc.) that we are heavily intermixed with.
Therianthropy for example, for the longest time has relying on the niche nature of the concept while hoping that they'll always be forgotten about by the public eventually. They keep popping up though, and visibility has been a rising line on a graph, it's never once returned to the obscurity that it had in the 90s-early 00s. By now, a majority of information that (for lack of a better term) "normies" have about therians is all bullshit.
There was an attempt at alterhumans organizing one time in the form of AltH, but they're already defunct and have left nothing behind except "AltH" as a convenient acronym for "alterhuman". Outreach and advocacy just kind of died in the water before getting anywhere.
I've seen the argument "alterhumanity faces no issues on its own, so advocate for other things instead and it'll help us by proxy". On one hand, yes, their fight is our fight. At the exact same time, alterhumanity is its own thing, it doesn't only exist as the sum of other groups. Using nonhuman identity as an example, there are people calling therianthropy a psyop and also trans people believing that nonhuman identity is made up by transphobes and not real. "Let's go along with it and wait for this to blow over" isn't an acceptable conclusion, we need to go "yes we are real, no will not be weaponized".
Our voices are important. Our identities deserve to be respected. Neither of the two will just fall into our laps, we have to work for it.
!!!!
Adding nuance from our experiences alert:
This may or may not be why we have such hard lines on how we specifically use -genic terms and use -orma as a headmate specific term, and ALSO why when we say "disordered system" we usually mean CDD systems.
Because many many plural communities are online, and we gave yet to see anyone besides ourselves be open and loud about their plurality in an offline space.
Of course there is more nuance, dipped shit (general, not OP&), but singlets don't have that nuanced and assume "plural = traumagenic = CDD" with no exceptions whatsoever.
So. Like. We understand. But also. We're sorry to say it, but when speaking with ignorant majority "normie" crowds and interfacing with the external offline world, you do in fact need to get down to their level, at least a tad.
LIKE WE MEAN. WE AGREE WITH OP BUT WE FEEL THE NEED TO ADD THIS.
We can't get what OP wants unless we start taking baby steps to get that respect. The online discourse would break most peoples' brains we feel like.
It's like how most non-queer people have their definitions of lesbian just be "women like women" and in the queer community there's like "men can identify as lesbians for many reasons including plurality, being multigender, or having that previous community connection" like. One of these is for advocacy and one of these is for internal discussion.
No yeah I agree there, I don't think drowning normies in community jargon and discourse would do much of anything but confuse. My main issue is that even the surface-level understanding is wrong a lot of the time. Like "therian = ppl who run around in animal masks and/or Furry: The Sequel", "kinning = you vibe with a character and/or think they're hot", "hearted = oh you just think [thing] is kinda neat", and the list goes on. Doesn't have to be "two philosophers meme" levels of info, but they should at least be able to distinguish that it is different from other things. Like with nonhuman identity, that's going to break their brains a little bit because it's new to them, but that's also something that can't really be made simpler because it's foundational to the concept. "Therians identify as nonhuman animals" is the baseline, while anything further like "here's all the shifting terminology, different microlabels, discourse, etc." is advanced level and not really what they need to understand it.
If I could explain it, if someone theoretically made a pamphlet meant to be handed out pride events, schools/colleges, seminars, etc. it would contain as little community jargon as possible and focus on explaining the experience itself. How it feels, how it's expressed, how to accommodate, common misconceptions (surface, not advanced), things like that. Educational stuff without having to get into "community politics" so to speak.
I was just talking about this with my roommates, actually. I don't want to bash on anyone on the community, but the recent view that outsiders have of the community is... not great. In part because, well, we are already a minority, we're all going to be seen as "weird" and "unusual" no matter what we do. And right now, if you talk about therianthropy to anyone, the first thing they are gonna view us as "people with masks that do quads" because that's the popularized version of the community that's been spread from tiktok, a big part of the community.
Right now, that's how we're seen by outsiders, we like it our not. And yeah, we can keep to ourselves, but the floodgate has already been opened. We are already well-known by people. The least we can try to do is control where the stream goes from this point forward. And that's the beautiful thing about it, isn't it? We have the opportunity (and duty, we like it or not) of making ourselves known by correcting misinformation, educating where we can, advocating for ourselves. We are already known, and we couldn't control the reaction it had on people outside of the community then, but we can take our chance now and use it to stop living in hiding. To show what alterhumanity, otherkinity, theriantrophy, etc means. It's gonna take time, and it's not that realistic to say we will succeed, but we can do it, little by little.
We are real, here, and not going anywhere. The community as a whole should work together (as I said, not really realistic since we're spread between various social media platforms, and the community from tumblr is very different from thr community from tiktok, for example) to minimize the hate this may bring us, and advocating for our right to be ourselves. We should be respected no matter who we are.