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cobaltdrgnHaving species be the most important part of my identity seems more natural the more I think about it.
Many folks have a species identity the same way that many folks have a gender identity. It's just that it's effectively invisible, because most folks who can/do communicate their species to us identify as human, and see everyone around them as human.
I’ve posted about this before-- actually I have an effortpost about it here. But if you're doubtful, click on a few news articles or scroll your timeline on an account where you mostly follow progressive but normative folks, and count the number of times someone posts something like:
- "let's be human"
- "what it means to be human"
- "I'm a human being, I have feelings"
- "treat me like a human"
and so on, and so forth.
Most people don't consciously experience species as a big part of their identity, or even think about it much at all. The only time it really comes up is when people are being treated as "less than" human, or when people are writing fiction about how horrifying it must be to be changed into something else.
But that primal fear that most people in this society seem to have, the one that drives werewolf stories and other monster horror? It’s rooted in species identity. Certainly other things influence such fiction too, like metaphor; but at the baseline, if you're a human, and the idea of being turned into a nonhuman creature with the same abilities as a human (opposable thumbs, same brain, etc.) horrifies and frightens you— makes you feel like you might lose your very self if it happened, or at the very least you’d be disgusting, grotesque, unlovable— that's probably your species identity you’re feeling. Human is You, nonhuman is Not You. And given that as far as we know, humans don’t just turn into other creatures, the fascination/repulsion that people have around such media, and the fact that they keep producing it, suggests that many actually care about species more than we think.
Many folks have a species identity the same way that many folks have a gender identity. It's just that it's effectively invisible, because most folks who can/do communicate their species to us identify as human, and see everyone around them as human.
I’ve posted about this before-- actually I have an effortpost about it here. But if you're doubtful, click on a few news articles or scroll your timeline on an account where you mostly follow progressive but normative folks, and count the number of times someone posts something like:
- "let's be human"
- "what it means to be human"
- "I'm a human being, I have feelings"
- "treat me like a human"
and so on, and so forth.
Most people don't consciously experience species as a big part of their identity, or even think about it much at all. The only time it really comes up is when people are being treated as "less than" human, or when people are writing fiction about how horrifying it must be to be changed into something else.
But that primal fear that most people in this society seem to have, the one that drives werewolf stories and other monster horror? It’s rooted in species identity. Certainly other things influence such fiction too, like metaphor; but at the baseline, if you're a human, and the idea of being turned into a nonhuman creature with the same abilities as a human (opposable thumbs, same brain, etc.) horrifies and frightens you— makes you feel like you might lose your very self if it happened, or at the very least you’d be disgusting, grotesque, unlovable— that's probably your species identity you’re feeling. Human is You, nonhuman is Not You. And given that as far as we know, humans don’t just turn into other creatures, the fascination/repulsion that people have around such media, and the fact that they keep producing it, suggests that many actually care about species more than we think.
