A Barrier of Humanness & A Secondary Kintype
Word count: ~500
Reading time: ~4 minutes

Author's note (17/3/2023): I wrote this essay before awakening as a gnoll, when my bison and what-I-now-call-gnoll experiences were still heavily intertwined and affecting one another. It was met with harsh criticism, older community members telling me that a fursona could not be a kintype, and encouragement to keep looking for my 'actual kintype.' If I were going through these things now, with all my experience, I wouldn't have listened to their criticism. I would have accepted that I was an original species. In a way the backlash helped me - I'm happy as a gnoll - but I'm sure I would have been happy too as whatever species I might've become if I hadn't been grilled into finding gnolls. And I wouldn't have felt like an outcast in my own community. Grilling is not a good way to help questioning commmunity members.

If I had to go purely by my ‘otherkin qualifiers’ I would not be able to draw my kintype.

True, I do experience phantom shifts, I do have a non-human body image, and I have had the occassional mental, dream, and sensory shifts. These are what I call my ‘otherkin qualifiers;’ the things that make me nonhuman. But whenever I experience them, there’s always a barrier of humanness present to make them less distinguished.

I am a human, first and foremost, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m also partially a bison. I reached this conclusion by examining the aforementioned qualifiers and looking for the creature that most closely resembles them.

But I cannot say that I truthfully am a bison, nor that I feel 100% like I should be one. My kintype is diluted by my own humanness. I don’t expect to see a bison in the mirror, I expect a monstrous bison-human hybrid. I don’t phantom shift into a bison, but, again, a bison-human. All my qualifiers are like this; anthropomorphic and diluted.

In other words, if I didn’t know what a bison was, I likely would never have thought of my theriotype as being a hulking, quadrupedal cud-chewer, but rather, have pictured it as something half human, half animal.

Where am I going with this? Well…

For the past few months I’ve been experiencing consistent canine-ish shifts. None of them match a known animal, and all of them are diluted, not only by my humanness, but also by my bisonness. This kintype is no less real than my bison ‘type is, but that barrier of humanness is impossible to get by.

For this reason, I’m slowly starting to accept that the most proper way to describe this kintype is as my ‘fursona.’ I realize that a fursona is specifically created to be a representation of yourself, but when no creature, real or imagined, better describes your nonhuman feelings, the best solution seems to be to draw all your qualifiers and accept the resulting monstrosity as just another part of yourself.