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Woo 

So, just realized that at some point in the past year, my first-line response to someone saying "hey I had a deity contact" went from "oh wow cool let's hear about it!" to "Ooh, okay, are you feeling all right, do you need any grounding or anything?"

Comes with experience, I guess. ;)

So @vagabondsun wrote some stuff and it make me want to write some stuff and all of a sudden I had my first Dreamwidth post in three years!

indicoyote.dreamwidth.org/5377

I call myself 'otherkin' a lot, because it feels like a broad term, easily encompassing experiences of being multispecies and synthetic and such. And yet, 'therian' is still a term that resonates for me, and one I still use in some contexts. Here's a stab at explaining why.

OKAY LEGITIMATE POST THIS TIME. #transdayofvisibility

Heyo! Iris Jay here! Nonbinary trans femme and cartoonist! Current projects include Crossed Wires (crossedwires.irisjay.net ) and Golden Trick! with my husband @itsnero (members.slipshine.net/goldentr )! (That's him in the photo next to me!) I also co-edited Tabula Idem with @explodinghye! (That's them in the other photo!) You can buy it here: gumroad.com/fortunamedia

@senemura@occult.camp April 1 tends to be a digital fast day for me. It's worked out quite well in the past.

@Ulfra_Wolfe@witches.town You are lovely and beautiful and I'm glad you're in my life. 💜

We are so diverse, but hopefully y'all here know that already. There was a long time that I was really frustrated and lonely about this stuff, feeling like I was the only one doing what I'm doing, but lately that's changed a lot. It does my plush heart a world of good seeing all the other folks working out gender in their own ways. You all are awesome.

💜🌊🌟

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Getting rid of testosterone, facial hair, etc, helped immensely with my dysphoria about masculinization. That, plus a lot of thought and experimentation, allowed me to find a gender expression that felt comfortable and simply correct for me.

That all couldn't have happened without my local trans community and the broader movement. Even if my expression didn't shift from one end of a binary to another, it was still a gender transition, and it's important that cases like this be visible.

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FWIW, here is that story: I'm AMAB, and have been dysphoric about a lot of traditional male traits for as long as I can remember. For years I was stuck because 'to female' was the only available transition path.

Eventually more became available, and I gave non-binary transition a shot. For me, that actually meant many of the same medical steps as a transfeminine transition, but without the associated social transitions. This was not out of fear, or an unwelcoming environment.

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I'm often so-so about proclaming myself as trans; that word in combination with my queer+masc presentation can sorta give the wrong idea about my story. Today, though, I'm here to remind folks that trans includes many different paths and approaches, and they're all valid.

uspol, Portland area, personal (3) 

@thefishcrow But now yeah wow what an asshole. >.< *offers hugs*

polytheistic theology 

@green Yeah yeah yeah, I think this gets back a bit to some of @starkatt's original point; the act of working with gods is on some level a /co-creation/. Someone divine is in my head, they're a conceptual/astral collection of concept and power, and they and I sorta collaborate (all below the level of (my) awareness (usually)) on how that manifests /to me/.

polytheistic theology 

@green Yeah, that's exactly my take on it! Part of gods-being-gods to me is that they have their own agency and existence, and that means /they have other stuff to do/. Some may crave Earth-company, and thus prefer attention/belief here so that they can sorta 'come nearer', but thinking of them as sitting around waiting for human attention to poof back into existence; that's painfully human-centric. ;)

polytheistic theology 

@Thaminga @starkatt See, funny thing about that, they don't look human to me. The only attested God I've worked with heavily is Lugh, who was always in my head as a big imposing golden-glowing wolf anthro. Theriomorphy is so much a part of my internal symbolset that of course it's going to play a part in how a deity looks to me.

polytheistic theology 

@green @starkatt 💯 yeah. American Gods has some bits that are very insightful and helpful, like the notion of culturally-bound and -influenced multiples of the Gods, but the core conceit, while useful for dramatic tension, isn't very good theology.

That sorta "Gods eat belief" thing that's been portrayed so strongly by Gaiman and Pratchett and Molyneux really gets in the way of actual practice sometimes IMO.

polytheistic theology 

@starkatt And yeah in general, I cannot overestimate how spot-on this is, in my experience. I would like to re-post a very resonant quote that I found of, in all things, a tabletop RPG book:

"The Gods don’t need humans, but they do need humanity — not to exist, not to maintain their power, but as a mirror. Human worship is the way by which the Gods know themselves."

polytheistic theology 

@starkatt As someone who's worked with some of those 'new gods', now in a couple different settings, I am a STRONG option-B, though I like to add a bit of elaboration: "pre-existed /in human recorded history/ only quietly." Mindspace is big, and much of it is not written down. :)

polytheistic theology 

So it's a common trope that beliefs give gods power, but I don't actually think that's how it works. In significant part, "power" doesn't seem like a useful way to phrase what gods do in the first place.

What I do think is that belief helps give gods *form*. How a particular god manifests and expresses themself is due in part to what folks expect of them. It's bidirectional, since a god does tell followers some about who they are. The manifestation is negotiated.

Furry art, substance usen(vape) 

@tastymochafox Okay until you pointed it out, even back to the rough, I was reading the vape as like, another thing of soap. XD Whoops!

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