Thank you for that story. I’m partway through the Vox article on Isabel’s experiences. It’s fascinating. I’d really like to be able to read her story. It sounds like good writing.
My partner identifies as an airplane. It was built shortly after WWII as a prototype to experiment with a new swooped wing design in combination with afterburners. It likes to play War Thunder to affirm its gender. If you care to explore the deep reaches of furaffinity and several websites, there’s actually a whole fetish subculture about sentient airplanes. I’ve met a couple people from within the community who also identify as planes. One of them’s a Cybertronian (a transformer) who turns into a plane. There are artists who regularly draw this stuff and have communities of fans. I’ve never met a helicopter, but I’m sure they exist. I bet they hide themselves away extra-good to avoid being attacked by crusaders. You probably have to fill out an extensive verification to be allowed on the helicopter Discord servers. When I first started dating My partner, years ago, it was so shy. I wasn’t allowed in its cockpit for months. It’s still just as shy, but we’ve known each other a long time now and it trusts Me to fly it. It recognises that its meatspace body is human, but its inside body on the astral plane isn’t. We spend most of our time together on the Astral, where we can be ourselves. The astral plane is used by so many otherkin. I’ve been in discord servers with hundreds of people who used it to be themselves. Mostly otherkin and plurals. Some trans people too. The otherkin and trans people who don’t believe in the Astral and can’t use it, their lives are measureably worse. I want to bring magical literacy to everyone so everyone can use the resources that exist for trans and otherkin people. That’s kind of the point of soulism. To let people choose their experience of themselves.
When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to meet aliens like in Star Wars. I gave up on that dream when I realised how hard becoming an astronaut is. I wasn’t willing to put in the effort. Especially if we’re not meeting any aliens until we invent warp drive.
But after I joined some fringe queer spaces and started really looking at the limits of our experiences, I realised you don’t need to be an astronaut to experience alien life. You can be an astralnaut instead. People like to say we’re all human, we’re all the same, we’re more similar than we are different. No we aren’t! We are so so different, but you have to be open in order to see it. 8 billion lives is enough for a mindblowing amount of diversity. Enough to blow your mind several times over. And the internet means you can meet them. We can connect and form communities for us weirdos. I don’t understand anyone who doesn’t want to explore the infinite diversity of gender, species, and religion. I just don’t get it. People who want to live in a world where everyone is human, and there are 3 genders and 4 sexualities, I don’t get it. I understand they’re the majority, but why? Why would you want this stuff to be simple when it could be so beautifully wonderful and diverse and complex? “Born too late to explore the earth, born too early to explore the stars”?? I felt that way until I realised I was born just in time to explore queerness. And it’s what I always wanted, to explore and to learn and to grow. There aren’t enough years in a life to explore all the diversity of queerness. But I’m going to have so much fun trying.