"Is Your Humanity Alterhuman?"

[mackerelgray]

Written by Machina on May 13th, 2025.

This post was written in response to a question by Sora/leo9ish (@through-lines) on Tumblr:

Actually, I’m curious—do individuals who are both nonhuman and human consider their human identity orthohuman (i.e. Not Alterhuman)?

I technically am also human and nonhuman, but my human identity is firmly rooted in my fictionkinity. Most folk I see talk about being human in relation to their “current” self or body or what have you—not a ‘type, like mine is.

So while my humanity is unambiguously alterhuman (depending on who you ask), the same doesn’t clearly hold up for others.

But does being nonhuman affect your humanity? Do you consider your humanity a part of your alterhuman identity?

We wrote a detailed enough answer that it gets its own spot in the writing archive.

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Oh, that's a really good question! We're going to answer it for each of us, because while we're all human, we all have different relationships to said humanity and its normality (or lack thereof).

Max

I'm a velociraptor and a human, where sometimes I'm both enmeshed together and sometimes we split apart - so then I'm a human who's being bothered by this large bird that lives in my brain and doesn't understand abstract thought. (I love it to death, it's just also a weird little animal that's clueless about many things. It doesn't know what an oven is.)

I'd call my humanity alterhuman, even though I live in a human body that's always been human and always been mine! I'm alterhuman, especially when fully human, because my humanity is always affected by living with my animality, and because I have an alterhuman relationship to fiction - my sense of self is profoundly affected by my relationship to my writing, and I frame that in an alterhuman context because "fictionhearted" is a very useful word to describe how impactful my fiction has been on my personhood. I live with two other people in my brain who are from that writing, Jude and Gavin, so clearly it's powerful stuff!

Gavin

I'm a normal run-of-the-mill human being from Max's writing project, which we all contribute to now because Jude and I have personal insights into why we did whatever we did. We dropped in from an alternate universe Detroit, MI, USA, about a decade in the future, which is incredibly similar to the modern day except we have sapient androids who look like human beings, who are currently being recognized as their own people with inalienable rights.

Personally, in my own history, I was not alterhuman before walking into this system - not otherhearted, not archetropal, not fictionhearted, nothing. I had no idea this subculture existed, even though I gotta assume it does exist in my world because I lived in what's approximately the modern United States, and alterhumanity has a history here. I feel confident in saying I was orthohuman back then, because my humanity had nothing that separated it from American norms of what makes a human being. I didn't feel like there was anything that made me fundamentally different from my peers, not in a way explainable by alterhumanity. I was a regular human guy!

But. As a fictional character, written by a writer - that's a different framework to look at things from. And looking at it from that perspective, I think I owe a lot of my normalcy to being written as The Everyman archetype. My fictional self was written to be essentially a typical guy with normal reactions to his increasingly fucked up circumstances, to contrast and foil with The Absolute Bullshit that our other protagonist Jude goes through for being an extremely specialized murderbot prototype. We're narrative foils and it worked out really damn well, it's a good story.

Taking that into account, is my humanity alterhuman? I think it's on the border, in some liminal space between normal and not. It's alterfictional for sure, it's been directly impacted by how I was a fictional character, and I can appreciate the metafictional nature of dual-wielding backstories, a personal past where I was a regular human being and a narrative past where I was intentionally written as a regular human being. I think it might play a part in why I'm so invariably human, while my partners and headmates are more fluid in their species.

And I'm involved in the alterhuman community now, which makes my analysis of my humanity very different from an orthohuman analysis of humanity - whenever I write about my species identity as human, I know that it is a species identity, and I can compare/contrast it with the lived nonhumanity of others, and that gives me a fundamentally alterhuman perspective on my species.

So I'm definitely human, at the end of the day, and I can't categorize it neatly into being typical or atypical. Humanity is full of contradictions, and I say this counts as an especially fun one!

Jude

I'm an android, the extremely specialized murderbot prototype Gavin mentioned up there! I'm also human by choice, human by association, human by transition - I'm transspecies, in the nonhuman to human direction, because humanity fits me more than being a fucked up android ever did.

I wrote an extremely long essay about it, where I say... pretty much everything I could say in this response. Basically, yeah, my humanity is fundamentally alterhuman. It's really not a normal human thing for your baseline species to be nonhuman, and it's definitely not a normal alterhuman thing to like becoming human, but here I am, being weird in both directions!