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.

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on January 2nd, 2025.

I've seen prey drive discussed quite a bit among many carnivorous therians, so I thought I’d pitch in and write about my own experiences with it, as someone who’s metaphorically a dog but really has all the hunting instincts of a humanoid sapient machine trained to murder people. And actually, all the deviant hunters I know have different prey drives, and I think it's really interesting to compare and contrast us.

-

Content Warning: longform discussion of hunting and killing other androids with detailed description, using it/its to refer to sapient targets as that's the language I used back when I was a deviant hunter.

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on November 4th, 2024.

This is a somewhat rambling journal post, because I realized that not everything needs to be a polished essay to contain noteworthy thoughts, I can just jot things down to have a record of it!

so I have Thoughts about how gender is a social construct in relation to my theriotype

because I know that my raptorself is a female velociraptor, but it doesn't care about human gender because raptor gender is mostly about feather patterns and comparison with other raptors - but it doesn't have that here. it's never lived with other raptors to compare itself with!

so for me, as a raptor, I'm effectively a genderless creature because my raptorself doesn't have a social niche to slot a gender into. which is very interesting!

versus, my human self is constantly engaging with human society with human genders and gender expectations, which means I'm transgender as a human! but I'm completely separate from gender as a raptor, because raptor brain doesn't live in a raptor society.

i think this is an interesting note, because this is not because raptors in general lack a sense of gender! as you can tell whenever you look at birds outside, birds are often very separated between their sexes, and they often have differing roles in their avian relationships - but as a raptor who doesn't have any of those avian relationships, i never developed that sense of having a raptorial gender role.

it's funny, I think it would go both ways? if I were a raptor in body millions of years ago, living with other raptors, I would have a raptor gender - I would be female in the ways so many other birds are female. and I would not be a trans man, as a raptor, because being a trans man relies on the concept of human masculinity. I wouldn't know about human concepts of gender, so I wouldn't have a human gender.

basically, right now, I'm a trans man and a genderless raptor, and it's a very cool intersection of species and gender that I'm going to chew on for a while

Written by Gavin Reed-Machina on August 25, 2024.

As a nonhuman, do you ever think about why there's so many stories and myths and legends about humans being turned into animals? You ever wonder why it's usually a punishment or a curse, or why the characters try to do whatever it takes to become human again? You ever think, "I don't understand, I would love to be an animal and get rid of my human body, what's the problem?"

As a human myself, one whose system has been in the alterhuman community for years, I hope I can help bridge the gap of understanding here.

The way many humans see being turned into an animal as a curse, the way they'd be incredibly distressed about becoming nonhuman?

That is species dysphoria.

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on July 19th, 2024.

so I've written a whole lot of essays about pretty heavy topics, fucked up things, and that has its place! however, listen to me, I contain multitudes, and I wanna talk about something incredibly silly and fun and just generally more important to my daily life -

✨ Food ✨

which is great, and sometimes cursed, but mostly great!

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on March 30, 2024.

I haven't seen many personal essays or in-depth posts by plurals that explain how their individual systems work and what their experiences are like, so I’m taking the alterhuman community mindset of Writing About My Personal Experiences as the host of a gateway system, just to archive my experiences in pen, since my memory isn't at all infallible.

Species dysphoria, but the “wrong” way, ft. my borderline personality disorder

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on March 5th, 2024.

J: so you know how my source is technically Detroit: Become Human? you know how we fucking hate that title? you know how we’ve made fun of it multiple times? unfortunately it's a mood! I also hate this!

This essay is about how incredibly uncomfortable I feel in my own skin around common android tropes, in media and some of its reflections in robotic identities and experiences, featuring reasons for why I'm like this and a suggestion for what I want readers to do about it at the end of the piece.