Just something I’ve been thinking about, considering the state of the shifter community, and the fact that I’ve heard such horror stories from people who have left it.

To a certain extent, I really don’t think it’s useful to keep people out of the shifter community on the basis of forms or identification or ideas alone. I find it counterproductive to say, “Well, you hold X belief or identity, therefore you can’t sit with us”, and not really helping the community most of the time, when this is done. I’m not saying that the people who claim to be “reincarnations of demigods here to help with the big astral war” or whatever’s this year’s apocalypse is shouldn’t be questioned and asked to provide logic and reason as to what they feel, but I am saying that a focus on the behavior instead of the identity, at least for now, may do everyone better in the long run. 

Which is why I personally don’t see any value in “gatekeeping”, when it comes to what people identify as and claim to shift into. In a healthy community, if someone is claiming to shift into a creature that looks like a cat with bat wings, it shouldn’t be as big a deal as the way they act identifying as a creature that looks like a cat with bat wings. Someone could claim to be a wolf shifter, with the most mundane of forms, yet still be a toxic, abusive mess to the community, while another person could claim to be a wolpertinger shifter, and be the most down-to-earth, rational, and kind person seen in the community yet.

And again, I’m not saying every person making these claims are legitimate and should be accepted at face value-I’m saying that in the long run, whether their identity and/or ideas holds up to criticism or not, it may be a good idea to just allow them to partake in the community, as long as they’re not showing signs of abusive or toxic behavior. Time will tell whether those people are serious about what they are-most people who are not tend to leave communities like these after they find out that people are not joking around, and those who are trying to get abusive footholds in the community may find it harder to do without some kind of “legitimacy hierarchy”. If an abuser can’t find a way to gain power over someone else, and cannot make wild claims without giving supporting reasons and evidence (at least to be left alone), it’s way more trouble than it’s worth for them to stick around, and this can easily push those kinds of toxic people outside of the community. Meanwhile, those that are sincere in what they claim will at least try to endure the questioning, especially if they’re still learning and piecing things together. Point is, toxic people naturally get chased out, and those who need guidance can be helped to figure out what they are.

(At the same time, the questioning should be questioning, and not grilling, which can become just as toxic as just letting people claim anything they want without some kind of reality check. It’s a delicate balance.) 

But this is part of the reason why I don’t really come after people claiming to be weird things. Part of it, anyway, and I see no reason to interfere most of the time, other than simply questioning them on what they claim, and seeing if it holds water or has some kind of logic behind it. Besides, unless everyone claiming to be a shifter of some sort provides hard proof of their claims to the person they’re trying to teach or lecture, there’s not a lot that they have over other members of the community. 

tl;dr?: Let people identify as whatever; feel free to question them on how they came to that conclusion, and of course you yourself can hold your own beliefs on various identity states and the like, but identity or beliefs alone should not be a reason for dismissal from a community- negative and toxic behavior from the person relating to the community should be.