Before there was TikTok, before social networks were even an everyday thing, there were people who described feeling a deep and inexplicable connection with certain animal species. Not as a metaphor, nor as a hobby, but as something they perceived as central to their very being.
The term 'therian', a contraction of 'therianthrope', a Greek word for half-human, half-animal, began to circulate in the 1990s on internet forums such as alt.horror.werewolves (source in Spanish), a space that was born to talk about fiction and ended up becoming a meeting point for those who recognised themselves in something more personal.
The community grew discreetly, almost clandestinely, through mailing lists and websites of the pre-Facebook era. They called themselves 'otherkin' at first, an umbrella term for those who identify as non-human beings in a broad sense, dragons, elves, angels, and from there the subgroup that identifies specifically with real animals - wolves, foxes, deer, cougars, birds - became distinct.
There is no unified doctrine. There are those who interpret it in a spiritual key, a kind of reincarnation or animal soul, and those who read it from a purely psychological point of view, without any mystical connotation. What they share is the conviction that their "inner phenotype", as they call it, does not fit in with the species to which they biologically belong.
TikTok and the leap into mass culture
For decades, therians existed in very specific niches on the internet, invisible to the wider public. That changed abruptly around the turn of this decade when TikTok' s algorithm began to amplify videos in which young people, many of them teenagers, showed what they call 'shifts' or 'quadrobics': movements that mimic the locomotion of quadrupeds, sometimes with masks or accessories that evoke the animal with which they identify.
The impact was twofold. On the one hand, the visibility allowed people who had never had a name for what they felt to find a community and a language. On the other, the virality brought with it an inevitable distortion: the short format of TikTok tends to flatten any identity into an aesthetic, and what for some is a profound question of identity was reduced, for many viewers, to a dance or an extravagant costume.
Today the hashtag #therian accumulates billions of views. There are YouTube channels dedicated to explaining identity from the inside, podcasts, Discord servers with tens of thousands of members and a constant production of content on Reddit.
The community has developed its own vocabulary, 'kintype' for the animal you identify with, 'awakening' for the moment you become aware of it, and its own internal debates about who can be considered therian and who cannot.
What is hard to ignore is that much of the recent growth coincides with the adolescence of a generation that has grown up searching for identities with which to name itself. This is not a value judgement: it is a fact worth bearing in mind in order to understand the phenomenon in context.
Therians and furries: a distinction that matters
A frequent confusion equates therians with furries, and although they share certain cultural spaces, the underlying difference is significant. Furries are people who feel an affinity with anthropomorphic animal characters, usually fictional, and participate in a subculture with a clearly playful and creative dimension: costumes, conventions, illustration.
Their interest in the animal does not necessarily imply identification with it. A furry can have a 'fursona', an animal alter ego, without this meaning that he perceives himself as non-human. Therians, on the other hand, argue that their identification is not a hobby or an aesthetic choice, but something they experience as part of who they are.
Empirical research (source in Spanish) supports this distinction. In studies with both communities, participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they identified with their animal species of reference on a seven-point scale.
Therians scored significantly higher than furries, 6.6 versus 5.6 on average, suggesting that identification is qualitatively different, not only in degree but in nature.
The data on how they perceive themselves is even more revealing. While just over a third of furries said they felt less than 100% human, that proportion rose to 85% among therians.
And of those who said they felt partially non-human, almost all attributed it to a mental or psychological feeling, not a physical one: few described looking at their hands and seeing claws, but many did feel that their way of perceiving the world, reacting or relating to others was something that did not quite fit with what they considered typically human.
Therians were also more likely to express a desire not to be human at all if they had the choice - nearly six in ten, compared to fewer than four in ten among furries, a difference that speaks to the extent to which this non-human identity is experienced as genuine rather than as role-playing.
The boundaries, however, are porous. There are people who identify with both labels at the same time, and the furry subculture has historically been a space where many therians have found community before they had the vocabulary to name themselves otherwise.
Mental health: what psychology still can't answer
The most uncomfortable question is the one surrounding mental health. Psychological professionals do not have a clear consensus on how to address therian identity. It is not listed as a disorder in the DSM-5 or ICD-11, and some psychologists argue that when it does not interfere with a person's daily functioning, it should not be treated as a pathology.
Preliminary studies and several clinical reports suggest that there is a correlation, not necessarily causal, between the 'otherkin'/'therian' identity and patterns of dissociation, autism spectrum disorders, social anxiety or depression.
The interpretation of this correlation is what divides specialists. Is the 'therian' identity a way of processing or channelling a pre-existing experience of alienation, or can it, in certain cases, make social integration even more difficult for someone who already had difficulties? There are no definitive answers yet.
What does raise concerns in some clinical settings is the weight of the digital context.
When an adolescent in the process of identity construction finds on the internet a community that offers belonging, vocabulary and unconditional affirmation, the risk is not in the identity itself, but in the fact that the online environment can reinforce narratives without the critical filter that professional accompaniment would provide.
This is not unique to therians: it is a structural problem of how digital communities function around any minority identity.
