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Notes -
Dysphoria doesn’t care what’s fulfillable, feasible, affordable, or possible. It rejects one’s current body plan (that’s the dys) and usually says a different one would be proper.
If you were wearing an uncomfortable shirt, it would be uncomfortable whether it was a comfortable shirt worn inside out, in need of tailoring, or just badly made. The rate of suicide among dysphoria sufferers is high primarily because of the discomfort; whether or not the shirt can be reversed, there comes a point you just want to take it off.
I do have a theory as to why the anthro animal body plan is so often approximately a dog-snouted humanoid, though.
While humans domesticated dogs, dogs were domesticating humans, both species’ brain sizes shrinking as we grew to rely on each other for survival. Dogs have neural circuitry, mirror neurons, for responding to human verbal and facial cues. Dogs can’t point their fingers (instead pointing using their whole bodies), but they’ll follow a human’s pointed finger, something even the best trained cat never does.
We aren’t just Homo sapiens and Canis lupus, we’re Canis lupus familiaris and Homo sapiens canofilia. Both of our species are conditioned by evolution to enjoy looking at each others’ faces and reacting to emotions.
Here’s where the theory all comes together. As a young boy with autism, the family dogs’ faces were more comprehensible and familiar than my human family’s. I, like many people with autism, had mild prosopagnosia: I recognized human faces but couldn’t imagine them. Not so with dogs, and to an extent, any besnouted mammalian cartoon face. I could easily imagine them expressing any human emotion.
I believe autism dampens instinctual ability to understand human facial expressions of emotion, but often leaves instinctive comprehension of animal faces untouched, thus the high incidence of anthropomorphic animal appreciation among the autistic.
At that point, picking the European wildcat or a My Little Pony as one’s fursona (furry persona) instead of the golden hamster is like finding one’s favorite sushi restaurant out of all the seafood restaurants in town.
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