Regarding phantom limbs
Content warnings: medical treatments, pain, physical problems, surgery, genital mention, weird brain stuff.
Several folks have asked me about the phrase “phantom limbs,” which was used in my old Theri There comics. Some animal people (called therianthropes or therians) have experiences that they call phantom limbs, where they feel as if they have tails or other non-human body shapes. I told about the basics of it in this comic, and this post will make more sense if you read that first.
When I made that comic in 2005, the only name therians gave to that experience of theirs was “phantom limbs.” Readers were concerned that it might be wrong to use that name for that experience, because it might be inaccurate to use the same name as the phenomenon experienced by amputees.
Before I made that comic, I had researched enough about the phenomenon to know that it can be strange or even painful. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about why it happens, how it works, and how to treat it.
The big problem with treatment– and this reveals a lot about what phantom limbs are– is that pain medicine can’t stop phantom limb pain. You can’t put anesthesia in a foot that isn’t there. It’s thought that the brain makes phantom limb pain because it can’t understand that the limb is gone, so it assumes that the limb is just numb or something. The pain is the brain’s way of trying to remind you to move and fix the limb.
One of the only kinds of treatments that helps is called “mirror box therapy,” which uses an optical illusion to help the brain figure out that the limb is gone, so that it can stop sending pain signals. Brains are just weird about pain! There are a lot of strange things that happen with phantom limbs.
Phantom sensations are experienced by a lot more people than just amputees.
There are people who have all their limbs, but in response to paralysis, they feel an extra phantom limb.
Experiments found that you can induce phantom limbs in people whose physical limbs are all okay. Brain scans showed they weren’t just saying it, they were really feeling it. Some transgender people feel phantom body parts that match how they feel their body should be. Transgender people are a lot less likely than cisgender people to have phantom sensations after having surgery on those parts. It seems like that happens based on whether a person feels like that really was a part of their body, and something they miss.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the phrase “phantom limb” was used by therians who believed the origin of the phenomenon was spiritual, as well as by therians who thought the origin might be a psychological or neurological condition. Later on, therians became concerned that it might be offensive or incorrect to call it that. They came up with some other names for it, such as “astral limbs,” or “otherlimbs.”
The problem with “astral limbs” is that it means that one believes in a specific higher level of existence (the astral plane), where a spiritual part of a person (the astral body) resides. A lot of therians who experience phantom limbs don’t believe in the astral plane.
I see nothing wrong with the word “otherlimbs,” except that it’s generally trouble to make up new jargon for things that already have names in English. Then only insiders understand what you’re talking about, and it makes a communication barrier between insiders and outsiders. Standard English is best, unless if you’ve got a really good reason to change it, in which case, go for it. Maybe this is a good reason.
I don’t think that the phantom limbs experienced by therians are really different from those experienced by other kinds of folks. I’ve talked to transgender and disabled therians who experience both kinds of sensations, and they say these feel the same. Therian phantom sensations don’t feel different than those felt as part of a transgender or disabled experience. It’s strange for therians to feel the sensation of a tail when they weren’t born with one, but people have felt phantom sensations of body parts they weren’t born with, either, such as third arms or different genitals. Phantom sensations don’t just happen from the loss of a body part, they’re a weird experience that our brains create as they try to make sense of our bodies.
I’m in favor of calling this therian experience by the name “phantom limbs,” since is most likely just a particular kind of phantom limb just as experienced by amputees, paralyzed people, and transgender people, and not a wholly different and unrelated phenomenon. As far as I can tell, it’s correct to call it by that name. If you really want to differentiate between them, though, and you don’t feel okay about calling the therian one “phantom limbs,” then call it “otherlimbs,” not “astral limbs.”
Interesting read! Its true, making up new jargon is hard…. I’m not sure where I lay in this argument.
