My narrative is that Soulism is not true, but that even if it was, it would still not be desirable. It is a two-pronged approach, and that approach is necessary because You’re not going to stay focused on just the question of what is possible. When You talk about the groups Soulism protects, then You’re shifting the focus from whether it is possible at all to whether it would be good, on the assumption that it is possible. In order to indulge that rhetorical shift, it’s necessary for me to have an answer for both.

I am familiar with otherkin and I am more than happy to respect Your identity to the extent that doing so does not place anyone else in danger. Unfortunately that means that I don’t want to give You the power to physically transform into Your real form. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, I’m happy to refer to You in whatever way You wish, however, the mere presence of Your true form would jeopardize countless lives. You may say that You have no ill intent and I can believe that, but the trouble is that everyone who sees You will recognize that they too can physically become divine dragons, and there are plenty of people out there who would jump at the chance to use that power for destructive purposes. The military would want to transform soldiers into dragons, but even worse, it’s essentially giving every private citizen a nuke.

As a mere human myself, it seems like I would be left a helpless bystander in the inevitable dragon wars, with no means of fighting back or protecting myself. That hardly seems fair or equal, or desirable. Once people see dragons flying around, there will be no going back, and whose to say there will be anything left standing when the smoke clears?

I am sympathetic to You to be trapped in a body that You don’t identify with. I’m willing to work with You to relieve Your suffering to wherever extent that I can within the confines of the material realm, and to encourage others to do the same. But I am not willing to tear up all of reality just for Your sake, nor am I going to kneel before You, regardless of Your divine status. There has to be a limit, otherwise someone’s going to identify as an all-powerful being capable of controlling everyone else and then none of us will be free to be ourselves.

I am trans and plural myself. But I am also someone who studied physics in school. I believe very firmly in an objective, physical reality. Lightning is caused by the laws of electromagnetism, it will always be caused by that, and it always has been, regardless of what people believe. There is no point in history where it was caused by Zeus. Galileo did not conjure up the moons around Jupiter through sheer belief, the moons were always there and we simply lacked the technology to be able to see them. If it had been the case that physical reality could be altered through belief, then the solar system would be geocentric and the historical data from before the heliocentric model would be inconsistent with our current models.

If reality is merely the product of belief, then it seems to me that I should start trying to convince myself that animals love being kept in awful conditions and enjoy being killed, and it is only because of assholes like myself who choose to believe that they are suffering that they suffer in the first place. In short, I would have to abandon every deeply held conviction that I have about both reality and morality, I should turn away from my observations and experience, away from inconvenient truths, and stop doing any sort of actions to actually improve the world and instead delude myself into thinking everything is perfect, because it’s only because of my negative vibes that it’s not.

This is what You’re asking of me, and to comply would be to abandon everything I believe and value. It would require me to deny myself to accommodate You. I’m not going to do that. As they say, “Your right to swing Your fist ends at my nose.” You ask the impossible of me.