Updated 2025-01-23
Oh wow! It's been a while, hasn't it? Did you know that I'm into werewolves, and have been since I was a teenager?
In my teens I had a few good friends who were Wiccan, and one time we had a session of connecting with your inner self (there was a name for it but I don't remember what it is), and during this session I started walking digitigrade and feeling very wolfish. There wasn't a need or desire to get on all fours, but I couldn't put down the heels of my feet. I spent 30 minutes just standing on the balls of my feet, walking around the room, feeling the carpet between my toes.
One of my friends there, Ray, mentioned that there likely some wolf in me!
Not long after this, one autumnal evening, some Wiccan friends took me out onto Heath Common (near Wakefield). It was a beautiful clear sky and the moon was so full and bright that the entire common, all the grass, paths, and Gorse bushes, were lit up by the moonlight; it felt as though it was as bright as the day!
My friends instructed that I lay down in the grass and just look up at the moon, while they say nearby. I just stared at the moon, laying there in the darkness, bathed in moonlight, hearing nothing but the sounds of nature all around me (and the odd car on the nearby road). I don't remember how long I laid there but after a while one of my friends asked me how I felt, and the most natural response was to let out a howl!
Around the same time I was friends with an RPG group (there was a bit of crossover with the Wiccans) and we started playing the Table-Top Role Playing Game Werewolf: The Apocalypse (shorted to W:TA). We played that game a LOT, and though I started off with a male character I was eventually playing a female character. Those were some of the best RPG sessions of my teenage years, and I remember we all had a fantastic time!
I was properly hooked into the game, reading the rule and source books cover to cover, and everytime I've moved house I've taken them with me. I still have some of them to this day though reading them now, with my recently (in the past 10 years) developed media literacy, I have come to realise that they're pretty problematic. :S
Sometime in 1999 I had started using the Internet at home, a dial-up connection on a free/local call ISP. I spent a lot of time looking up stuff about my hobbies, including W:TA, which lead me to reading more about werewolves in general. I ended up on a website about a haunt in the US, Haunted Verdun Manor and I was awestruck seeing their walk-around werewolves! The more I read about these werewolves the more I wanted to go there and be one!
Being an autistic teen with no real idea of how to be online in the late 90s I wrote an email to one of them, pouring out my soul. The reply that I got back has long been purged from my memory but it wasn't particularly encouraging and also admonished me for being a teen who'd played a bit too much W:TA. He was not wrong, I did make a fool of myself, but that did temper me a bit.
I don't give this anecdote for any reason other than to draw focus on who I was at the time; an autistic teen who was too young to be thinking about something like that. For the record we got talking a few years after this email and things were all good. :)
Not long after that I stumbled onto the Furry subculture and started getting involved with that, my first meet being a LondonFurs meet in 2000 (I think?) and made some friends who I'm still in contact with (Orona, FoxB, Juniper). I was in college at this point and was having a fantastic time in Furry, though as this post is supposed to be about werewolves I'll have to come back to the Furry thing another time. :)
I don't recall the exact year, but sometime maybe around 2004 or 2005 I had started chatting with some of the werewolves from Verdun Manor as they were also active in Furry, and I think I had met two of them (DarkFang and Ysengrin) at either Further Confusion or Anthrocon. The specifics aren't as clear to me right now, but I did room with them both at FC06 and I also spent a few weeks hanging out with them in their old place in California, which was right out in the sticks and maybe an hour from San Jose (where FC took place). Overall I felt good about myself; I was hanging out with werewolf kin and I'd also gotten my own werewolf suit "Graafen"!
Graafen, the werewolf, running along a pavement
Being a werewolf RL was a dream come true and felt absolutely incredible, but my bad eyesight meant that it was so difficult for me to see in the suit that I felt super self-concious about it. On top of that I wasn't feeling super great about myself in general.
When I hit my late 20s/early 30s I ended up pretty depressed and loathed myself and everything I liked at that point. I rejected everything that I had enjoyed, pushing it away from me, which included the werewolf stuff. I didn't know why but I felt sad all the time and it was just easier to distance myself from everyone so I didn't hurt them.
In hindsight that was entirely down to the gender dysphoria I had, and I was pushing away everything I associated with being male. By this point I had gotten a female husky fursuit, "Radinov", and though I really enjoyed being her I still felt bad in general. One part of my brain was screaming "YOU'RE TRANS!" while the other part was coming up with every excuse under the sun for why I couldn't be; I wasn't like this when I was younger (false), I was too ugly/old (false), no point starting now (false).
Now that I'm regularly medicating I'm feeling so much better about myself and it's like I've gone back in time, feelings wise. I'm not anxious/depressed all the time, all those strong feelings from my youth are coming back, and the most surprising of all is that three days ago, when the Wolf Moon was full, I got this very strong werewolf urge. I got back in contact with Ysengrin, which made me really happy, and thinking about all the werewolf stuff made me realise that I'm still a werewolf deep down. I wasn't a male werewolf (I never truly was), but I am a female werewolf and I needed to redesign myself.
Within two hours I'd found and bought some premade line art and was already thinking about what I wanted as I went home from work. As soon as I got home I dug out my graphics tablet and spent two nights working on the design.
With all that out of the way I'd like to introduce my werewolf side, Riveclaw (pronounced /ˈriːva/)!
I wanted a more "traditional" werewolf name; suffixes like "fang" and "claw", but also wanted to have something that references my cultural heritage. I grew up in West Yorkshire, which was part of Danelaw and still has a regional dialect to this day. Looking at some old Yorkshire words I picked "rive" which means to rip/tear, and added it to "claw" suffix. Riveclaw!
EDIT 2025-01-23: I've realised that it's very easy to mispronounce the name that I've chosen for myself, so I've elected to slightly alter it; change the "e" to an "a" for Rivaclaw!
Thinking back over all this through the days I've thought about it, and the two to three hours I spent writing this blog post, I've come to realise that me being a werewolf and me being trans are VERY strongly connected.
I'm trans and I'm a werewolf, and in me they are the same thing!
P.S.: You may be a werewolf and not trans, or trans and not a werewolf, or both but they're not linked, and that's okay! I'm just talking about me specifically and I don't hold or see anyone else to my standard.