Those Shores Call: Reading the Selkie as Queer and Neurodivergent by Arlo Z. Graves

Swords & Sapphics team
Jul 18
6 min read

Today, we are honoured to feature a beautifully insightful article from author Arlo Z. Graves, exploring selkie folklore through a queer and neurodivergent lens.

If you're looking for your next read this Disability Pride Month, pick up The Ice Moves for No One and dive further into the world of fantastical queer selkies!

The selkie, do you know her?

A harbor seal slides from the bubbling surf onto the pebbly beach. The dark, wet body changes, lengthens. The fur splits, revealing a human figure, a woman. Naked in the moonlight, dripping sea water, she hurries down the beach to the bonfire. There she meets her kin for a night of dance and revelry.

She is mysterious, alluring, captivating, a folkloric being treading the tidelands of our imaginations. Selkie myths may have first arisen from several seeds: a husbandry relationship to the sea, an explanation for physical differences in newborns [1], the Sami people coming ashore in their furs [2], or any number of other things. In this brief exploration, I read the selkie through the lens of queerness and neurodivergence.

Growing a social media presence has taught me at least one thing. A lot of folks don’t know of the selkie. In the simplest of terms, the selkie is a fairy, fae, sidhe-adjacent entity, who lives in the sea as a seal. When she comes ashore, she can remove her seal skin and become a human, usually beautiful. Most stories depict female selkies, but they very much have male counterparts as well.

While there are many myths, the plot beats broadly play out as follows: selkie woman comes ashore and sheds her skin to enjoy shore activities like dancing in the moonlight or lying on the beach. Living her best life. Some guy comes along and steals her pelt, removing her ability to return to the water. This, somehow, forces her to become his wife. Sometimes they have children together. Inevitably, she will find her pelt at some point and flee back to the sea, escaping the guy’s control.

The selkie mostly appears in Celtic and Norse folk traditions, the Celtic version being more docile while the Faroese Kópakonan exacts revenge. After Kópakonan’s human “husband” (captor) kills her seal husband and two seal children, she vows vengeance: "Some shall be drowned, some shall fall from cliffs and slopes, and this shall continue, until so many men have been lost that they will be able to link arms around the whole island of Kalsoy." [3]

Having written several pieces of fiction to date on the selkie, I find myself leaning deeper and deeper into the myth as allegory. Yes, we see the motif of the animal bride [4], but in working with the selkie, I increasingly see more. As one sees their own distorted face in the surface of a tidepool, so too do I see my identities in the selkie myth.

The selkie has become for me an allegory of intersection. I read in her as a story of developmental disability (I’m a diagnosed Autistic, howdy!) and queer identity, especially queer identity in afab folks and how we move through, and are treated by, society.

Exhibit A: we see the selkie come ashore. She sheds her seal skin and places it safely on a rock while she dances naked, lounges about, gets In-N-Out Burger, whatever she chooses. She simply chills and vibes with her friends. Then a man comes along, of course. And, of course, he can’t keep his hands to himself, and he snatches her pelt. With exquisite incel energy, he locks her pelt away in a trunk, boat, mancave, wherever, so she has no other choice but to follow him home. He has taken a part of her without her consent.

Reading the pelt as a metaphor for queer identity, we see a free, untamed femme forced to give up, or have stolen, a sacred part of herself. The man represents society taking from her, forcing her into the box of wife and mother and servant. But the man is also representative of himself (cis men, broadly). He is the patriarchal insecurity fighting to erase queerness wherever he sees it. He is the voice whispering of the Sapphic femme: ‘what a waste. She just needs a man. A good man would cure her.’

But the selkie is never cured. No matter how far the man drags her from the sea, drags her from her true form and identity, he cannot take the sea from her, and the sea always calls. Queer people cannot be unmade by heteronormativity. We can be silenced, threatened, damaged, or worse, but we cannot be made cisgender or heteronormative by force of will.

The selkie has also become an allegory for autism and neurodivergence for me. I myself am diagnosed with ASD Level 2. My struggles have been in communication and social understanding. In short, I move through the world as an outside looking in. A visitor. Someone come ashore to the human realm but always looking back over my shoulder to the waves.

The selkie woman is an autistic person, especially an afab autistic person, already so deeply overlooked by society [5]. In this reading, the removal of the seal skin becomes the donning of her human mask. This identity is attainable to her, but it comes with a price and a removal of part of her. It is forced upon her, a choice she would not have made on her own. Again, much as the queer selkie, society takes her pelt.

You cannot have this. You are better without this. You must not be an animal, don’t make those sounds, don’t move your body like that. Your true form is unacceptable, inappropriate, bad. I’m taking this from you for your own good for you are human. Act like it.

The man, our cultural expectations, knows best, the story tells us. He can make the selkie what she needs to be, something useful and palatable, and silent. Part of her, most of her, her truest form, must be erased. Otherwise, she is worthy of nothing.

To move in the world as a neurodivergent or queer person (or both) is to be a selkie. There are many aspects of the human realm that delight, but we cannot come to them as we truly are. A core part of our nature must be left behind or hidden in order for us to receive welcome.

I am writing this from the United States, where it was only in 1973 that homosexuality was removed from the DSM and declared to be neither a mental illness nor sickness [6]. One needs only open social media to see us backsliding towards bigotry and radical far-right ideology regarding LGBTQ+ existence. Furthermore, the overlap between neurodivergence and non-cisgender identity is increasingly supported by research findings [7]. I personally believe that my sense of gender strongly relates to the way I perceive the world around me, but I hesitate to speak more on this lest my ability to attain gender affirming care be taken away because I’m Autistic [8].

Let us return to the folklore. The selkie in the myth often finds her skin. Maybe the man kept it locked in a box, hidden in his fishing boat, wherever it is, one day while he turns his eyes away, she finds it. She reclaims herself and returns to the sea.

With that in mind, reading the selkie as queer, neurodivergent, or both, what is our sea? To where do we return? Is there a land we may escape to, return to, be home in? Or are we forever yearning for distant shores that we have never seen and never will?

I may not be a selkie in the literal sense, but oh do those shores call.

This is an excerpt adapted from my panel presentation Change Me, Change Me Back: Shapeshifting, Transformations, Queerness, Disability, and the Myths We Tell, as debuted at BayCon 2025.

About the Author

Arlo “Zven” Graves grew up in rural California mountains surrounded by nature and all the magic it contains. They’re lucky enough to live in their childhood community, in a once abandoned cabin.

Zven lives with a condition called mixed connective tissue disease; think a cousin of lupus. After a particularly bad flare up in 2020, Zven realized how much they wanted to see chronic illness represented in the fantasy adventure stories they loved reading, to see characters find purpose and fulfillment, even without a magical cure.

Zven has a degree in creative writing from the University of California Santa Cruz. Their short nonfiction, Gerald: a Memoir, won the Stories That Need to be Told 2023 grand prize, and their debut novella, Black Rose from Graveside Press, released early 2025.

Their first full length fantasy novel, The Ice Moves for No One from Quills and Cosmos, follows the adventures and misadventures of a queer, disabled selkie.